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Red Hat CEO Talks About State Of Open Source (techcrunch.com)
To mark Red Hat's 25th anniversary, TechCrunch spoke with the company's CEO Jim Whitehurst to talk about the past, present and future of the company, and open-source software in general. An excerpt: "Ten years ago, open source at the time was really focused on offering viable alternatives to traditional software," he told me. "We were selling layers of technology to replace existing technology. [...] At the time, it was open source showing that we can build open-source tech at lower cost. The value proposition was that it was cheaper." At the time, he argues, the market was about replacing Windows with Linux or IBM's WebSphere with JBoss. And that defined Red Hat's role in the ecosystem, too, which was less about technological information than about packaging. "For Red Hat, we started off taking these open-source projects and making them usable for traditional enterprises," said Whitehurst.
About five or six ago, something changed, though. Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because they didn't look at some of the infrastructure technologies they opened up as competitive advantages. Instead, having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that. "The biggest part is it's not just Google and Facebook finding religion," said Whitehurst. "The social tech around open source made it easy to make projects happen. Companies got credit for that." He also noted that developers now look at their open-source contributions as part of their resume. With an increasingly mobile workforce that regularly moves between jobs, companies that want to compete for talent are almost forced to open source at least some of the technologies that don't give them a competitive advantage.
In October, Whitehurst also answered questions from Slashdot readers.
About five or six ago, something changed, though. Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because they didn't look at some of the infrastructure technologies they opened up as competitive advantages. Instead, having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that. "The biggest part is it's not just Google and Facebook finding religion," said Whitehurst. "The social tech around open source made it easy to make projects happen. Companies got credit for that." He also noted that developers now look at their open-source contributions as part of their resume. With an increasingly mobile workforce that regularly moves between jobs, companies that want to compete for talent are almost forced to open source at least some of the technologies that don't give them a competitive advantage.
In October, Whitehurst also answered questions from Slashdot readers.
Open source is great do more open source. It's not that our business model is built around being a paid safety net for big corporations that demand such things when doing that open source. I just really love it. The source thats open. You can do more of that and we can be more paid support for it. Open source A#1.
Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because...having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that.
I'm happy that this has happened, but I'm unclear why. I read the article, and it didn't explain. How did Google profit from open sourcing Angular? How did Twitter profit from Bootstrap?
The company that built the product is going to automatically hold a strong majority of the mindshare around it unless they really behave like assholes. Case in point: don't be like Joyent viz a viz Node.JS (savagely attack core contributors on your corporate blog over pronoun politics). Be like Facebook with React (actually show you care about the community's concerns for the most part).
Has ruined the Linux ecosystem. Is this the garbage that RH is proud of?
Open Source Software especially the GNU variety, tends to limit on ways people can profit off of GNU Software (Where selling the actual software is near impossible when people can get it legally for free).
Now what the cloud did was having this software for free, but who really cares, because you can put it in a server farm data center mega infrastructure, and you just pay for the computing that you use. Sure you can have the software and its source, because chances are you will not have the millions of dollars to implement the massive data center to fully utilize it.
Where a decade back. We were operating with small server farms (normally for a fair size organization) having a couple of racks of servers where each one was doing one or two jobs. Meaning the software sales were important, because people are not going to pay a monthly fee to run it on their servers, when they can buy the software and the servers themselves and run it over a long period of time.
So Open Source is more palatable because it doesn't conflict with their business model.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
IMO:
The first era of open source software was about developer freedom.
The second era was about developer freedom.
The current era is about agility and cost control, both for product developers and the users. This is also seen by the rise of public clouds.
Slashdot has its share of haters who complain that others in FOSS are more successful than they are by embracing the business world. Too bad?
Whitehurst, Shuttleworth, et al have done a million times more for FOSS than these complainers could ever dream of. No matter how much the complainers whine about "greedy corporations," guys like Whitehurst guys have taken Linux and FOSS into the mainstream while the whiners have taken three trips to the kitchen from their mom's basement in-between posting on Slashdot about why corporations are bad.
Logic would dictate that it's a good thing to see large, successful organizations built on FOSS. But jealously gets in the way.
Redhat is a premium Linux Brand. People use it for highly critical systems. They don't use RHEL at home or on desktops.
Redhat provides a huge value-add for companies with complex problems. RH has smart engineers with hands-on practical knowledge. They won't ship a new hire with 1 month Linux experience to a client location, like many of the big "IT consulting" companies do.
Redhat also provides a curated, validated, set of container images. This isn't like grabbing some docker image from Joe-Blowe on the free dockerhub and hoping everything will be fine.
If your problems aren't complex or aren't for critical has-to-work systems, then there is centOS or debian or Ubuntu or any number of other options.
Redhat is fine with that, since that isn't where they make their money. Eventually, profitable businesses will have complex and critical systems. Then they will need redhat support.
And I'm not trying to be rude. We don't use Redhat where I work. In a few years, after our company has matured and is earning tonnes-o-cash, we will switch over some systems.
About five or six ago, something changed
Five or six what ago? Releases? CEOs? Doctor Whos?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The state of opensource is that it is freely ignored by licensees, blatantly violated, with no enforcement.
"You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein"
GPLv2 forbids additional restrictive terms added to the agreement between the licencee and those to whom the licensee distributes the work (or derivative work). (distributees)
Terms can be memorialized or not. They can be verbal, be evinced by a course of business dealings, or be in a writing.
Here the additional terms added to the agreement were in a writing (they are memorialized).
The writing even outlines various penalties to be assessed if the client makes use of the rights granted by the original grantor vs the newly added restriction by GRSecurity / Brad Spengler!
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Firing Leinnart Pottering? Have you done that yet?
Really no difference between the two partner companies any more.
Where is the configuration to not make it a monolithic pile of shit?
numbnuts
Since you obviously don't know the meaning of the word "Monolithic" I can dismiss you. You have been weighed and measured and found to be irrelevant. Please proceed to the soylent recycling facility "citizen".