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What makes us Red Hat

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Re: What makes us Red Hat

#61

Post by [deleted] »

dhbx9 wrote: post #14
m348e912 wrote: post #4

Red Hat was primary reason it took me a lot longer to adopt Linux than it should have. Headbanging experiences with dependency hell and things not working as expected left me extremely discouraged. It wasn't until I dabbled a little with Solaris 7 and finally found Slackware that I realized that Linux could "just work". IMO Red Hat's success was primarily based on the critical mass of support behind it, not because i…

IMO the distro that actually made me realize that after some good configuring Linux can just work is Gentoo. After Portage no package manager was ever good enough for me.

[deleted]

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#62

Post by iamacynic »

davidw wrote: post #50
iamacynic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's bad only if that's the company you want to take to $1 billion scale. what if you don't have hot shot VC buddies from princeton, and didn't go to stanford, and need to make $1m in cash to do your real business idea? all of a sudden doing paid features for an open source project or doing consulting sounds like a fantastic idea because that will get you to $1m, almost guaranteed (if you're generally capable) hint:…

Consulting is not a great business in a lot of ways, and 1 million is not at all easy unless you're 1) someplace where that's not a lot of money, or 2) you're famous. I would heartily suggest avoiding it, as it's also not scalable even at a small size. Look at the kind of stuff the 'micropreneur' guys do, like patio11's bingo thing. That was small (I agree with you there) but still something that once running, kept m…

you do it until you get the money, then do what you want.

maybe you're not getting what i'm saying because it involves investing (aka betting) your own money into something.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#63

Post by nickpsecurity »

roymurdock wrote: post #9
rrdharan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're the most successful free software business in history. Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.

Canonical (Ubuntu), and SUSE as well.

I thought Canonical was losing money.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#64

Post by ElijahLynn »

Something I just learned recently after I started working for Red Hat and is the tldr; of the article:

"Red Hat also commits to keeping our commercial products 100% pure open source. Even when we acquire a proprietary software company, we commit to releasing all of its code as open source."

I had no idea this was the case, pretty cool!

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#65

Post by TallGuyShort »

dpark wrote: post #59
outworlder wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...and I particularly remember that an ad agency that wanted our business once shipped us a box containing a burnt red hat (!). Now that's a great ad agency.

Eh, "we hate your competitor" is neither imaginative nor compelling.

Actually took me forever to figure out he meant a literal box, containing a literal burnt red hat. I parsed that as a box (server) imaged (burnt) with Red Hat (the operating system).

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#66

Post by chirau »

rrdharan wrote: post #6
schoen wrote: post #3

More than 15 years ago, I worked for a Linux services company that competed with Red Hat. We sometimes saw them or were invited to see them rather negatively (as the competition), and I particularly remember that an ad agency that wanted our business once shipped us a box containing a burnt red hat (!). Time has shown that Red Hat really knows what they're doing, on many different levels, and they're the most success…

> they're the most successful free software business in history. Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.

Isn't Apache technically free as well?

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#67

Post by SEJeff »

rrdharan wrote: post #6
schoen wrote: post #3

More than 15 years ago, I worked for a Linux services company that competed with Red Hat. We sometimes saw them or were invited to see them rather negatively (as the competition), and I particularly remember that an ad agency that wanted our business once shipped us a box containing a burnt red hat (!). Time has shown that Red Hat really knows what they're doing, on many different levels, and they're the most success…

> they're the most successful free software business in history. Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.

There is no billion dollar open source company outside of Redhat, if a billion dollars in revenue is your benchmark. On pure success financially from an OSS company, they truly are unrivaled.

Otherwise, there are thousands of small open source companies that do quite well for themselves. If you look at pure profit however, Redhat does abysmally compared to say Microsoft or Apple, or any traditional proprietary software company. Due to this, the valuation for a purely open source company have to be lower which prevents a lot of the VC funding frenzy for "the next unicorn company". If you want small and sustainable OSS can work. Otherwise, Redhat is the black swan in that they pulled off something thought to be impossible.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#68

Post by SEJeff »

chirau wrote: post #66
rrdharan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're the most successful free software business in history. Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.

Isn't Apache technically free as well?

Apache is a foundation however, not really a "business" per-se.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#69

Post by SEJeff »

roymurdock wrote: post #9
rrdharan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're the most successful free software business in history. Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.

Canonical (Ubuntu), and SUSE as well.

Canonical isn't really profitable and much of SUSE's stuff is actually proprietary from the days of Novell.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#70

Post by rayvd »

throw7 wrote: post #46

The Red Hat retail to Enterprise shift still leaves a little bitter taste in my mouth. I remember when they shut down public access to the rhel binaries and the beginnings of Centos. All legit to the letter of the license and no more. I get it though. Anyone know how Centos under Red Hat is nowadays?

Still thriving, to my knowledge. Scientific Linux is also out there as well.

My recollection is that Red Hat was actually working directly w/ CentOS on some things to streamline their build processes. Red Hat doesn't see CentOS as a threat (as it did OEL).

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