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What makes us Red Hat

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Re: What makes us Red Hat

#91

Post by houst0n_ »

kbenson wrote: post #34
digitalshankar wrote: post #27

Red Hat or the Microsoft of Linux is the face palm of linux distros, forget dependency hell, how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system or distros like Ubuntu? People just buy it for the support even if the Red Hat they use is Gnome 2 and Firefox V.3.0. Then finally RHCA/RHCE courses, i should get certified from this distro to prove my Linux skills for the companies even though i…

> how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system So, what makes the Debian package system superior? Having built multiple specs in the past, but not any debs, I'm curious. Given that you can often convert debs to RPMs and vice-versa, and can use the different package managers on either type of repository, it's not obvious where one has any specific benefit.

There is no difference.

From the top of my head in the last few years I have (and you have also probably) used the following to get software: rpm/yum, deb/apt, pacman, ports, sysvr4(Solaris), ips, homebrew, pkgin, npm, gem, pip, hex, cpan and hmmm probably a few others.

They all do pretty much the same thing, one might have prettier progress bars or a better cli but we're just talking compressed tars with some metadata files.

Competition is good and all that, but how much innovation do we need to drive in package managers? We have lots of tools all doing the same thing with negligible advantages over their competitors and I don't see it as a positive.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#92

Post by keithpeter »

knieveltech wrote: post #40
michel-slm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before yum and dnf, dependency hell is a serious issue indeed. After that it's still a problem if you use multilib (sometimes updates get pushed for x86_64 but the i686 packages are missing) but I wouldn't really call it a dependency hell anymore.

Seriously. Weekend long marathons of dependency chasing (in the snow, uphill both ways) to finally get config/make/make install to run were not only a thing but disturbingly commonplace. These kids don't know how good they've got it. God I feel old.

You could recreate the experience for younger colleagues using a slackware install and deliberately not using any of the more advanced tools (slackpkg+ &c) and hiding the existence of slackbuild scripts.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#93

Post by infodroid »

duozerk wrote: post #56
infodroid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered the possibility that your poor experience with Red Hat was due to the fact you were new to Linux? Encountering dependency hell is usually a sign that you don't know what you're doing. Red Hat "just works" and has always enjoyed the reputation of being the most bulletproof distro if you could afford it.

> has always enjoyed the reputation of being the most bulletproof distro if you could afford it. I've always heard that said about Debian more than about Red Hat (though Red Hat certainly is pretty stable). Red Hat has a lot more success in businesses though because you can get contractual support; which may not only be useful if you don't want to get the skills in-house but also because your own customer may contrac…

Debian also has an impressive reputation for quality. In many cases it has achieved, through its vast user and developer network, what Red Hat could only achieve through paid staff and commercial resources.

But this is not true in all areas, especially in some aspects that matter to companies such as training/certification and having good up-to-date documentation.

And as a volunteer-driven project, I don't think Debian can ever be as responsive to end-user problems or requirements as a commercial product can be.

But it definitely gives Red Hat a good run for its money. For example, the Debian LAMP stack has long been and still is the gold standard.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#95

Post by dec0dedab0de »

yeukhon wrote: post #13
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.

> Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Are you sure you meant "open source software" not free software?

I don't think it is possible to be Open Source without being Free Software, and vice versa. At least I've never seen it done.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#96

Post by nickpsecurity »

SEJeff wrote: post #67
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.

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 softwa…

Mozilla should be considered in similar category to Red Hat. They make almost half as much in the hundreds of millions range. That's focusing on search revenue instead of doing lots of products like Red Hat does. If they did that for enterprise, they'd probably be in the billion a year situation Red Hat is. Especially now that the competitors are surveillance engines & they could differentiate w/ paid offering. Even per organization rather than per user. Plus value-added services like encrypted backups.

They have a lot of potential that's underutilized.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#97

Post by jhasse »

kbenson wrote: post #34
digitalshankar wrote: post #27

Red Hat or the Microsoft of Linux is the face palm of linux distros, forget dependency hell, how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system or distros like Ubuntu? People just buy it for the support even if the Red Hat they use is Gnome 2 and Firefox V.3.0. Then finally RHCA/RHCE courses, i should get certified from this distro to prove my Linux skills for the companies even though i…

> how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system So, what makes the Debian package system superior? Having built multiple specs in the past, but not any debs, I'm curious. Given that you can often convert debs to RPMs and vice-versa, and can use the different package managers on either type of repository, it's not obvious where one has any specific benefit.

I have built both debs and rpms and I like rpms more. Both aren't perfect though (still so much fiddling around with Bash in pre/post scripts for doing anything more then extracting a bunch of files).

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#98

Post by jwildeboer »

SEJeff wrote: post #67
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.

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 softwa…

Actually we are a $2.xB revenue company ;-)

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#99

Post by a3n »

knieveltech wrote: post #40
michel-slm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before yum and dnf, dependency hell is a serious issue indeed. After that it's still a problem if you use multilib (sometimes updates get pushed for x86_64 but the i686 packages are missing) but I wouldn't really call it a dependency hell anymore.

Seriously. Weekend long marathons of dependency chasing (in the snow, uphill both ways) to finally get config/make/make install to run were not only a thing but disturbingly commonplace. These kids don't know how good they've got it. God I feel old.

It feels so good to not have to look at that book with the guy on a horse, to get networking going every time I installled a new distro, or sometimes upgrading. Especially because I usually didn't know what I was doing to fix the issue, I didn't even know what I was looking for.

Thanks to everyone who did read that book and others cover to cover (or wrote them), so that my linux install just works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Network_Administrator's_...

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#100

Post by nickpsecurity »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #77
nickpsecurity wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Canonical was losing money.

I am pretty sure they've been in the black, but not by much, for some time.

It was losing tens of millions just a few years ago to try to get into mobile. The financials are also private. Doesn't leave me much to go on. :)
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