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What makes us Red Hat

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Re: What makes us Red Hat

#111

Post by Apocryphon »

From Orion's Arm, online massive sci-fi collaborative project http://orionsarm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Information_Age_(novel)/...:

2015/46 - visual and tactile bodysuits enable advancement in personal Virtual Realities, which begin to take the market share from TV, radio, films, and other media.

2017/48 - first universal operational machine 'Harvey' constructed by a team lead by Peter Shor at Bell labs, with funding from IBM, Lycos, RedHat and Pepsi.

That bit from the timeline was probably written around 1999-2001 or so. Kind of amazing that out of the tech companies mentioned, RedHat is the one that's still doing pretty well.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#112

Post by SEJeff »

jwildeboer wrote: post #98
SEJeff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;-)

At numbers that big, what are a few more hundred million? Chump change!

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#113

Post by houst0n_ »

keithpeter wrote: post #110
houst0n_ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical are ditching Mir? I must have missed this one. Was this discussed here? Page won't load for me but my first thought was this was a poor taste April fools ;)

"I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS." I checked the date of the post really carefully as well. That is certainly a change of direction.

I guess unity was the only thing driving Mir then? Is dropping one the same as dropping both?

Seems like good news to me, having a significant player like canonical contributing to the community instead of fragmenting without much benefit can't be bad can it?

I don't use it on the desktop anyway, but I hope that moves in this direction are rewarded by the community.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#114

Post by flamedoge »

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…

What about Canonical?

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#115

Post by bronson »

0xCMP wrote: post #81
oddevan wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automattic comes to mind: AFAIK they've built a pretty successful business on WordPress and related products.

They aren't public, but yes I believe they are valued at 1bn+ too

There's a big difference between valuation and revenue.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#116

Post by curt15 »

tapoxi wrote: post #23
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…

I agree, but they've certainly come a long way. When I started with Red Hat 6.2, the dependency hell of installing RPMs from random websites and using the (almost never functional) up2date left me with an awful taste in my mouth as I jumped ship to Debian and the "just works" experience of apt-get. After switching to Fedora because we're using CentOS at work, I've come to like it. DNF and yum are fine replacements fo…

>The only things I don't like on an out-of-the-box Fedora installation are the stupid, touchscreen sized title bars in GNOME 3 and SELinux - which is fortunately easily disabled.

What does one do to fix the title bars?

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#117

Post by SEJeff »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #96
SEJeff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe, but from a corporate standpoint, Mozilla's leadership is pretty abysmal. Take the entire debacle with Mozilla Messaging. It was pretty much the only serious game in town for a decent gui mail client on Linux or really cross platform and they dropped it on the floor instead of finding some way to monetize it. I'd have paid for a decent Linux mail client with sensible calendaring (that isn't evolution aka outlook for Linux).

I lost a lot of faith in Mozilla years ago when the Firefox brand was starting to get really big and the Linux releases for everything Mozilla would lag behind by a few months. As a very early and avid Mozilla Phoenix/Firebird user, I lost faith in the brand as a whole. Sure they're doing wonderful things with webgl and the bleeding edge javascript stuff, but so is Google, and arguably to a greater degree.

Their potential is underutilized due to pathetic leadership, which will continue to flounder until that is resolved.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#118

Post by rsa4046 »

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.

I had the exact same experience -- Gentoo gave me control, understanding, confidence. Gentoo/Funtoo gave also come a long way since early days.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#119

Post by Jedd »

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.

And yet the word free does not appear anywhere in TFA.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#120

Post by groks »

curt15 wrote: post #116
tapoxi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but they've certainly come a long way. When I started with Red Hat 6.2, the dependency hell of installing RPMs from random websites and using the (almost never functional) up2date left me with an awful taste in my mouth as I jumped ship to Debian and the "just works" experience of apt-get. After switching to Fedora because we're using CentOS at work, I've come to like it. DNF and yum are fine replacements fo…

>The only things I don't like on an out-of-the-box Fedora installation are the stupid, touchscreen sized title bars in GNOME 3 and SELinux - which is fortunately easily disabled. What does one do to fix the title bars?

  cat  ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

  /* Make window title bars more compact.
   *
   * From: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/276951
   */

  headerbar entry,
  headerbar spinbutton,
  headerbar button,
  headerbar separator {
      margin-top: 2px; /* same as headerbar side padding for nicer proportions */
      margin-bottom: 2px;
  }

  EOF
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