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What makes us Red Hat

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Re: What makes us Red Hat

#181

Post by infodroid »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #74
infodroid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UNIX vendors didn't normally ship releases or updates that introduced dependency issues. Part of their job was doing testing and quality assurance, that's what you were paying good money for. Most such issues were introduced locally. A good sysadmin would know how to avoid dependency hell. For example this might include taking basic precautions such as testing changes in a chroot or development/testing environment, b…

The problem with dependency hell was more that RedHat back then didn't have such a thing as a "rolling release" or "testing" in Debian speak. So while "RedHat 6" worked fine, trying to upgrade (say) OpenOffice would require that you download the rpm from OO's website, which would require that you upgrade Gnome, which would require that you upgrade X, which would require that you upgrade glibc, and down the rathole. C…

Except this really has nothing to do with rolling releases, or the amount of software the vendor ships in the official repositories. Switching to Debian won't solve the problem either.

There is no distro today that provides packages for all the software you will ever want, or the specific version that you need. At some point, you will resort to installing software from outside the officially-supported sources, whether from experimental or user-maintained package repositories, or from a third party in binary or source form.

Until recently, this was an operation that wasn't guaranteed to be easy or straightforward or risk-free. In the worst case, it could even screw up your system in ways that are time-consuming to diagnose and fix.

In the example you gave, I would conclude that OpenOffice didn't package their RPM well, because it ended up driving RH6 users down the rabbit hole. At the very least, they could have unpacked all the files under /opt and provided static binaries, or included all the libs in the archive. Many packages still do that today, such as Vagrant, which installs under /opt/vagrant and includes its own Ruby interpreter there.

Nowadays there are efforts underway to make installing custom software safe and easy, projects like: flatpak, OSTree, appimage, and snap. Hopefully we can reach a point where you can install whatever version of whatever software you want without breaking anything.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#182

Post by tekklloneer »

davidw wrote: post #20
tekklloneer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of them. Many of them are smaller players consisting of core developers providing feature additions for money, or support contracts, or selling an "enterprise" wrapper/hosted. scala, mail servers come to mind quickly

It's really difficult from a business point of view. To have a business, you have to have something scarce to sell people - it could be simply your time, but that's difficult to scale. For most companies it's some kind of product, but open source products are inherently not scarce. So to succeed, you have to have a source of scarcity in there somewhere, and that's not always easy, on top of the fact that no startup i…

I know a handful of people doing this right now, and they're pulling above average developer salaries. However, they're also traveling a ton and building kick-ass resumés as well.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#183

Post by crizzooo »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #64

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!

Can you elaborate on this for a Linux noob?

I spent an entire weekend setting up Ubuntu, and then wss extremely jaded when I could barely get anything to work, and even getting Flash in the browser was a huge pain in the ass. So I only use my windows side partition now, and its just easier....

Still mostly do everything on my Mac anyway

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#184

Post by mynameisvlad »

shanemhansen wrote: post #166
bonzini wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free or paid?

I don't know if Mark was paid last time I saw him drop by the office, but I imagine he planned on making some money.

Was that snark really necessary? Parent had a valid question; your org could be using the OSS Ubuntu which would be free, or the enterprise version which costs money. You never really specified which, and it changes the argument drastically from a cost perspective (and therefore potentially some of the motivations behind the choice.)

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#185

Post by ElijahLynn »

uggedal wrote: post #131
ElijahLynn wrote: post #64

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!

Where is the source of Ansible Tower?

Not out yet, but you can go to https://www.ansible.com/open-tower for updates. The cool thing is that even though it isn't out yet, it will be, because that is the Red Hat way.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#186

Post by nickpeterson »

davidw wrote: post #125
iamacynic wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consulting involves very little capital outlay, and is mostly just trading your own time and expertise for money. Creating a product - even a small scale one - is much more of an investment (and a risk), because while you're building it, it earns nothing. The payoff is that it can make money while you're asleep.

I've decided the best company is calling old people and selling them extended warranties for their Buicks.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#187

Post by nickpsecurity »

SEJeff wrote: post #117
nickpsecurity wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outloo…

I get your points on what issues they have. Yet, you were talking about how Red Hat is so huge in terms of labor and money. I was only bringing up Mozilla in the sense that they're a FOSS company making a ton of money with a bunch of employees that goes far in Red Hat's direction. I've got plenty of ideas for how I'd do it way better as a business. We're talking whether they make big money, though.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#189

Post by jldugger »

callahad wrote: post #16
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.

Firefox, WordPress, Drupal, and Wikipedia may also fit your definition.

Drupal and Wikipedia aren't even for-profit companies.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#190

Post by nickpsecurity »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #108
nickpsecurity wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Ah yes, that may be it, I am fairly sure they were in the black for a while from their cloud services, but they probably blew that on their push to mobile.

The same article said they were approaching break-even before the mobile push. So maybe, maybe not. It's clear they could do it if they wanted to. It seems to have mostly lost money that Shuttleworth put into it out of his pocket, though.

That's too bad because I like what they've done in terms of usability of Linux outside Unity. I switched to Mint at that point until the distro got subverted way too easily. Then back to Ubuntu with shitty Unity. I can't wait for the new one without it that was just announced since the mobile thing didn't pan out.

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