What makes us Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#191

Post by TheAdamAndChe » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 12:42 AM UTC

jhasse wrote: post #107

brightball wrote: post #2

It's this mindset that makes me want to support Red Hat as a company. As good as the Fedora 25 experience has been for me, I'd love to see Linux laptop vendors (especially Dell) make it an installed option soon. Maybe CentOS laptops would make more sense for them from a sheer "stability for support sake" experience.

The advantage of Ubuntu LTS is that you can upgrade it to a non-LTS. Also good for branding that both are "Ubuntu". I'd love if CentOS / RHEL would become Fedora LTS.

I disagree. Red Hat's brand is pretty powerful in the corporate linux world. If anything, Fedora should be renamed to RHEL Unstable or something.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#192

Post by ams6110 » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 12:59 AM UTC

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…

I maintain several RHEL and CentOS clusters.

I never install anything from source. Packages from yum repositories only.

Upgrade OpenOffice with a downloaded RPM? No. The point of RedHat is stability for enterprises. If you want the latest version of everything, RedHat is the wrong distribution.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#193

Post by greenhouse_gas » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 1:10 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #192

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I maintain several RHEL and CentOS clusters. I never install anything from source. Packages from yum repositories only. Upgrade OpenOffice with a downloaded RPM? No. The point of RedHat is stability for enterprises. If you want the latest version of everything, RedHat is the wrong distribution.

This was RedHat Linux, not RHEL. This was _way_ before the RHEL/Fedora split.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#194

Post by gerdesj » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 1:11 AM UTC

Redhat: I clicked on the link and was presented with a wall of words. Oh and there was a bloody great piccy above the words that I had to scroll past. It looked a bit rubbish. Is that really the best that a multi billion dollar company's S&M department can come up with?

Back in the day, after I'd farted around with Slackware, Yggdrasil, Mandrake etc I'd come back to RH but that was a long time ago and now is now.

Should I bother to read the blurb ... had a go ... had another go ... ... got bored ... didn't finish - soz.

I believe that RH are an important component of the (GNU)Linux ecosystem but I am not exactly fired up by this effort. I am fired up by software in general and Libre software in particular.

OK ... another go at the marketing thing ... oh, apparently RH are the leading force in open source software.

Piss off.

Open source software looks after itself.

Feel free to include say the kernel devs amongst your "life blood" Feel free to read LWN's articles that describe how stuff is done

There is no doubt that RH has contributed to open source software in a significant way but they are not on my radar these days.

Cheers Jon

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#195

Post by greenhouse_gas » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 1:24 AM UTC

infodroid wrote: post #181

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, whethe…

We're talking about different levels.

Generally, nowadays you keep a system relatively up to date using apt-get update and upgrade, pacman or yum. Back then all you had was RPM (the equivalent of dpkg).

The attitude was "you want new versions? Go to upstream, download the .RPM and install".

Now, OO (don't remember if it existed back then) depends on certain versions of (say) GTK.

What do you do?

Go to gtk.org and download the rpm.

Rinse and repeat

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#196

Post by Arizhel » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 1:31 AM UTC

alsadi wrote: post #109

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 many success stories in opensource companies but they are not as open as redhat nor as succesdful as redhat. There is a consulting company over the corner that customizes opensource software at small scale. There coreos, percona, suse,... Oracle is the only multi billion dollar database-centric company. Faceboom is the only successful social media (twitter is micro blogging or whatever you call it) Microsoft is…

>Faceboom is the only successful social media

Was that a Freudian slip or something? :-)

I'm going to have to remember that one.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#197

Post by ams6110 » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 1:53 AM UTC

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #193

ams6110 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maintain several RHEL and CentOS clusters. I never install anything from source. Packages from yum repositories only. Upgrade OpenOffice with a downloaded RPM? No. The point of RedHat is stability for enterprises. If you want the latest version of everything, RedHat is the wrong distribution.

This was RedHat Linux, not RHEL. This was _way_ before the RHEL/Fedora split.

Aha -- I saw RedHat 6 and read "RHEL 6"

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#198

Post by mintplant » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 2:01 AM UTC

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…

Mozilla is (in practice) a non-profit, monetization is not the goal outside of what is necessary for continuity.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#199

Post by pksadiq » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 2:02 AM UTC

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #95

yeukhon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I don't think it is possible to be Open Source without being Free Software, and vice versa.

It is a bit tricky here. Based on the situation, the same software can be some times be open source AND free software, or open source only (ie, not free software).

Eg: Linux kernel. When it is run on your computer, usually it is open source and mostly free-software (linux-libre would be fully free). When it is run on your router, they (vendor) shall give you the source code, but may not allow you to modify it. This is violation of freedom 1 (The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish). Then it won't be a free software, but just open source. You can't even confirm whether the source code they gave corresponds to the binary run in the router.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#200

Post by mintplant » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 2:03 AM UTC

grkvlt wrote: post #86

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.

Who? They're not even in the same ballpark. RH has 10k employees and USD 1bn in revenue with a market cap of ~15bn, these guys just seem to be a ~500 person WordPress shop.

Automattic is the WordPress shop. They develop WordPress and run WordPress.com. There aren't any recent revenue numbers available, but indirectly powering ~25% of the internet is nothing to sneeze at.