What makes us Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#211

Post by thinkmassive » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:30 AM UTC

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…

Cloudera will soon be a publicly held mostly-open source company valued well over a billion dollars.

Hortonworks is already public and almost fully-open source, although their market cap is under a billion ($670MM today).

Edit: I missed that the billion refers to revenue, and that RedHat is >2 billion. That's extremely impressive! These data platform companies are doing well, but I think they're still doing far under a billion in annual revenue.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#212

Post by greenhouse_gas » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 4:35 AM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #203

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say this enough. You write a config script for your OS and run it. Need to set up device #25? Upload and run. You're guaranteed to get the same system as device #24,23... You can keep it in source control, etc. If it (or guix - no systemd FTW) takes off, I can't imagine using another distro again. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't have enough maintainers yet (a year or so ago nginx was some 4 or 5 versions behi…

The biggest problem Nix[OS] has right now is documentation. The wiki is deprecated, but still the only source for explanation of several key parts of the system. nix-shell is fantastic, but hard to learn simply because there is no specific place to learn. Nix language really needs some clear documentation so a user can understand how to get from "I don't have X" to "I have a working default.nix for X, and X installed…

My problem with documentation isn't so much that the nix language is so hard, but that a nix's package configuration's is (obviously) not the same as upstream.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#213

Post by smarterclayton » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:02 AM UTC

maxamillion wrote: post #135

uggedal wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the source of Ansible Tower?

I heard at AnsibleFest is that it's undergoing legal review and export compliance, no official timeline yet though.

Export compliance is a huge PITA for red hat. Most open source projects and libraries are not very well set up to meet requirements from the US gov. It sucks down a ton of time, making sure everything is above board.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#214

Post by sidegrid » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:03 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #104

outworlder wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presentation matters.

Yes, and presenting a literal burnt red hat seems neither imaginative nor compelling.

Yes. Shallow and pedantic.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#215

Post by cyphar » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:03 AM UTC

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.

SUSE is older than RedHat and is also successful.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#216

Post by cyphar » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:07 AM UTC

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!

I work for SUSE and we have a very similar view on making all of our products free software. Everything I've ever written or done for SUSE is free software and I contribute it to openSUSE before it goes into our enterprise distribution (we are a member of the openSUSE community and we very strongly believe that our contributions should go to the community before they go to our enterprise distros).

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#217

Post by scrame » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:16 AM UTC

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.

its not that .deb is a better than format than .rpm, but apt is better than yum, as a dependency manager.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#218

Post by cyphar » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:20 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #82

ElijahLynn wrote: post #49

Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago. Absolutely love working for this company! Especially that most engineers use GNU/Linux of some sort. Great to see this!

"Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago." I have something I'd like to ask you ... Two years ago, at the RSA convention, I ran into a redhat employee and was chatting about (unix) and I mentioned that I was the founder of rsync.net with the expectation that he knew exactly who we were and what we did. He had no idea and had never heard of us . I felt like I had uncovered an enormous flaw in my outreach and…

> Two years ago, at the RSA convention, I ran into a redhat employee and was chatting about (unix) and I mentioned that I was the founder of rsync.net with the expectation that he knew exactly who we were and what we did.

That's a bit presumptuous isn't it? While many people have heard of rsync I've only heard of you because of HackerNews, and not everyone reads this site. When I first saw the URL "rsync.net" I didn't think of "backups", I thought that you maintained rsync or provided some sort of support for rsync.

> But now I'm not so sure ... I have a feeling that somehow the redhat ecosystem and the people that use it are quite a bit differently focused than the HN crowd and people that are UNIX enthusiasts for the sake of UNIX.

I work for SUSE, not RedHat, but our culture is incredibly similar (and I collaborate with people from RedHat every day). The makeup of companies like us is incredibly varied, and it's not really fair to make generalisations like that.

I know quite a few people who work for RedHat and SUSE who are super obsessive about Unix and have hobbies that are massively tied to programming. But that doesn't suddenly mean that they will automatically know every startup that does cloud storage.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#219

Post by cyphar » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:22 AM UTC

ufo wrote: post #209

ElijahLynn wrote: post #49

Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago. Absolutely love working for this company! Especially that most engineers use GNU/Linux of some sort. Great to see this!

What sort of distros do the folks use there? I would have assumed everyone would be using RHEL or Fedora.

At SUSE engineers use a wide variety of distros. There's no company policy against using anything (some of my coworkers even use OSX). But I'd say that a fair few use openSUSE because that's the distribution that we all help maintain.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#220

Post by flukus » Thu, Apr 06, 2017, 5:27 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…

> 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.

That's the job of the linux distro, not mozilla.