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What makes us Red Hat

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Re: What makes us Red Hat

#241

Post by infodroid »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #195
infodroid wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dow…

If that's what you call dependency hell then you've had it easy!

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#242

Post by schoen »

dredmorbius wrote: post #228
Godel_unicode wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they the arbiter of what is and isn't open source? That kind of gatekeeping seems contrary to their entire purpose.

Because that is literally the single and only reason for their existence: to define and protect the Open Source Definition. (I'm not sure if it's still a Service Mark or not, though it was at one time.)

As I recall, the USPTO declined to grant the registration for the service mark, which was kind of sad for OSI, but they kept going anyway, encouraging people to refer to OSI-certified open source.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#243

Post by grkvlt »

mintplant wrote: post #200
grkvlt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting; they really don't have the brand recognition they deserve then. I would consider myself as reasonably well-informed as the next HN reader, and I certainly hadn't heard of them. Of course I don't work with WordPress - but i have heard of WordPress...

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#244

Post by dec0dedab0de »

vacri wrote: post #140
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Atlassian software is Open Source but not Free Software. You can download it, inspect it, and run it... but you need a paid license to keep it running. The same is true of RHEL, because CentOS is effectively "RHEL without a paid license".

the term Free software has nothing to do with Money. "Free speech, not Free Beer"

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#245

Post by nvarsj »

jeremyeder wrote: post #79
nvarsj wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes being old is a double edged sword. For instance, RHEL7 has a lot of problems on AWS because the kernel is too old to properly support many of the virtualisation features AWS provides. On bare metal RHEL7 is great, though.

Can you be more specific about this please? Disclaimer, I happily work for RH and today's blog has me ear-to-ear grinning.

Hey sure, I should have been more specific. The enhanced networking in AWS requires ixgbevf at least version 2.14.2. In addition we had random hardlocks with ext4 under the centos7 kernel. Also we had a lot of difficulties running docker on EBS disks with the device manager driver - hard lock ups randomly. That's all I recall off the top of my head. All these issues disappeared upon moving to Ubuntu 16.04 on a later kernel. Centos7 was great for us otherwise, it just didn't seem to work out so well with Docker + AWS.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#246

Post by kerny »

jaboutboul wrote: post #136

I proudly worked for Red Hat for almost a decade and I can honestly say that they've got pretty much everything right, from culture to work ethic to vision and execution, all throughout its done with the community at the forefront. It really is part of the company's DNA and they don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk. A great company, culture and a great place to work.

Why would you leave such a great place to work?

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#247

Post by collinmanderson »

mintplant wrote: post #225
fnj wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the internet's destructive hacking do they "power"?

Quite a bit, I imagine, but unfortunately security does not necessarily correlate to popularity.

They now do automatic security updates, so the situation should improve.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#248

Post by nvarsj »

nvarsj wrote: post #245
jeremyeder wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific about this please? Disclaimer, I happily work for RH and today's blog has me ear-to-ear grinning.

Hey sure, I should have been more specific. The enhanced networking in AWS requires ixgbevf at least version 2.14.2. In addition we had random hardlocks with ext4 under the centos7 kernel. Also we had a lot of difficulties running docker on EBS disks with the device manager driver - hard lock ups randomly. That's all I recall off the top of my head. All these issues disappeared upon moving to Ubuntu 16.04 on a later…

Here's another example: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1419877. live-restore works well on Ubuntu 16.04, afaict.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#249

Post by SEJeff »

psankar wrote: post #205
SEJeff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical isn't really profitable and much of SUSE's stuff is actually proprietary from the days of Novell.

Which SUSE Stuff is proprietary ? SUSE Linux Enterprise editions have been always open. They are built on top of the openSUSE platform.

All of the Open Enterprise Server stuff, which is one of their big moneymakers.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#250

Post by digi_owl »

digi_owl wrote: post #240
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…

No surprises there. While just about every other package format out there is some variant of a tar-ball with added meta-data the RPM is a custom binary format. I know someone did a blog or article on the RPM format internals, but damned if i can find it with a quick search. I just get a whole bunch of Fedora and Red Hat links...

GDIt, why didn't i try a HN search in the first place...

https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/argh-pm.html

seems to be what i was thinking about earlier.

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