Is this good for IBM?
Both are walking dinosaurs at this point waiting for a meteorite...
Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
71–79 of 79 posts
Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like what I wrote in my original comment: > Expect customer audits to get more hardball; more aggressive use of anti-competitive bundling (“if you use this competitor’s product on RHEL, we will not support that RHEL host”)
From someone coming from support, This is horseshit.
It has to be horseshit. A significant part of Red Hat's value-add is customers can go to them with problems that might not actually be Red Hat's own, and still get help resolving them. "One throat to choke" is the charming phrase I often heard. It's huge for enterprise customers, and a big part of what they pay large sums of money for. I'm sure there are some cases where Red Hat does have to say they can't support something, but doing so willy-nilly would be suicidal.
Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
From someone coming from support, This is horseshit.
It has to be horseshit. A significant part of Red Hat's value-add is customers can go to them with problems that might not actually be Red Hat's own, and still get help resolving them. "One throat to choke" is the charming phrase I often heard. It's huge for enterprise customers, and a big part of what they pay large sums of money for. I'm sure there are some cases where Red Hat does have to say they can't support so…
I work for Red Hat Consulting helping customers with their Red Hat products (especially OpenShift) and I can confirm we often help customers who are using products that aren't ours, or even are competitors with ours. Just yesterday I was helping diagnose a problem with Hashicorp Vault. I've written code for this customer to integrate one of our solutions with it as well. My team has helped with Spring Boot issues (a "competitor" to us) and Liberty, and more.
We try to help with everything.
I can't speak on whether that will change or not since I don't know the future, but it wouldn't be an easy thing to move. It's deeply embedded in our culture.
Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
#74I work for Red Hat and wasn't going to comment (as I don't know Paul), but I feel somewhat compelled by so much of the negativity here.
Red Hat, like all companies, is not a monolith. It's a huge mix of people from different places, cultures, etc. It's a salad bowl of personalities, values, and priorities.
Somehow we come together to make some amazing products. As I mentioned above I can't comment on Paul because I don't know him, but I can comment on what I've seen at Red Hat.
We are super forgiving about "license violations." I've never seen the "Oracle tactics" and if I do, I'll probably quit. IBM is not infecting Red Hat, in fact it's the other way around. I don't interact with IBM at all but from what I've seen at a distance we are spreading our culture to them. I don't agree with every policy of ours regarding RHEL and subscriptions, etc, as I feel it disincentivizes community usage too much, but I've never seen it used punitively or aggressively against anyone, especially our customers.
I choose to remain optimistic that the future is bright, until there's actual evidence that it may not be true. Jumping to conclusions early is at best unproductive and at worst could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm excited to see what the future will bring.
Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc. Right, but that only strengthens my point. Red Hat is bundling add-ons with RHEL in an effort to boost add-on sales. Without the bundling, those products would be doing considerably worse in the marketplace…
I wouldn't put so much credence on historical revenue streams. As computing has changed, so have the revenue streams. There's fewer & fewer companies these days building and selling OSes. Linux has done wonders to standardize and commoditize the OS. I think the reality of computing today is that platforms, subscriptions & services are what companies want. It's a very Cloud Computing or Utilities-like conversation at…
I agree that the world is moving away from the OS-centric model, towards a cloud-centric model. I just don’t think Red Hat is nearly as strong in the new model as it was in the old.
Red Hat was an uncontested leader and innovator in the OS market. In the cloud market... not the same story. The gap in revenue between RHEL and everything else illustrates that.
Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't put so much credence on historical revenue streams. As computing has changed, so have the revenue streams. There's fewer & fewer companies these days building and selling OSes. Linux has done wonders to standardize and commoditize the OS. I think the reality of computing today is that platforms, subscriptions & services are what companies want. It's a very Cloud Computing or Utilities-like conversation at…
I agree that the world is moving away from the OS-centric model, towards a cloud-centric model. I just don’t think Red Hat is nearly as strong in the new model as it was in the old. Red Hat was an uncontested leader and innovator in the OS market. In the cloud market... not the same story. The gap in revenue between RHEL and everything else illustrates that.
I don't worry about that. We're backed by IBM Cloud now, there was that $34B bet placed last year, there's all sort of cross selling going on between IBM and Red Hat. I imagine we'll see more and more Red Hat software integrated in IBM Cloud services and offerings, and then, we'll have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux which will look a lot like Amazon Linux (which appears to be based on RHEL & CentOS).
Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that the world is moving away from the OS-centric model, towards a cloud-centric model. I just don’t think Red Hat is nearly as strong in the new model as it was in the old. Red Hat was an uncontested leader and innovator in the OS market. In the cloud market... not the same story. The gap in revenue between RHEL and everything else illustrates that.
I don't worry about that. We're backed by IBM Cloud now, there was that $34B bet placed last year, there's all sort of cross selling going on between IBM and Red Hat. I imagine we'll see more and more Red Hat software integrated in IBM Cloud services and offerings, and then, we'll have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux which will look a lot like Amazon Linux (which appears to be based on RHEL & CentOS).
Do you think IBM cloud will get more competitive price and feature wise? AWS (and Google and Azure, etc) are overpriced in many ways (dgress charges anyone?). I would love to see IBM cloud be price competitive. If it also then featured first class Red Hat products that could be compelling even to startup and hobbyists. I'd happily pay the same cost I pay now for a VM to get the equivalent CPU/mem/disk in an OpenShift cluster.
Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, just sounds like that person can’t keep track of how many system they deploy.
Well, it's not always as simple as 'how many systems' even when you're talking about just an operating system. There's licensing based on cores and/or sockets. Then there's licensing for virtual machines. Oracle was really nasty in some of the licensing scenarios, IIRC. If you ran an Oracle DB on an unlicensed platform in a VM (such as VMWare), then when you got audited, you needed to pay for how many cores/sockets w…
Is there evidence of Red Hat ever doing that kind of gotcha licensing?
Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it's not always as simple as 'how many systems' even when you're talking about just an operating system. There's licensing based on cores and/or sockets. Then there's licensing for virtual machines. Oracle was really nasty in some of the licensing scenarios, IIRC. If you ran an Oracle DB on an unlicensed platform in a VM (such as VMWare), then when you got audited, you needed to pay for how many cores/sockets w…
Is there evidence of Red Hat ever doing that kind of gotcha licensing?
I don't know of any, but that isn't to say there isn't any. Oracle on the other hand is widely known for this practice.