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These same VCs who are so fundamentally incompetent at the basics of capitalism, like risk management 101 of interest rates, that they had to get bailed out by the government, by the FDIC randomly deciding to rewrite the entire rule book that the rest of us normies have to live by.
Not if they need a long term supported and certified OS with various compliance checkmarks associated with it.
> If Red Hat tried to force people to pay too much, everyone would switch to the freely distributed versions (AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.). Not if they need a long term supported and certified OS with various compliance checkmarks associated with it.
I find it hilarious they are saying VCs wont invest in redhat style business because it's growth is not "hyper". These same VCs who are so fundamentally incompetent at the basics of capitalism, like risk management 101 of interest rates, that they had to get bailed out by the government, by the FDIC randomly deciding to rewrite the entire rule book that the rest of us normies have to live by.
> If Red Hat tried to force people to pay too much, everyone would switch to the freely distributed versions (AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.). Not if they need a long term supported and certified OS with various compliance checkmarks associated with it.
Yeah, but the question is whether such requirements apply to software beyond operating systems.
Confluent was arguably also able to do this for a similar reason - at the time they launched, the Kafka model was becoming vital, but was also novel and difficult to manage in production, and its enterprise services and support were critical for adoption. (They do have a managed cloud now, but their enterprise services were 73% of their revenue in 2021 and 61% in 2022: https://investors.confluent.io/node/8466/html ).
But it's hard to run what is essentially a professional services firm and popularize an open-source product at the same time... unless your open source product is already rapidly becoming paradigm-defining, and you're the people with the unique know-how to position yourself as the saviors for that space.
"open core is the best model" says company dedicated to pursuing open core... There are dozens of "open source business models" and as this article shows the "red hat model" isn't even one thing.
Weird to see a startup making such simplistic, wrong statements to promote their business rather than to protect an entrenched business.
> If Red Hat tried to force people to pay too much, everyone would switch to the freely distributed versions (AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.). Not if they need a long term supported and certified OS with various compliance checkmarks associated with it.
The reality is containers and container-first OSs are killing RHEL, you no longer need a breadth of OS packages or a fully capable OS. Just docker or podman. The only place RHEL has a stranglehold is with COTS apps, but those are all moving to containers too. I can't think of any widely used container that uses RHEL/CentOS or Fedora for the base image, that was a huge miss on RH's part.
1. Customer support
2. Certifications
3. Vendor support
Any business could do exactly the same thing, and do it better than Red Hat. But there's really not much reason for a customer to move away from Red Hat if they're already on it, and it would take you a hell of a long time and a dumptruck full of capital to match them on the above.
Open Core is not a business model, just like Open Source isn't a business model. A business model is promising to fix a customer's problem, certify their software, and get vendors to support them. That alone will get you a yearly renewing contract for a couple million that you then upsell over time.