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The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

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Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#21

Post by wmf »

candiddevmike wrote: post #19
rdtsc wrote: post #12

> 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.

You can have CIS, FIPS, and a whole host of other compliance without Red Hat, arguably just as easily. 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…

That's why they created OpenShift which is arguably worth more than RHEL.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#22

Post by breck »

I think it would be a great benefit to our country if governments started phasing out the purchase of any proprietary software.

If you want to make software for the government, it must be public domain.

In the long run we'd all have lower taxes, more efficient government, and better software for all to use.

The downside would be some people in the 1% would no longer earn billions in fees from the rest of us for "licensing" software laden with technical debt to the government.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#23

Post by wejick »

Expected to see canonical model get mentioned in the article, combination of proprietary online services with opensource products. Well we know all of debate around it and the peculiarities of canonical, but I feel like it worths mentioning.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#24

Post by mgfist »

fatneckbeard wrote: post #11

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.

SVB was a bank, not a VC.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#25

Post by candiddevmike »

wmf wrote: post #21
candiddevmike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have CIS, FIPS, and a whole host of other compliance without Red Hat, arguably just as easily. 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…

That's why they created OpenShift which is arguably worth more than RHEL.

Eh, OpenShift is too opinionated to be valuable for the companies that can afford it, and way too expensive for those that might benefit from it vs a cloud based PaaS. OpenShift's biggest problem has always been that it continues to diverge just enough from vanilla k8s to require "OpenShift specific" shit for everything.

I don't see OpenShift getting the same COTS lift as RHEL, so in my mind it's still going to be a net loss for RH long term as that revenue leaves RHEL and doesn't go to OCP.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#26

Post by jasoneckert »

tssva wrote: post #15

Red Hat early on invested in understanding the needs of the different industry verticals they were trying to sell into and made sure their products could meet things such as compliance and audit requirements of differing sectors. They developed guides on how to deploy their products in a manner which met those requirements and their professional services engineers understood not just Red Hat products but the specific…

I concur with your points 100%.

Moreover, I remember Red Hat sales reps back in the 2000s to be incredibly technical and knowledgable compared to every other vendor's sales reps. Every time I had a specific question regarding technical implementation or even compliance laws in my region, the sales rep knew the answer or forwarded me immediately to someone who did. They were very organized.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#27

Post by EdwardDiego »

btown wrote: post #17

Red Hat worked because it was a time (the height of the dot-com bubble) when open source operating systems were something of a Wild West - rapidly becoming an industry standard, but not well understood by existing businesses. Red Hat provided guidance for that transition. 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 nove…

Confluent also moved early on the Confluent Community Licence for Kafka Connect connectors they developed to prevent other service providers being able to provide the service that Confluent did.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#28

Post by dralley »

jt2190 wrote: post #6
16bitvoid wrote: post #2

> Under Red Hat control, CentOS no longer modeled RHEL production code but was marketed as a beta—a preview of what was coming down the pipe. Eventually, the company sunsetted the project entirely, and as a result, new copycats emerged. I thought CentOS was downstream of RHEL. Doesn't this describe what CentOS Stream became?

It was, but that changed as of RHEL 8. I suspect that AmazonLinux (also originally downstream of RHEL) caused Red Hat to reconsider this. I’m not sure why exactly. Perhaps Red Hat/IBM compete with Amazon in some space, or perhaps they felt that Amazon should release their patches.

The CentOS Stream transition was a shift from the "throw it over the wall" model of open source like Android to a more collaborative approach.

Example: As a user of (original) CentOS, you discover a bug. Where do you report that bug? The Red Hat Enterprise Linux bug tracker, because CentOS is just a clone and the community has no real ability to fix things. Then what? You wait until a Red Hat employee gets around to looking at it, and then wait until the next patch release which might be up to 6 months away.

Now repeat with the new model.

As a user of either CentOS Stream or one of the RHEL clones such as Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, etc. you discover a bug. Where do you report that bug? The CentOS Stream bug tracker, upstream for RHEL and thus also upstream for all RHEL clones. CentOS Stream is a community project, so the community (including yourself, and including maintainers for Alma / Rocky / Oracle Linux) can actively contribute to and drive the fix onwards to completion and test it afterwards, wheras before it would sit in internal nightly builds for a few months.

Both the community and Red Hat benefit from aligning incentives that way. However, I understand why there was a lot of frustration about the way it was announced and implemented. It could have been handled better.

disclosure: I work for Red Hat, but not on anything related to RHEL or CentOS Stream.

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