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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

#31

Post by andrewem »

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…

Side note on Confluent’s products. Thanks for that link - the “Disaggregation of Revenue” table where the 73% and 61% numbers came from shows that Confluent Cloud revenue increased from $94M in 2021 to $211M in 2022, which was more than Confluent Platform’s revenue growth. If those growth rates continue then Confluent Cloud will very soon be the majority of their revenue.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#32

Post by gabereiser »

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…

This is correct. They still do this. They are the only ones. They go beyond just "hey, I know of a database that could handle that size" to "why are you storing this here? this is PII, this is analytical data, this is business data, here's a proposal for doing this with open source at scale". It's not just "buy our product". They go above and beyond the needs of the product to the needs of the customer, like you said.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#33

Post by nimbius »

modern redhat --and this cannot be stressed enough-- is nothing like old redhat despite IBM's fervent insistance after the acquisition they would remain hands off.

The hat killed Centos because some IBM midlevel manager needed to make quota for a bonus, and they didnt stop to realize just how unsuccessful this tactic was for Oracle/MySQL.

moderen redhat is carved into about 40 seperate repositories and channels for packages designed to fleece you right down to the last RPM. need Ansible? sure it comes with redhat 9. need posix acl support from galaxy? that's another repo you didnt pay for. same goes for about a hundred other packages.

redhat might have had great tech support in the past, but put a ticket in now and you're in IBM levels of "prove it" hell with SOSReport zips and zoom screenshares until your entry level support guy gives up the ghost and calls a developer, who tells you the bug cant/wont be fixed because libraries are hard or a rebase is impossible or any other number of boilerplate excuses why this ancient 4.x kernel based distro cant just source its solutions from fedora like they said they do

and the flagships? forget it. Yeah Quay exists but try to implement it and youll find cool stuff like an administrator account defined in configuration but not created. once created in the admin panel youll have to go back and disable new user creation so you can control user creation at all, and the whole thing just feels rickety and poorly designed from the get-go. none of this is mentioned in the docs overtly, but is buried in Redhats bloated docs pages. just buy a quay hosted whatever from the hat instead.

Openshift is equally appalling as its a massive ecosystem Redhats done virtually everything to control and nothing to distribute or competently document. its painfully obvious IBM wants you to hire a consultant to build and deploy it...There is an open-source offering, but it cant be easily rolled into an airgap installation and it suffers the same level of byzantine and poorly written documentation as Quay. K3S/RKE2 easily beat it for nearly every use case.

Then theres the docker fiasco which unsurprisingly neither of these juggernauts wanted to deal with the others bullshit so now dockers broken in all but the most monied instances of IBM hardware. redhat became so absolutely resolute about podman being "everything you can do i can do too" that it has a fucking compose option to translate docker compose into podman because people like compose but rewriting your appstack to pods when you dont want to be arsed with k8s is sort of a non-starter.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#35

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

breck wrote: post #22

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 "lice…

The Irish government released its Covid phone apps as Free Software.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#36

Post by huslage »

I was at Red Hat very early on. Red Hat has been remarkably consistent throughout its journey once it graduated from selling boxes of software at book stores (which was a necessary step). Red Hat only astook venture money once it was ready to go public and never before. The philosophy of Red Hat was to "make the pie bigger" and still largely is, therefore it supports open source first before anything else. This works because it provides product-market fit at scale and by nature. The thought that "all" Red Hat sells is software support, certifications, and subscriptions to updates is so short sighted and misses the point.

Red Hat created an industry and all of the successful enterprise Linux distros have followed its model to some extent or another (Canonical, SUSE, etc). You don't need "open core" (which is a misnomer if there ever was one) if you continue down a path that creates and maintains communities of software authors out there in the world that will constantly feed value back into the ecosystem.

A virtuous cycle of community maintained software alongside a thriving and growing business is still achievable, no one seems to have the guts to do it.

(edited for typo)

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#37

Post by dralley »

nimbius wrote: post #33

modern redhat --and this cannot be stressed enough-- is nothing like old redhat despite IBM's fervent insistance after the acquisition they would remain hands off. The hat killed Centos because some IBM midlevel manager needed to make quota for a bonus, and they didnt stop to realize just how unsuccessful this tactic was for Oracle/MySQL. moderen redhat is carved into about 40 seperate repositories and channels for p…

> The hat killed Centos because some IBM midlevel manager needed to make quota for a bonus, and they didnt stop to realize just how unsuccessful this tactic was for Oracle/MySQL.

I cannot stress enough how untrue this is. See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35586311

RHEL clones were always going to exist, this is and was obvious, and there are more of them now than ever. That's not the point. The point is that now there is a way for RHEL clones, including ones from competitors like Oracle, have some way of contributing back to RHEL, whereas beforehand if you were a CentOS user your only possible course of action was to file a bug in the RHEL bug tracker and wait for a Red Hat employee to prioritize it.

The business benefit is also a technical benefit - the ability to fix bugs and add features is no longer strictly limited by the amount of engineering capacity Red Hat can contribute. Companies like Facebook use CentOS Stream at scale internally and make contributions that ultimately end up in RHEL, users and vendors have a target they can integrate against early without needing gated betas, etc.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#38

Post by commandersaki »

huslage wrote: post #36

I was at Red Hat very early on. Red Hat has been remarkably consistent throughout its journey once it graduated from selling boxes of software at book stores (which was a necessary step). Red Hat only astook venture money once it was ready to go public and never before. The philosophy of Red Hat was to "make the pie bigger" and still largely is, therefore it supports open source first before anything else. This works…

I find Redhat jumped the shark when it started selling its distribution with different licensing options that let you use different number of CPU cores.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#39

Post by hash872 »

>Getting contracts for development work with large customers can be difficult since most organizations already have preferred vendors for software development. Developing features under a support model gives you no entitlement to the technology. And, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll eventually put yourself out of a job since customers can use it without help

But there are a large number of outsourced software development companies, some of them publicly traded- Cognizant/Infosys/Wipro types, plus Accenture, plus the new generation of Eastern European ones like EPAM and Grid Dynamics. Government-y ones like CGI. Oldschool companies offering consultancies like EY/Deloitte, etc. Hovering in the background is Toptal, which is technically different but I would imagine the bulk of their revenue comes from enterprise outsourced dev contracts. All of these companies are making this business model work somehow? And there are lots of them too. So it can't be that bad of a way to make money (yes I understand that these are not VC-investable businesses)

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#40

Post by [deleted] »

nimbius wrote: post #33

modern redhat --and this cannot be stressed enough-- is nothing like old redhat despite IBM's fervent insistance after the acquisition they would remain hands off. The hat killed Centos because some IBM midlevel manager needed to make quota for a bonus, and they didnt stop to realize just how unsuccessful this tactic was for Oracle/MySQL. moderen redhat is carved into about 40 seperate repositories and channels for p…

[deleted]
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