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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

#41

Post by n0zmer »

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…

Fwiw, redhat is the creator and maintainer of podman, and it's the only fips compliant container tech out rn.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#42

Post by dfc »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #20

Reasons why people pay for Red Hat: 1. Customer support 2. Certifications 3. Vendor support I don't know another distribution of Linux that provides all these things to the extent Red Hat does. You don't use Red Hat because you want to, you use it because it's the only choice. 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 fr…

When I pay Redhat for customer support how is it different than the vendor support I pay them for?

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#43

Post by weare138 »

The biggest reason why we don’t see support and services companies achieving hyper-growth is that they are uninvestable. Annual revenues are low and nonrecurring, and margins are tight. VCs are looking for 80%+ gross margins and hockey stick growth.

In other words, Red Hat's model doesn't work for Wall St and VCs looking to make quick easy money riding out the next tech 'unicorn'. Red Hat has survived and thrived for 30 years now, while most modern VC backed tech companies are lucky to make it past 3. The infiltration of Silicon Valley VC vultures was one of the worst things to happen to the tech industry and why we rarely see sustainable startups like Red Hat anymore.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#44

Post by Dalewyn »

throwaway892238 wrote: post #20

Reasons why people pay for Red Hat: 1. Customer support 2. Certifications 3. Vendor support I don't know another distribution of Linux that provides all these things to the extent Red Hat does. You don't use Red Hat because you want to, you use it because it's the only choice. 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 fr…

>A business model is promising to fix a customer's problem, certify their software, and get vendors to support them.

This can also be described as assuming liability.

Fact of the matter is people don't want to assume liability themselves. If they can pay to get someone else to assume that liability (which Red Hat is happy to do) they will.

The rest of the FOSS ecosystem on the other hand is all about assuming liability yourself. No warranties expressed nor implied, no support, no nothing. For a business that is simply not palatable.

This is also why businesses happily pay tons of monies to Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, etc. for licenses and support. They assume liability, liability the businesses don't want to assume.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#45

Post by zzzeek »

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…

Hi -

I work at Red Hat for the last eight years, long before IBM had anything to do with us, and I cannot stress enough how much IBM is *nowhere* to be seen in not just our day to day engineering jobs, but pretty much not even periodically. I know nobody at IBM, I have no email addresses of anyone at IBM, nothing we get in our inbox (and we get a lot) ever has anything to do with "IBM" in it, I have no links or access to any IBM-specific intranets or resources of any kind. They truly have stuck to their promise of not changing Red Hat; our support system is the same, we still respond to bugs, ask for SOS reports, and customer support people do collaborative screenshares, just as we were always doing, there's nothing different about any of that. There have been no top-down changes or decrees or anything I'm aware of that would change how we do any of that stuff.

as far as Podman it's all I use for all of my server environments and I like it a lot better than Docker. It's simpler without all the weird "Dockerish" things getting in the way. Not having a monolithic server hang the whole machine due to a misbehaving container is well worth it.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#46

Post by KennyFromIT »

weare138 wrote: post #43

The biggest reason why we don’t see support and services companies achieving hyper-growth is that they are uninvestable. Annual revenues are low and nonrecurring, and margins are tight. VCs are looking for 80%+ gross margins and hockey stick growth. In other words, Red Hat's model doesn't work for Wall St and VCs looking to make quick easy money riding out the next tech 'unicorn'. Red Hat has survived and thrived for…

I don't think this can be overstated enough. The incentives for vc-backed companies these days don't align with this model, hence the reason it's not more widely in use.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#47

Post by Spooky23 »

gabereiser wrote: post #32
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…

Other “open source” companies are always focused on modern startup stuff. Too much fake it till you make it.

They have a unique value proposition in that they are an OS, so they are everywhere by default. It makes sense to have a .gov, banking, healthcare, etc teams who grok whatever the issues are in those verticals.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#48

Post by Spooky23 »

dfc wrote: post #42
throwaway892238 wrote: post #20

Reasons why people pay for Red Hat: 1. Customer support 2. Certifications 3. Vendor support I don't know another distribution of Linux that provides all these things to the extent Red Hat does. You don't use Red Hat because you want to, you use it because it's the only choice. 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 fr…

When I pay Redhat for customer support how is it different than the vendor support I pay them for?

When you run enterprise product X on Red Hat version Y, that vendor will do less fingerpointing. They may even work with Red Hat in the backend to deal with bugs, etc.

If you go put that on Debian or whatever, they’ll make you reproduce on RHEL.

This becomes a big deal when you have RHEL, VMWare, and other vendors in the mix. If you ignore the certification, the app vendor or VMWare will just shrug at you.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#49

Post by nine_k »

commandersaki wrote: post #38
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.

I kept thinking that Red Hat's Linux offerings are properly FOSS, and the stuff you buy is support contracts.

What are some per-CPU offers from them? (Because that's what I'd expect from Oracle, and hardly from RH.)

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#50

Post by hyperthesis »

gabereiser wrote: post #32
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…

So they're a pure consultancy firm, competing with those infatuated by the write-once-sell-many economics of software.
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