The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat • Hacker News Board

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#101

Post by rwmj » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:16 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #84

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…

SuSE for example.

SUSE are probably the closest company to following Red Hat's business model (with a more European/German focus). The other ones are the cloud vendors who are getting around to realising now that without certification there are many government orgs, large companies, the military etc who simply cannot use their cloud services.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#102

Post by Twisell » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:21 AM UTC

asddubs wrote: post #87

Twisell wrote: post #82

I quite disagree with two ideas in this article: 1. For me until proven otherwise, RedHat have an OpenCore model, the CentOS shift is too recent to be meaningful. My company literally panicked about their CentOS servers because they didn't want a rolling distro and so decided to switch to something else free for low risk VM (worse I'm afraid) and pay RHEL support for critical applications. 2.There are a shitload of s…

why didn't they just switch to rockylinux?

They switched to Oracle Linux... and for the love of humankind don't ask me why...

(At least they had the sense to switch to REHL for critical servers)

Now on the app side we are left with some vendors that don't support installs on OracleLinux (because who would switch to that... again don't ask me why).

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#103

Post by debarshri » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:25 AM UTC

hahnchen wrote: post #94

rwmj wrote: post #89

(Note: I work for Red Hat) I'm constantly amazed that people still don't understand why Red Hat makes money, and this article won't enlighten you as it doesn't understand it as well as being full of other incidental mistakes (like their description of CentOS is way off the mark). Red Hat takes Linux and certifies it against all kinds of government, safety, privacy etc standardards, such as PCI and FIPS and numerous l…

Does redhat have customors who don't need government compliance? If so, why do they use red hat?

I have seen huge law firms use Redhat's distribution. There are service level agreements, dedicated support engineers as part of the contract. It is gives peace of mind, sense of security and large firms always prefer solutions that have enterprise support, you cannot cheap out when data/security leak can impact share price.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#104

Post by mr_toad » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:28 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #89

(Note: I work for Red Hat) I'm constantly amazed that people still don't understand why Red Hat makes money, and this article won't enlighten you as it doesn't understand it as well as being full of other incidental mistakes (like their description of CentOS is way off the mark). Red Hat takes Linux and certifies it against all kinds of government, safety, privacy etc standardards, such as PCI and FIPS and numerous l…

It makes me cynical when most certifications and compliance involves a lot of paperwork and not much in the way of changes to software.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#105

Post by solatic » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:32 AM UTC

hahnchen wrote: post #94

rwmj wrote: post #89

(Note: I work for Red Hat) I'm constantly amazed that people still don't understand why Red Hat makes money, and this article won't enlighten you as it doesn't understand it as well as being full of other incidental mistakes (like their description of CentOS is way off the mark). Red Hat takes Linux and certifies it against all kinds of government, safety, privacy etc standardards, such as PCI and FIPS and numerous l…

Does redhat have customors who don't need government compliance? If so, why do they use red hat?

Ten years of contract-guaranteed long-term support is also category-leading: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata

Particularly for systems that are installed as appliances in customer data-centers, where you as the vendor are both (a) responsible for the appliance as a whole to continue working but (b) have little / restricted access to continue maintaining it, RHEL helps you sign long multi-year support contracts for said appliance with the customer while keeping your maintenance costs to a minimum (since the cost of hiring more support engineers then flying them out is going to be higher than the RHEL license cost).

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#106

Post by helmholtz » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:38 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #104

rwmj wrote: post #89

(Note: I work for Red Hat) I'm constantly amazed that people still don't understand why Red Hat makes money, and this article won't enlighten you as it doesn't understand it as well as being full of other incidental mistakes (like their description of CentOS is way off the mark). Red Hat takes Linux and certifies it against all kinds of government, safety, privacy etc standardards, such as PCI and FIPS and numerous l…

It makes me cynical when most certifications and compliance involves a lot of paperwork and not much in the way of changes to software.

Great, so you won't make the piles of money that RHEL does, but maybe you'll enjoy your work more.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#107

Post by vetinari » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:41 AM UTC

helmholtz wrote: post #106

mr_toad wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me cynical when most certifications and compliance involves a lot of paperwork and not much in the way of changes to software.

Great, so you won't make the piles of money that RHEL does, but maybe you'll enjoy your work more.

You can have work that 1) you enjoy, 2) is well paid and 3) is legal. Pick two.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#108

Post by pas » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:43 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #104

rwmj wrote: post #89

(Note: I work for Red Hat) I'm constantly amazed that people still don't understand why Red Hat makes money, and this article won't enlighten you as it doesn't understand it as well as being full of other incidental mistakes (like their description of CentOS is way off the mark). Red Hat takes Linux and certifies it against all kinds of government, safety, privacy etc standardards, such as PCI and FIPS and numerous l…

It makes me cynical when most certifications and compliance involves a lot of paperwork and not much in the way of changes to software.

because compliance is mostly about documentation.

glorified checklists.

but checklists work (you might have heard about surgeons leaving medical tools in patients, and checklists eliminating this problem, seemingly the dumbest simplest technology, yet it's very powerful compared to the default of nothing)

of course the quality of answers matter, but that's on the environment (auditors, regulators, industry best practices, trade groups, client expectations), see the absolute total shambles of the state of IT sec in South Korea, the 1000 year old COBOL systems in finance/insurance, the reservation system in air travel, the sorry state of TLS before LetsEncrypt, SMTP servers (how SPF, DMARC, DKIM and ARC and MTA-STS are all needed to signal that you really prefer TLS, really don't want to be impersonated, you really vouch for forwarded stuff, etc).

also there's the BeyondCorp step-up. nobody bothered to really segment the internal network. nowadays the default is zero-trust.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#109

Post by vetinari » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:44 AM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #95

hahnchen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does redhat have customors who don't need government compliance? If so, why do they use red hat?

Once you are the default choice that has other network effects, so yes. For example if you are a software vendor who needs to ship a proprietary kernel module - think something like software to control a lab instrument - only Red Hat has a credible kernel ABI scheme with the required scale (because of the reasons I gave in GP). So every ISV in this situation specifies RHEL and requires that you run your software on a…

And this is something that CentOS Stream breaks and that makes it not an alternative anymore.

RHEL did ABI or kABI breaks only with minor releases. CentOS Stream can do them randomly, just like any other distribution.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#110

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 9:46 AM UTC

gabereiser wrote: post #51

hyperthesis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

consultancy is just part of it. They fund many open source projects. They support them commercially. They aren't a Deloitte or Accenture. Linux Kernel, Various JBoss Software (Keycloak is cool), OpenShift, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and more [1] [1] https://redhatofficial.github.io/#!/main

[deleted]