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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

#161

Post by relaxing »

bregma wrote: post #145
acapybara wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm failing to see how this relates, whatsoever, to the discussion at hand. I don't mean any offense toward you. Just having an incredibly hard time making any sense of what you wrote.

I work for a company that ships safety-certified software. We, or often our customers, have discovered bugs in that software. We do not fix the bugs because one single small bugfix means re-certifying the entire software , a process that takes months of producing proof of matching the safety case plus many more months of updating and approving accompanying documentation and going through an audit. Everything has to b…

> Known unfixed bugs are a fact of life in certified software.

And all the other software.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#162

Post by midasuni »

andrewem wrote: post #31
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.

If those growth rates continue in 1 years time they’ll be a trillion dollar company

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#163

Post by codethief »

rwmj wrote: post #101
pjmlp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which raises the question: Why doesn't Red Hat have a cloud offering yet?

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#164

Post by bonzini »

penciltwirler wrote: post #59

Hold on... aren't there a bunch of incredily successful "open source" / "source available" companies? Databricks, Cockroach Labs, Hashicorp, MongoDB, Elasticsearch etc?

And how many of them are now trying to switch to fauxpen source licenses like MongoDB's SSPL?

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#165

Post by ghaff »

rwmj wrote: post #98
froh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what happened to SUSE? they were the same. are they no more?

SUSE are very much still around, and they have the same successful model as Red Hat, with a more European (specifically German) focus.

In fact they have a new CEO who ran Asia Pacific for Red Hat.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#166

Post by dboreham »

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…

Regulatory capture.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#167

Post by tlocke »

debarshri wrote: post #103
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?

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.

I think you've nailed it with this comment. A big organisation thinks completely differently to a small organisation or individual. A big organisation will happily spend a lot of money to reduce risk. They like having a number to ring 24 / 7 to support software that they depend on. The money they spend on a support subscription will be a tiny fraction of their profits, and so they don't blink at the cost, even though it seems a lot of money to you and me.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#168

Post by ghaff »

codethief wrote: post #163
rwmj wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which raises the question: Why doesn't Red Hat have a cloud offering yet?

Because it has a partnership model with the big cloud providers and many others.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#169

Post by eitally »

mnahkies wrote: post #160
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…

We use https://cloud.google.com/container-optimized-os/docs for our kubernetes nodes on GCP, as I'm sure most companies that use GKE do. Your comment made me want to say "but COS is certified too!" however now I'm unsure - a quick Google certainly doesn't bring anything up. Why have Google not done this, is the demand not there? Or have they and they just don't document it prominently? (Note we don't have any PCI req…

Vanilla options on GCP would not be certified for specific regulatory requirements. You would need to be -- in the cases of government regulations -- need to be running Assured Workloads.

https://cloud.google.com/assured-workloads

As to your question of why: maintaining compliance is expensive, especially if you're accustomed to pushing prod code changes hundreds of times per quarter.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#170

Post by eitally »

relaxing wrote: post #161
bregma wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a company that ships safety-certified software. We, or often our customers, have discovered bugs in that software. We do not fix the bugs because one single small bugfix means re-certifying the entire software , a process that takes months of producing proof of matching the safety case plus many more months of updating and approving accompanying documentation and going through an audit. Everything has to b…

> Known unfixed bugs are a fact of life in certified software. And all the other software.

The difference is that those bugs are certified in one and not the other. In many cases, bugs are known to the SW provider but not disclosed to customers unless they happen upon them. With certified SW, bugs are by default disclosed up front.
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