171–180 of 222 posts
(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…
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.
(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.
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?
(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…
Red Hat makes more money because they’re an enterprise software company and everyone thinks they’re just an OSS services company. They’re that too, but they are far more sophisticated than these articles claim.
At the core is that Red Hat’s distro is perceived as more of a standard by the ISV community that certified their software against it. Red Hat does a masterful job of playing both sides of openness - open copyright, closed trademark. They’re pure open source… but they fork most of the upstream with their own branded project version, and convince companies to certify against the proprietary trademarked offering. Automated upgrades and most documentation are behind a paywall. But they also have some of the best security responsiveness and extended support (up to 10 years?) in the industry to make up for it.
Beyond Linux, they also meet customers where they’re at by watching the competition and customers, and pivoting when they need to. Customers seem to like a competitors product more? They find the next leapfrog angle and invest years in it, dumping the old. OpenShift was rewritten 3 times before hitting paydirt! That’s good business sense. OpenShift trying to take on vSphere, Ceph evolving into an enterprise storage player, etc. These aren’t simple moves.
This dance of subtle open/closed aspects a great business model, and hard to replicate: open in code, but closed in the direction the money must flow. Most business folks don’t have the patience to weave this narrative, which takes years of reputation building. And it’s required alongside all the other “build a product people want” difficulty.
IBM also loves this model: “WebSphere” certification over “Java EE”, for example. Hence “OpenShift” certification over Kubernetes, or “RHEL” over Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
what happened to SUSE? they were the same. are they no more?
You know what works just like the Red Hat model, but yields way better returns? The AWS model. Just take all these tech-tested market-tested open source projects, slap on a new name and bill them by the hour.
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.
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…
one detail > 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) IBM created that industry, by lifting Linux into their supported platforms portfolio. and the first Enterprise Linux ever was suse linux enterprise for s/390, followed by x86 releases at about the time RH released their first RHEL.
Red Hat didn't create the industry single-handed, either. They deserve a lot of credit but Linux succeeded because it was a group effort where there was a chance for a lot of players to make money (and opportunity to displace others).
(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…
This is partly true. It’s worth noting that Canonical/Ubuntu has the same certifications such as DISA/STIG and FIPS, and runs quite a bit in highly sensitive environments, often bundled by ISVs, such as VMware or Pivotal, where I’ve worked. Red Hat makes more money because they’re an enterprise software company and everyone thinks they’re just an OSS services company. They’re that too, but they are far more sophistic…
The companies that do have the scale needed to compete are the cloud vendors who are rolling out various certified cloud instances, and in the case of Microsoft/Azure, AMD-based confidential computing.