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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

#191

Post by xyzd23345 »

pastage wrote: post #158
froh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They deserve credit but while IBM did spend lots of money on Linux around 2000, and that helped legitimize Linux. I feel that RH has always been the leader in this industry, and RH Linux was well entrenched in the enterprise long before IBMs big push. So IBM helped but they did not create it, in my view.

I would disagree with RHEL being entrenched by the time of IBMs big push. At the time, you were still more likely to see commercial Unix than Linux at large companies.

Red Hat becoming entrenched wasn't a guarantee in my mind until IBM made that big push. If you could point to a single event that made it likely Linux would take over, without a shadow of a doubt it would be the blessing it received from IBM. There were an enormous number of bigcorps that made initial investment in Linux after that.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#192

Post by xyzd23345 »

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?

Why would they? Managed services were never part of the Red Hat business model. They've added some cloud stuff as of late, but in general you don't go to Red Hat to buy or lease hardware. And I don't think Red Hat ever had any serious interest in selling you any either.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#193

Post by froh »

jzb wrote: post #179
froh wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IBM did not create that industry, though they certainly helped it along. 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).

IBM did a 1bn USD investment creating the market for Linux based enterprise infrastructure, "vendor independent" on all their server products (PPC, s390 itanic and once available x68 based servers), with all IBM software products (db/2, websphere, ...) available "certified" on sles, RHEL and some Asian localized Linux variants.

this created an immense Push on HP, dell, Dec, sgi, ... to follow suit

and oracle, sap, Software AG, anything serious.

this push and commitment b IBM was.so.relevant because it established Linux as a serious platform with enterprise level SLAs and mutual commitments for the full stack.

the 4d chess was to establish a solid consulting business for "consolidation" on the "single platform"

and it paid off immensely for IBM --- and for most others.

given the IBM market position around 2000 this was pivotal and prophetic.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#194

Post by rurban »

hyperthesis wrote: post #50
gabereiser wrote: post #32

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…

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

They develop gcc e.g. whilst redhat develops the other good stuff you need.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#195

Post by stonogo »

dralley wrote: post #28
jt2190 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was, but that changed as of RHEL 8. I suspect that AmazonLinux (also originally downstream of RHEL) caused Red Hat to reconsider this. I’m not sure why exactly. Perhaps Red Hat/IBM compete with Amazon in some space, or perhaps they felt that Amazon should release their patches.

The CentOS Stream transition was a shift from the "throw it over the wall" model of open source like Android to a more collaborative approach. Example: As a user of (original) CentOS, you discover a bug. Where do you report that bug? The Red Hat Enterprise Linux bug tracker, because CentOS is just a clone and the community has no real ability to fix things. Then what? You wait until a Red Hat employee gets around to…

What kind of Stockholm Syndrome is required for a user to believe that a transition from "bug-compatible with FIPS-certified stable releases" to "no-promises best-effort ABI stability" is desireable because now we get to do our own tech support?

I'll never in my life understand this. It's like Red Hat took the time they should have used to talk to their customers and spent it writing a Guide To Enjoying Eating Shit to lecture everyone about how great things are now.

I'd respect the company a lot more if they just said "we bought all this CentOS stuff and it turned out to be a money pit so we're throwing it out and making it a part of the beta testing process" instead of this relentless gaslighting that anyone on Earth wanted this.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#196

Post by shagie »

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…

Proprietary often has a lower total cost of ownership than the comparable loss of productivity and loss of support compared to open source software.

Do you have a good example of a company that provides support comparable to Microsoft's www.office.com (word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, teams, and one note). Note that this is a web instance which means that the cost of installing and managing software updates on various computers is reduced.

The lower taxes is not guaranteed at all when looking at the total cost of ownership.

With open source software, this often means increasing the staffing (because there's no corresponding org that will do the support with the necessary SLA) which also means that there isn't necessarily more efficient government.

The "better software for all to use" - switching to LibreOffice (or one of its forks) doesn't mean that the open source developers are going to prioritize the issues from Smith County, KS when there's an issue that impacts them.

To go down this path of "lets have government use open source" it is first necessary to get the open source developers to want to make their product competitive for government use compared to the proprietary ones that are out there and for companies to step up and provide similar SLAs that Microsoft and others offer.

That is something that can happen now, but isn't because there isn't enough interest from the FOSS community to do that for that sector. Trying to push the public sector to do it would be painful, expensive, and inefficient and not result in any better software.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#197

Post by INTPenis »

pas wrote: post #113
INTPenis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4. We have all the in-house support staff we need and only want to use the self-support license, but since we're a service provider we were forced into the CCSP program where each license costs a lot more.

Forced into how? can you please elaborate?

All service providers have to be in the CCSP program, nothing wrong with that. And we do use it for clients. But it kinda sucks that even our in-house stuff has to cost the same. Discourages use of RHEL in-house.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#198

Post by ossusermivami »

dmd wrote: post #185
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…

The thing I don't understand about Red Hat is how the support is so bad . I (a customer at a medical/educational site) pay for Red Hat, and on the few occasions I've requested support, that support has never, not once, actually solved my problem. In every single case, I eventually solved it myself after weeks of back-and-forth with one support person after another consisted solely of "solutions" like "reinstall the O…

I had that same experience, some time there is a lot of back and forth with junior support people that doesn't seem to have a clue what's going and only follow a script, it gets better when it gets escalated but that's painfully slow to get there if you are not a marquee customer.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#199

Post by breck »

shagie wrote: post #196
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…

Proprietary often has a lower total cost of ownership than the comparable loss of productivity and loss of support compared to open source software. Do you have a good example of a company that provides support comparable to Microsoft's www.office.com (word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, teams, and one note). Note that this is a web instance which means that the cost of installing and managing software updates on vario…

> Proprietary often has a lower total cost of ownership

I think you are right in the short run, but I think in the long run TCO is far higher with proprietary software. Because you are sinking money into a lost cause and delaying the cost of a future expensive migration from the closed source to the open source.

People and organizations will always want to mold their software to their domain, and for a while and for the right price, that works. But proprietary companies sweep technical debt under the rug, talent leaves, they start to slow down, and eventually the software slows down the organization considerably. It becomes harder for the organization to hire and train people on the proprietary stack. I recently spent a week working alongside federal employees and almost without exception everyone hated their tech stack, attributed a double digit percentage of their productivity lost to it, and would often build things using open source on their own machines to get work done.

Eventually the org switches to a more open source stack, but the process to extract themselves is costly. I think that cost might be greater than the cost of just starting with open source in the first place.

It seems almost like a natural law that all proprietary software is eventually replaced by open source alternatives.

> Do you have a good example of a company that provides support comparable to Microsoft's www.office.com

Not as a package, no. For each individual item, there are alternatives, but I'll agree there is a missing offering for a fully self hosted alternative to Google Workspaces or Microsoft Office 365. If I'm not mistaken, Collabra Online is trying to be that, but the execution seems to leave something to be desired.

> The "better software for all to use" - switching to LibreOffice (or one of its forks) doesn't mean that the open source developers are going to prioritize the issues from Smith County, KS when there's an issue that impacts them.

I wonder if ChatGPT could influence things here. I wonder if support agents from ChatGPT trained on loads of open source content and code will turn out to be more effective than human support agents for proprietary stacks, and you might be able to build an open Office365 or Google Workspace competitor.

Anyway, just doing some back of the envelope math, I estimate governments in the USA spend $20B - $50B a year on proprietary software[1]. It certainly gives a lot to open source too, but I believe if more of that money was diverted to open source we'd all be better off in the long run. Not a slam dunk case, I know, I'm at the early stages of this line of thought. And of course, even if you could prove that open source would have a much lower TCO, it would be a protracted battle to go up against the folks with a lot of money on the line to deny that truth.

[1] According to this site (https://www.itdashboard.gov/itportfoliodashboard) it looks like total unclassified Federal Government IT spending is ~$84B a year. It looks like Palantir alone gets $1B a year from the government. The latest information I can find on Oracle is that 25% of their revenue comes from US Gov (so say ~$12B per year). Microsoft is perhaps $5 - $25B? Not sure.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#200

Post by shagie »

breck wrote: post #199
shagie wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary often has a lower total cost of ownership than the comparable loss of productivity and loss of support compared to open source software. Do you have a good example of a company that provides support comparable to Microsoft's www.office.com (word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, teams, and one note). Note that this is a web instance which means that the cost of installing and managing software updates on vario…

> Proprietary often has a lower total cost of ownership I think you are right in the short run, but I think in the long run TCO is far higher with proprietary software. Because you are sinking money into a lost cause and delaying the cost of a future expensive migration from the closed source to the open source. People and organizations will always want to mold their software to their domain, and for a while and for…

Money isn't diverted to open source - its spent on staffing (both in house and consultancies) needed to support the open source software.

Hiring Deloitte or Accenture or another consultancy to provide the support for an open source piece of software (be it directly or "we need to have people with these skills") is still extracting money from the org and I can assure you that the consultancy isn't contributing back to FOSS.

As it is, Microsoft is a known quantity with a support SLA that meets the necessary requirements both for hosting of data and for response time. The cost of Microsoft licenses and support is less than the cost of hiring additional staff or bringing in a consultancy.

A budget item with a fixed number in it is much preferable for budgetary allocation than open ended numbers typically found from consultancies.

The support of open source software is often more costly for the public sector than going with a big tech solution - even when including the cost of licensing.

Until the cost of support for open source solutions comes down to where the proprietary options are, it is often not something that is considered.

RedHat is an example of a company that is doing it right - offering the support that the public sector desires with a consistent budget line item.

If you can stand up a PostgreSQL instance that is able to compete with the Oracle performance and support (e.g. backup restore failed - call support and have someone on the phone helping now) for less than the cost of the Oracle licensing you will have people beating down your door to sign up.

Same thing with Microsoft.

For the federal government to do this on their own is much more costly. It goes back to the consultancies to implement, migrate, and maintain. Trying to staff up to be competitive to be able to do it in house is also quite costly (note the pay difference between public sector and private and then multiply that difference as an ongoing expense by the number of employees needed).

And so this returns back to the FOSS community to address the needs of the public sector and create the needed companies that are competitive to be able to provide that ongoing support.

ChatGPT will not write an office.com competitor this decade... or next.

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