Just a reminder: Never say never. Of course, there will never be another Amadeus Mozart too (in that sense of the word). Greetings from Austria.
Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
11–20 of 76 posts
Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#12> Red Hat is a fantastic company, and a pioneer in successfully commercializing open source. However, beyond Red Hat the effort has largely been a failure from a business standpoint. SUSE started around a year before RedHat, in 1992. Sure, we haven't had the same success and growth, but I would disagree that RedHat pioneered the model. I wouldn't even argue SUSE pioneered it (arguably it was Cygnus in 1989 -- though…
Is anybody still using Suse besides some big three letter corps?
Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#13> Red Hat is a fantastic company, and a pioneer in successfully commercializing open source. However, beyond Red Hat the effort has largely been a failure from a business standpoint. SUSE started around a year before RedHat, in 1992. Sure, we haven't had the same success and growth, but I would disagree that RedHat pioneered the model. I wouldn't even argue SUSE pioneered it (arguably it was Cygnus in 1989 -- though…
> it is a little bit annoying that people always ignore that we still exist Count me among them. I wasn't even aware that the SUSE Linux project was still a thing, let alone one backed by a business. Marketing might not be a terrible idea at this point in time - the best product in the world won't sell if nobody knows about it.
It's very popular in Europe, RedHat is very popular in the US.
I think the IBM acquisition is a fantastic opportunity for SUSE to start their engines here in the US. They have a fantastic value proposition: start with openSUSE Leap for free, then upgrade to a paid SUSE contract (can be done on place). This should appeal to CentOS and Fedora users who consider using RHEL, but don't because it's too hard to switch. They can also appeal to people who don't need the IBM integration but feel like they're not getting as much attention as before (priorities will likely change at RedHat). They can also appeal to developers with their rolling Tumbleweed release (which can also convert to openSUSE Leap/SUSE).
If SUSE had publicly traded stocks, I'd consider buying in right now as they have a really good opportunity over the next few years to steal customers from RedHat/IBM. They're big Linux contributors (Greg Kroah-Hartman used to work on the project), so they are _very_ attractive.
Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#14> Red Hat is a fantastic company, and a pioneer in successfully commercializing open source. However, beyond Red Hat the effort has largely been a failure from a business standpoint. SUSE started around a year before RedHat, in 1992. Sure, we haven't had the same success and growth, but I would disagree that RedHat pioneered the model. I wouldn't even argue SUSE pioneered it (arguably it was Cygnus in 1989 -- though…
Is anybody still using Suse besides some big three letter corps?
Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#15Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#16an interesting, yet somewhat unrelated thing that came through this article was the market cap's graph of some big names like Microsoft, Amazon,Oracle, VMware and Red Hat.
(https://a16zpeter.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/peterlevine1.p...)
it mentions in 2014, their Market cap was: - Microsoft: ~$300B - Amazon: ~$160B - Oracle: $160B - VMware: $40B - Red Hat: $10B
I'm not sure how true this was back in 2014, but the current market cap 4 years later for these companies is as follows:
- Microsoft: ~$833B (177% increase) - Amazon: ~$803B (400%) - Oracle: $181B (13%) - VMware: $60B (50%) - Red Hat: $30B (200%)
it's incredible to see in the same period of time just how massive both Microsoft and Amazon have been able to perform (market wise at least) and specifically the hockey stick market cap of Amazon in that time frame...
Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#17The problem of investment in the world of open source software is a difficult one. What company wants to pay for improvements when they know competitors are going to get all the benefits of these investments too. It's one of these bad equilibrium, prisoner's dilemma, kind of situation.
In practice, the funding often comes from those people or companies that more urgently need the improvements or those that are pushed by end users who are willing to pay a premium to avoid lock-in. There is a longer tail of users who free ride and pay nothing for improvements.
Even businesses that support open source, at any moment in the future, have strong incentives to use network effects to steer their customers into more subjugated positions and adopt proprietary non standard or non open systems, or to sell themselves to businesses that will do that.
The coagulation of tech companies in a few large players is a sign that this may be happening right now.
I wonder if there are ways to promote wider investment in open source and open standards technology that benefit more people and get us into better economic Nash equilibria.
Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#18> Red Hat is a fantastic company, and a pioneer in successfully commercializing open source. However, beyond Red Hat the effort has largely been a failure from a business standpoint. SUSE started around a year before RedHat, in 1992. Sure, we haven't had the same success and growth, but I would disagree that RedHat pioneered the model. I wouldn't even argue SUSE pioneered it (arguably it was Cygnus in 1989 -- though…
I was delighted to find that SuSE has started using btrfs to do the same root filesystem snapshotting that Solaris does with ZFS! Suddenly it was back on my radar after not paying much attention to it since the 1990's (I went into Debian land and stayed there, pretty much).
Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#19The article touts the business model as the underlying failure of Open Source. However I think this is missing the forest for the trees. If you add up all the value that Open Source delivered by giving millions, yes, let's go for millions, of developers access to high quality tools that previously were only available as expensive, proprietary products then clearly the model has been a runaway success. The only lament…
It seems to be closer to saying that the Red Hat model - essentially being a professional scapegoat, with some consulting on the side - hasn't succeeded to keep up with the returns venture capitalism expects.
The flip side is that companies that take over the operations part of the value chain and not just corporate liability are fully able to compete with closed source companies, and that kind of hosted service is where corporate open source is likely to go.
Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)
#20The article touts the business model as the underlying failure of Open Source. However I think this is missing the forest for the trees. If you add up all the value that Open Source delivered by giving millions, yes, let's go for millions, of developers access to high quality tools that previously were only available as expensive, proprietary products then clearly the model has been a runaway success. The only lament…
The article didn't claim that OSS wasn't successful in the broader sense, just that in the business sense, the Red Hat business model has failed. It further points to a model that does work, SaaS.