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

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#181

Post by harishpillay » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

parasubvert wrote: post #175

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…

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…

Red Hat "fork[ing] most of the upstream" is not telling the whole story. Yes, Red Hat works with upstream code, does additional QE/QA and certification as needed and make that available to customers on a subscription. Changes, improvements, bugfixes etc are all also sent back upstream. It is a two way street. Not a one way "take from upstream only" model. If that was the model, Red Hat would have not survived to thrive. Upstream First is the default for Red Hat.

Red Hat's code base is a mix of GPLv2/v3, MIT, BSD, Apache - ie, it spans the entire open source licensing spectrum from protective copyleft (GPL) to non-protective (BSD, Apache, MIT). Red Hat is only obligated to release code to GPL code that it ships to customers, but Red Hat goes above and beyond and ships all code that it worked on or otherwise to customers. There is ZERO value in holding back code/fixes etc. Pushing that upstream empowers the whole global community (yes, including competitors). Not doing so will result in fragmentation of the various open source code bases and downstream products.

Trademarks are not the same as copyright. Trademarks tell the receiver who it represents. It is the identity of the entity. So, that is protected and I think that is very fair.

Disclosure: I work for Red Hat.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#182

Post by rwmj » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 1:56 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #166

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.

Yes and no, it very much depends on the country and regulation you're talking about. Not every regulation is uncompetitive red tape. I'm quite happy that airline and medical software is heavily regulated, or to give a more recent example that we've been working on, that in-car software is required to have minimum response times to user inputs.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#183

Post by parasubvert » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 1:58 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #180

parasubvert wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Canonical don't have the heft to compete against Red Hat, and especially not IBM + Red Hat. If Wikipedia's figures are right, Red Hat employs more people maintaining the kernel and RHEL packages than Canonical employs in total . This matters a lot for government and other large customers. The companies that do have the scale needed to compete are the cloud vendors who are rolling out various certified cloud instances…

It’s not about Canonical’s employee count, and frankly it’s not about Linux - that’s a shrinking revenue base. You’re also ignoring that Ubuntu was the leader in cloud for Linux for many years, mostly due to the lagging kernel releases when things like Docker arose, but also smart marketing moves on their part.

It’s about the apps and the datacenters. The hyperscalers are formidable competitors, so it’s all about OpenShift becoming the new multi-cloud operating system across them.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#184

Post by PeterisP » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 2:06 PM 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?

One example is companies who don't need strict compliance themselves, but have some customers who do.

If 10% of your customers need this for compliance, then you have to test and certify that your stuff works with something like RHEL - and so that becomes an option, or even the default option for the other 90% of your customers.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#185

Post by dmd » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 2:10 PM 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…

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 OS", "we won't support you unless you update [completely and utterly unrelated minor package]", and "please give us [piece of information that was included in the original ticket". In several cases I finally found the right answer ... in access.redhat.com/solutions .. but the support person was never able to find it.

We purchase it because we're required to, but we get absolutely no value for the money.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#186

Post by quanticle » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

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…

This reminds me of how NASA would never have a Shuttle in flight during the transition from December 31 to January 1, because they were unsure as to whether the shuttle's computers could handle the rollover correctly [1]. Sure, they could have updated the software to make sure that the rollover was handled correctly, but that would have required them to recertify the entire OS running the Shuttle, and it was easier to just plan missions such that the Shuttle was never flying on New Year's Eve.

[1]: https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2006-11-0...

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#187

Post by warner25 » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 3:05 PM UTC

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…

Interesting to hear this. My last job was in a shop that ran RHEL servers and I always felt bad for not using the support that we paid for. Like after working through a problem, thinking, "Oh, we should have called Red Hat." I guess we weren't missing much. We got support instead from upstream IT folks internal to our organization who packaged the applications together with RHEL (and that level of support was similar to what you describe).

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#188

Post by anothernewdude » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 3:16 PM 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…

> As a result if you are a government or many large companies you simply cannot download Linux and YOLO it.

Experience begs to differ

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#189

Post by hodgesrm » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 4:26 PM 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…

I'm really surprised that the article does not highlight cloud services as a way to monetize open source. This seems like the most obvious way to get revenue from back office open source projects, especially databases. RedHat itself invested in relationships with cloud vendors from early on.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#190

Post by xyzd23345 » Sun, Apr 16, 2023, 4:48 PM UTC

froh wrote: post #73

huslage wrote: post #36

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.

To this day every IBM customer I've ever contracted for has also been a Red Hat customer. That even applies for mainframe shops. Sales reps and support and account managers at IBM and Red Hat had eachother on speed dial a decade ago since it was so common to work a ticket that involved both companies products, or sell a bundle that would include both companies software and/or hardware, etc.

My only question is what the hell took IBM so long in making the decision to buy them out. I've never been less surprised by a big acquisition than I was with IBM and Red Hat. The only surprising thing was that nobody outside of that space saw it coming.