Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

opencoreventures.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 222 posts

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#201

Post by kbenson »

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 makes more money because they’re an enterprise software

That was my immediate thought on reading the GP. HAving been in a few Red Hat meetings to discuss possibly using some software of theirs recently, the meetings were indistinguishable from how a meeting with VMware or Veeam goes. They are a company providing enterprise solutions.

That's not meant negatively, that's just what they are, and if you're in the market for an enterprise solution then you appreciate that these companies exist. You get assurances that what you get works as advertised or the provider spends time and effort making it work as they advertised, and you aren't spending your (limited) engineer talent to do so when it can be spent on areas that aren't easily served by throwing some money at it or the cost benefit ratio is far more in your favor.

> OpenShift trying to take on vSphere, Ceph evolving into an enterprise storage player, etc. These aren’t simple moves.

Except it isn't. One of those meetings I had? It was for Red Hat to tell me that they don't really have a good competitor to vSphere anymore, since the RHV platform is being EOL'd and they're getting out of that game. Sure, you can run a VM in OpenShift now, as long as that VM lives in a container and is part of a k8s cluster. The path to success for virtualization with Red Hat is Kubernetes or bust, I guess.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#202

Post by wlonkly »

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…

Probably oversimplifying, but I get the feeling that Red Hat's compliance-enabled versions are for enterprise companies who need Linux, and Canonical's compliance-enabled versions are for smaller tech companies (or once-smaller ones) who need compliance.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#203

Post by op00to »

mr_toad wrote: post #104
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…

It makes me cynical when most certifications and compliance involves a lot of paperwork and not much in the way of changes to software.

Checklists literally drive the world.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#204

Post by op00to »

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?

When was the last time you got a feature your business needed included in the upstream kernel? Red Hat customers pay Red Hat engineers to take their business needs and turn them into upstreamed functionality.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#205

Post by op00to »

toyg wrote: post #143
andrewem wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I always take those numbers with a big pinch of salt. There is a wave, in the management world, that wants every business to be "Cloud” (i.e. SaaS), because of the (largely correct) assumption that it enables better rent-seeking and long-term lock-in. So every vendor is officially busy "pivoting to a subscription model" and wants to show growth in that area to investors, so they file everything they can under "cloud"…

People want cloud services because they can show value back to the business faster than traditional enterprise solutions. That gets you more money.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#206

Post by breck »

shagie wrote: post #200
breck wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think your assessment of the current situation is probably accurate.

My point is it's suboptimal, and the U.S. Federal Government could change things, as the biggest buyer of tech in the world. If they said "everything has to be public domain", it would be a seismic event. I think we would all be better off if they did this (probably with the exception of Nit: I think you misread my ChatGPT comment. I said ChatGPT could be a competitor to office.com's _support_ agents, not that ChatGPT could build office.com.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#207

Post by murdoze »

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…

We have discovered a critical bug in QNX 6 kernel in a networking scenario. There is no workaround, since the bug was in the core of their message passing infrastructure - a non-blocking by design kernel call, SendPulse(), sometimes blocks.

It took me 9 months talking to them about this problem until I managed to reproduce it on just two nodes and half a page of code, and record kernel logs that clearly showed a race condition.

We have received a patched kernel in a few days, and it worked like that for a while. This fix was merged into the official release after almost two years.

After that - only Linux, where we can see and fix stuff. No proprietary code and bureaucracy, no "fast, robust and reliable" operating systems.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#208

Post by carlmr »

murdoze wrote: post #207
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…

We have discovered a critical bug in QNX 6 kernel in a networking scenario. There is no workaround, since the bug was in the core of their message passing infrastructure - a non-blocking by design kernel call, SendPulse(), sometimes blocks. It took me 9 months talking to them about this problem until I managed to reproduce it on just two nodes and half a page of code, and record kernel logs that clearly showed a race…

This is exactly my point. Also, even if there is a workaround, more often than not the complexity of the mountain of workarounds just creates the next set of certified bugs.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#209

Post by philderbeast »

dogma1138 wrote: post #137
philderbeast wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame your number one reason is customer support, when at least in my experience it has been woefully lacking. Despite having a reasonably large contract with them at work, we had multiple support tickets go without response for months, with at least one that I am aware of being left open for almost 2 years before being closed as "won't fix" Noting that its only my personal experience I am sure plenty of other…

That sounds like an account management issue. You need to know how to manage and work with vendors more often than not it’s not the size of the account that matters but how you engage with them.

to be clear when I say no response, I am talking they got consistent updates that essentially said "we have no update on this issue", not them simply never putting anything on them.

also like it or not, by paying for support people have a right to expect that the company being paid will be engaging with you and the request you are putting into there system, not that you will have to find a person to chase down because your tickets are being ignored.

Re: The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat

#210

Post by parasubvert »

kbenson wrote: post #201
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…

> Red Hat makes more money because they’re an enterprise software That was my immediate thought on reading the GP. HAving been in a few Red Hat meetings to discuss possibly using some software of theirs recently, the meetings were indistinguishable from how a meeting with VMware or Veeam goes. They are a company providing enterprise solutions. That's not meant negatively, that's just what they are, and if you're in t…

> Sure, you can run a VM in OpenShift now, as long as that VM lives in a container and is part of a k8s cluster. The path to success for virtualization with Red Hat is Kubernetes or bust, I guess.

Yes, that's the plan as far as I can tell. The demand for "vSphere but cheaper" is omnipresent. OpenStack and RHV failed, but OpenShift (and ACM) represents a new opportunity and foundation to take a run at vSphere. It will be hard - folks usually vastly underestimate how much smart engineering has gone into that layer.

Post reply on HN