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Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

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Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#31

Post by dredmorbius »

It's worth nting that the exemplar of the prorietary shrinkwrap consumer softare market is also a one-off: Microssoft.

There is no other pure-play software company of comparable market success.

The consumer personal-computing operating system market resisted incursions by CPM, other DOS vendors, other GUI alternatives, x86 commercial unices, Linux, FreeeBSD (and others), and BeOS. Apple's share remains a scant fraction.

Likewise, the Office applications, and small-business server market remains dominated by Microsoft, especially file, print, mail, and directory services (AD).

Contenders in the software space tend to be small, heavily reliant on professional services (IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, consulting firms), specialised (Adobe, AutoDesk)The SaaS market has impinged somewhat; Gmail, Google Docs, etc., but still only marginally.

This from someone whose watched and criticised Microsoft for decades, and strongly prefers Linux. I've not had a Microsoft desktop personally or professsionally since the mid-2000s, and even then it was under protest and largely avoided.

Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#32

Post by jcbrand »

freehunter wrote: post #21
cyphar wrote: post #7

> 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…

Purely anecdotal and I've never worked for or on a team whose main responsibility was Linux administration, but at two places I worked in the past, our Linux guys didn't like SUSE. It wasn't a technical problem, and more marketing could probably help fix the problem. I have a SUSE Linux certification, and at two companies folks from the Linux team commented that SUSE makes them uncomfortable because they're unsure of…

Ubuntu's pronunciation isn't exactly clear to English speakers either.

People needed to be told that it's Ooboontoo and not You-ban-too (or whatever else people came up with).

Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#33

Post by freehunter »

jcbrand wrote: post #32
freehunter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely anecdotal and I've never worked for or on a team whose main responsibility was Linux administration, but at two places I worked in the past, our Linux guys didn't like SUSE. It wasn't a technical problem, and more marketing could probably help fix the problem. I have a SUSE Linux certification, and at two companies folks from the Linux team commented that SUSE makes them uncomfortable because they're unsure of…

Ubuntu's pronunciation isn't exactly clear to English speakers either. People needed to be told that it's Ooboontoo and not You-ban-too (or whatever else people came up with).

Right, fortunately Ubuntu has enough marketing behind it that most people who know Linux already know how to pronounce it. SUSE's marketing is more limited in that regard.

In 2006, Ubuntu was a ridiculous name. Then Canonical's marketing kicked in.

Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#34

Post by raverbashing »

freehunter wrote: post #22
organsnyder wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how they were used at my last employer. Yes, their OpenShift platform is very good, and they have a lot of good products in their ecosystem, but the biggest value they provided was a vendor to blame if things went south. Maybe Red Hat and IBM aren't as different as we like to think.

Exactly. The best reason to hire IBM is so you have a company who is big enough to sue when something goes wrong.

Funnily enough, nobody sues IBM when their product is an obscenely expensive barely functional mount of manure

Even more funny, those who propose the acquisitions of said tools are not held responsible when things go south for their complete inadequacy for their job.

Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#35

Post by mixmastamyk »

rumcajz wrote: post #4

The article argues that Red Hat's business model was selling a "slightly better version of Linux". IMO they were rather in the business of being a professional scapegoat. Someone to blame when that scary open source thing goes wrong.

I like to think of it as liability insurance.

Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#36

Post by mprev »

beatgammit wrote: post #13
falcolas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The…

At this point SUSE is just as niche in Europe as it is anywhere else.

In an enterprise setting, why would you throw your lot in with a company that seems to change owners every few years rather than the biggest name in open source that also now happens to be owned by IBM?

Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#37

Post by mixmastamyk »

laurentb wrote: post #16

an 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…

A portion is investment in the stock market in general.

Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#39

Post by robla »

zackbloom wrote: post #27

That article never actually explained why Red Hat was successful where others weren't. It got lost on showing how _not_ successful they were, even as it said how exceptional their results were.

Agreed. My theory: the market will only sustain a finite amount of revenue by open source software creators. That amount grows 20-30% per year as competing business models collapse and as customers learn the value proposition, but there is a ceiling. Red Hat has been brilliant about identifying the market segments that were ripe for an open source player, and entering those markets (often via acquisition).

There might be room for another Red Hat now that Red Hat will no longer be independent. IBM may have just legitimized Red Hat as a top-tier player.

That is, of course, if IBM still has the clout and capitalization to be considered a top-tier player. 20 years ago, it would have been considered funny to say "IBM is great and all, but they're no Apple". My oh my have times changed.

Re: Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

#40

Post by kbutler »

freehunter wrote: post #21
cyphar wrote: post #7

> 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…

Purely anecdotal and I've never worked for or on a team whose main responsibility was Linux administration, but at two places I worked in the past, our Linux guys didn't like SUSE. It wasn't a technical problem, and more marketing could probably help fix the problem. I have a SUSE Linux certification, and at two companies folks from the Linux team commented that SUSE makes them uncomfortable because they're unsure of…

Are there still people who pronounce linux lie'-nucks?

And Linus Torvalds[1] originally pronounced it with a bit more ee and oo (almost lee-nooks) than he does now[2] (lih'-nucks).

[1] https://youtu.be/uK0xXFZtJ8Q

[2] https://youtu.be/5IfHm6R5le0

And gnu and gnome and Debian and nginx and SQL and GIF and ...

The industry is full of made-up words with non-obvious or disputed pronunciations.

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