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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)

#41

Post by wmf »

bewo001 wrote: post #24
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…

Wasn't there a close collaboration between IBM and SUSE?

Back in the early days of enterprise Linux, IBM wanted to avoid Red Hat becoming a monopoly so they backed SUSE (and later Ubuntu) quite a bit.

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

#42

Post by jondubois »

>> We had made the product so easy to use and so important, that we had out-engineered ourselves. Great for the open source community, not so great for us.

I can relate to this. The other sad truth is that if you do not 'out-engineer yourself', then your open source project will likely not even be able to get any users to begin with; it's extremely competitive. It took me over 5 years of work; constantly refining my project in order to reach almost 5000 stars on GitHub and 50K downloads per week. Those are pretty big numbers for a framework targeted entirely at developers but in terms of monetization, it's barely enough to cover a single salary and my project is one of the lucky ones because it's back-end and it's somewhat more opinionated.

Front end frameworks and non-opinionated back end tools (e.g. the ones that just implement existing standards/protocols) have near zero monetization opportunities. For front end frameworks, you need a huge success like Vue.js or React in order to monetize at all. It seems that Evan You from Vue.js gets enough money to cover his salary - But Vue has over 100K stars on GitHub and is one of the top 10 repos in the world. If Evan was a musician or an actor, he'd have a multi-million dollar salary for sure.

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

#43

Post by nostrademons »

I see Red Hat's business model as a product of the times - there was this cheap, underutilized, but difficult-to-use competitor to the OS they really wanted to use, and a lot of corporations that really wanted to spin-up big IT departments and web services quickly. They filled the market need that existed in the late 1990s; it's unclear if this model fills any major market needs that exist now, when turnkey SaaS solutions exist for a lot.

This doesn't mean there won't be other successful open-source companies. It seems like each generation of open-source projects fills a different economic need, all specific to the business landscape at the time:

In the early-mid 2000s we had open-source as a retention bonus for good engineers and PR campaign for the companies involved (Hadoop, Nutch, Protobufs, Snappy, and other Google open-source projects, Cassandra, HBase, Hive, HipHop, and other Facebook open-source projects).

We also saw open-source as a means of securing cooperation between different corporate interests (WebKit) or securing critical partnerships & goodwill by assuring the source code would be available (Chromium, Android).

Starting in the early 2010s, we saw companies releasing an open-source product and then making money off a hosted version of it (Elastic, Datastax).

Nowadays in the crypto world we see organizations releasing an open-source software system, reserving some of the currency for the development team, and profiting off the capital appreciation of the currency. (Ethereum etc.)

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

#44

Post by RoutinePlayer »

cyphar wrote: post #23
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…

There was a video explaining how to pronounce SUSE several years ago (both funny and a little worrying that such a video was necessary)[1]. It is pronounced strangely since it was a German name and so you have to put on your best German impression to get the "s" sound right. All jokes aside, I think most folks would agree that SUSE's marketing really needs to be reworked very significantly. [1]: https://www.youtube.c…

Respectfully, this is something I've never been able to understand about open source projects. Why stick with names that are difficult for most humans, and causes folks to forget your great company still exists? Why not run a small marketing and imaging campaign to sort that out. You already got a great green chameleon logo :-)

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

#45

Post by setquk »

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 never understood that mentality.

Not once have I had an insurmountable problem with any Linux platform.

The same is not true with Microsoft, Oracle and IBM from experience, even with paid up top tier support. Even 60,000 employee defence companies have no real power. I've seen someone forced to throw a registry fix out to 5000 desktops (over hundreds of disparate sites) because MSFT wouldn't fix a fucking bug.

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

#46

Post by eloisant »

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…

In France, I've never worked for or even heard about a company that uses Suse. It's usually Debian if the sysadmin have all latitude, RedHat if certifications or having a company behind the product mattered for the managers.

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

#47

Post by NikolaNovak »

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).

Fascinating!

As a non-native English speaker, yet one who's been in North America and dreaming in English for 2+ decades, Ooboontoo was the one and only pronunciation that came to my mind (I suppose because it's a fairly phonetic interpretation).

To me, "You-Ban-Too" is a completely "you have to squint and tilt your head and really want to see it" pronunciation/interpretation :->

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

#48

Post by NikolaNovak »

erikb wrote: post #12
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…

Is anybody still using Suse besides some big three letter corps?

FYI/FWIW, I think they were preferred for Canadian Government / Shared Services Canada deployments until a few years ago

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

#49

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

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…

> SUSE makes them uncomfortable because they're unsure of how to pronounce the name.

Amusing the irony in this considering most people pronounce "Ubuntu" and indeed "Linux" incorrectly.

FWIW, it was the first distro I ever tried back in 1999 and I always pronounced it "Suzy" but have heard a few variants. Everyone pronounces different words differently so it doesn't really matter.

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

#50

Post by dragandj »

smackay wrote: post #5

The 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 /does/ discuss that, and mentions that Open Source in the sense of software technology has been a huge success, but also that as a /business model/ is far, far, behind the proprietary models. It also mentions that there are another OS-based models that are successful, such as SaaS, cloud, etc.
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