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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)

#51

Post by saidajigumi »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #49
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…

> 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.

There's a fascinating solution to this problem, used by Nikon[1]:

[...] Nikon Corporation (that's Nikon Japan) officially and consciously blesses all regional pronunciations of their company name.

This is policy, agreed upon decades ago—likely in the 1950s—in some meeting room somewhere in Tokyo. Nee'kon is correct. Neye-kon is correct. Nick-on is correct. Many others are correct.

This was explained to me when I was a Nikon employee by the Executive Vice President of Nikon Inc. himself, in the flesh. I can still picture the conversation, 25 years later. And to anticipate the usual objections: Nikon Corp. is the ONLY, the SOLE, the UNITARY authority on this question. "Nikon" is not a natural word in the Japanese language. The company that is now Nikon (then Nippon Kogaku, K.K.) made it up. It's a brand name—like Kodak or Xerox. A neologism, and maybe even a portmanteau (that's debated). It was likely first conceived in the Latin alphabet, not in Kanji. Nikon Corp. gave birth to this name, and they own it. They get to make the rules about it. And their rule is clear: all regional pronunciations are equally correct. If you doubt this, just listen to their own regional advertising, produced by the company's various subsidiaries around the world. You'll hear several different, completely official, pronunciations. Oy. I feel better now.

Addendum: Of course, it goes without saying that however they pronounce it in Scotland is wrong.

[1] https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...

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

#52

Post by mega_behemoth »

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 is a shit name. Ubuntu is a shit name. Debian is not a shit name. Redhat is not a shit name. Windows is a brilliant name.

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

#53

Post by phendrenad2 »

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.

> Buy Red Hat

> Something goes wrong

> Blame Red Hat

> Keep your job

Sounds about right.

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

#54

Post by forapurpose »

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…

> This should appeal to CentOS and Fedora users who consider using RHEL, but don't because it's too hard to switch.

It's hard to switch from Fedora and CentOS to RHEL? Isn't CentOS almost exactly the same bits, minus the branding and a few proprietary pieces?

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

#55

Post by dragandj »

raverbashing wrote: post #34
freehunter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And even more funny would be to find someone who has enough power to sue IBM, which probably has more lawyers in its legal department than the plaintiff has total employees.

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

#56

Post by pjmlp »

dragandj wrote: post #50
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.

Basically models where having partial access to the source code still doesn't provide a way to clone a product at zero cost.

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

#57

Post by scarejunba »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #47
jcbrand wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :->

It's partly because of the flattening of certain vowels that happens in Am English. Like how con is similar to Kahn in Am English, bun has a little ah to its uh. Hence u (you) bun (bahn) tu (Too).

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

#58

Post by tschellenbach »

patmcguire wrote: post #38

Elastic, Mongodb, and Docker all have this business model. I guess the difference is in their case they developed it first and then open sourced - they've got a much more credible claim to superior support.

How is Docker doing?

Elastic and MongoDB also offer cloud hosted versions of their tech.

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

#60

Post by spicytunacone »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #48
erikb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's preferred now? I know Canadian schools liked SUSE as well.
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