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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)

#71

Post by bradknowles »

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…

I’ve been a Linux user and Administrator since late 1998, and various forms of *nix before then.

I’ve known of SUSE for a long time, but it was never the name that stopped me from doing anything with it. I just never used a product or worked on a project where it was used, and so I was never exposed to it.

TIL, I’ve been pronouncing it wrong for probably something close to a decade.

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

#72

Post by bradknowles »

kbutler wrote: post #40
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…

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.

I try to use his original pronunciation wherever and whenever I can, but most of the time I hear “Lin-ucks” with a short “I”, and I naturally respond in kind without even thinking about it.

But then there are occasionally articles like this one which remind me that I’m saying it wrong, and that I know better.

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

#73

Post by bradknowles »

freehunter wrote: post #33
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).

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.

I’ve been using it for years, and only today have I learned that I’ve been pronouncing it wrong.

Sigh....

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

#74

Post by type0 »

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…

It's an acronym, spell each letter in your own language and be confident that it will be correct

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

#75

Post by type0 »

forapurpose wrote: post #54
beatgammit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not something that RH says you could so there you go. You can't just pull one system out and put a new one, specially Fedora, this would be equivalent of pulling a rug from underneath someone standing on it, who knows you might be lucky, just try it.

SUSE on the other hand encourages switching after the introduction of LEAP 15, in other words it's supposed to be trivial to do.

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

#76

Post by cyphar »

h1d wrote: post #64
madhadron wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was delighted to find that SuSE has started using btrfs to do the same root filesystem snapshotting that Solaris does with ZFS! Suddenly it was back on my radar after not paying much attention to it since the 1990's (I went into Debian land and stayed there, pretty much).

You need to read more into the news. It's actually a reason to get unexcited about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771

Red Hat doesn't have any btrfs engineers, they all moved to Facebook -- so they don't currently have anyone in-house to do btrfs work. SUSE does (one of the upstream maintainers is a SUSE guy). Facebook also runs btrfs.

Red Hat's plan for "replacing" btrfs is to write a bunch of additional tools around devicemapper/LVM. My experience with using LVM is that this is not going to end well -- if you thought btrfs was unstable you've seen nothing yet.

To be clear, btrfs does have its issues, but linking to RHEL no longer supporting something they never actually fully supported is a bit of weird thing to argue is a negative of btrfs. Red Hat doesn't get to by the sole arbiter of what is and isn't good software (and it should be noted that Project Atomic's snapshotting using ostree is simply not as good as using btrfs and the transactional-update integration into openSUSE Kubic -- btrfs snapshots are atomic for a start and rollbacks are a single syscall away).

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