15 ms·

What makes us Red Hat

280 points by swonderl 10y ago

brightball 10y ago
It's this mindset that makes me want to support Red Hat as a company. As good as the Fedora 25 experience has been for me, I'd love to see Linux laptop vendors (especially Dell) make it an installed option soon. Maybe CentOS laptops would make more sense for them from a sheer "stability for support sake" experience.
- kbenson 10y ago
  There's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there (or at least, there has been in the past. I've been out of the loop on this for a few years). CentOS/RHEL are definitely the stable, long-term distros, but they don't always map exactly to a specific Fedora release, so you can't necessarily just build RPMs for the last few Fedora versions and also support CentOS/RHEL. Historically, when looking for software that wasn't already in a repo but packages were provided, you would often see Ubuntu and Fedora packages but not RHEL (and thus CentOS) packages. RHEL's release schedule is really optimized around server and workstation time scales, not desktop time scales. Ubuntu's is much more amenable to desktop use, where you get an LTS release every 24 months. RHEL regularly goes 3-4 years now (with point release refreshes, but that's not too exciting for desktop users). The flip side is that RHEL and CentOS have a much longer support lifecycle.
  - bonzini 10y ago
    Point RHEL releases are certainly exciting for desktop users. You get lots of driver and filesystem updates, and some point releases even rebased Mesa, X11 and GNOME. Plus, Software Collections such as Red Hat Developer Toolset provide updated MySQL/MariaDB, Ruby, Python, GCC, etc.
- jhasse 10y ago
  The advantage of Ubuntu LTS is that you can upgrade it to a non-LTS. Also good for branding that both are "Ubuntu". I'd love if CentOS / RHEL would become Fedora LTS.
  - TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
    I disagree. Red Hat's brand is pretty powerful in the corporate linux world. If anything, Fedora should be renamed to RHEL Unstable or something.
    - jhasse 10y ago
      That would also work :)
- vacri 10y ago
  A rolling distro should never be used by a hardware vendor, at least not for a 'general release' bit of hardware.
schoen 10y ago
More than 15 years ago, I worked for a Linux services company that competed with Red Hat. We sometimes saw them or were invited to see them rather negatively (as the competition), and I particularly remember that an ad agency that wanted our business once shipped us a box containing a burnt red hat (!). Time has shown that Red Hat really knows what they're doing, on many different levels, and they're the most successful free software business in history.
- xapata 10y ago
  I hope you hired that ad agency.
  - xapata 10y ago
    Funny, both the top and bottom comment in this little thread branch are saying the same thing.
- rrdharan 10y ago
  > they're the most successful free software business in history. Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.
  - oddevan 10y ago
    Automattic comes to mind: AFAIK they've built a pretty successful business on WordPress and related products.
    - 0xCMP 10y ago
      They aren't public, but yes I believe they are valued at 1bn+ too
      - bronson 10y ago
        There's a big difference between valuation and revenue.
m348e912 10y ago
Red Hat was primary reason it took me a lot longer to adopt Linux than it should have. Headbanging experiences with dependency hell and things not working as expected left me extremely discouraged. It wasn't until I dabbled a little with Solaris 7 and finally found Slackware that I realized that Linux could "just work". IMO Red Hat's success was primarily based on the critical mass of support behind it, not because it was the best distribution.
- infodroid 10y ago
  Have you considered the possibility that your poor experience with Red Hat was due to the fact you were new to Linux? Encountering dependency hell is usually a sign that you don't know what you're doing. Red Hat "just works" and has always enjoyed the reputation of being the most bulletproof distro if you could afford it.
  - djaychela 10y ago
    What timeframe are you talking about? I remember it didn't "just work" for me when I first started experimenting with it (V4.2, IIRC). Yes, I was new, but it wasn't the easy-install experience that it now is, for sure.
    - sevensor 10y ago
      I started at around the same time -- Red Hat Linux 4 era. Yum didn't exist yet. I was also quite new to Linux, but I'm reasonably sure there really wasn't something that would do dependency resolution for you. You either had to find an RPM that had the right version, or you had to find a tarball somewhere and run configure and make yourself.
  - notalaser 10y ago
    Back when Solaris 7 was a thing, dependency hell was very much a thing.
    - infodroid 10y ago
dhemmerling 10y ago
This is a pretty timely statement of values and development ideology apropos Canonical's sudden pivot from fragmenting the Linux desktop community.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tux1968 10y ago
  What are you referring to?
  - dhemmerling 10y ago
    Ditching Unity + Mir, and returning to Gnome. Convergence is good. https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cl...
    - houst0n_ 10y ago
      Canonical are ditching Mir? I must have missed this one. Was this discussed here? Page won't load for me but my first thought was this was a poor taste April fools ;)
      - houst0n_ 10y ago
        Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631 Can't find a cached version of the actual ubuntu article though. Edit: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6qrnNnWg1IJ:https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6qrnN... No mention of mir though?
      - keithpeter 10y ago
        "I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS." I checked the date of the post really carefully as well. That is certainly a change of direction.
jjirsa 10y ago
Spending most of my time near the JVM, the work they've done with Shenandoah (and previously Netty) has been really incredible. Love Redhat's OSS work.
digitalshankar 10y ago
Red Hat or the Microsoft of Linux is the face palm of linux distros, forget dependency hell, how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system or distros like Ubuntu? People just buy it for the support even if the Red Hat they use is Gnome 2 and Firefox V.3.0. Then finally RHCA/RHCE courses, i should get certified from this distro to prove my Linux skills for the companies even though i am a debian guy? No Thanks.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system So, what makes the Debian package system superior? Having built multiple specs in the past, but not any debs, I'm curious. Given that you can often convert debs to RPMs and vice-versa, and can use the different package managers on either type of repository, it's not obvious where one has any specific benefit.
  - chousuke 10y ago
    I've built both Debian packages and RPMs, and I feel that RPMs are somewhat easier to wrap your head around. It's been a while since I did Debian package building, though. It's also undeniably true that there was a time when APT + dpkg blew Red Hat's "equivalent" tools out of the water, but that's not the case anymore. One thing I like in particular about dnf/rpm is that I can install packages by using functions, so eg. telling yum to install perl(Net::DNS) will work and installs the perl-Net-DNS package. I'm not sure if apt can do this.
    - lima 10y ago
      And SPEC files are much easier to work with than Debian's folder full of different files.
      - snuxoll 10y ago
        This is my biggest gripe with debian packaging. Also, the use of make files and the magic that goes on behind the scenes with debhelper (which you probably want to use) makes packaging much less transparent. It took me days to grok how to make a proper debian package nearly a decade ago when I first did it - writing my first .spec file took an hour or so and now I can hammer most of them out in 15 minutes or less.
dumindunuwan 10y ago
> The Next Red Hat Please build officially Red Hat backed Fedora Tables. This will be a win to win situation for both sides.
- fs111 10y ago
  There is probably a market of 10 such devices. Why would you waste money on developing that?
yuhong 10y ago
OT, but I wonder when Lennart Poettering was hired at Red Hat.
- bonzini 10y ago
  I think about 10 years ago. I was hired 8 years ago and he had been around for a while.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    Which would be after PulseAudio but before systemd.
    - bonzini 10y ago
      Definitely before systemd. PulseAudio became default in Fedora 8 (August 2007 [1]), and the feature page lists Lennart as the owner, [2] so the time checks out. [1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-August/msg01196.html https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-Augus... [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio
johnny_1010 10y ago
What is so great about RH? When i had opportunity to use it, it look so bad mostly because lack of current/decent software in repo. Maybe their support is amazing?
- jajern 10y ago
  Yes, support and peace of mind. Packages that make it into their repository are fully tested and supported by RH. Almost all of them are old but they are pretty much guaranteed stable and Red Hat will support the software until the EOL of whichever RH version you are running, even if the developers of the package do not support a version of the package anymore.
  - nvarsj 10y ago
    Sometimes being old is a double edged sword. For instance, RHEL7 has a lot of problems on AWS because the kernel is too old to properly support many of the virtualisation features AWS provides. On bare metal RHEL7 is great, though.
    - rayvd 10y ago
      Red Hat is pretty good about back-porting features like this into the kernel and rest of the platform. It would surprise me if the issues you describe aren't on the roadmap to address. We have no issues running RHEL7 under VMware.
    - jeremyeder 10y ago
      Can you be more specific about this please? Disclaimer, I happily work for RH and today's blog has me ear-to-ear grinning.
      - maxamillion 10y ago
        Information about feature/errata backporting here: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/ https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/ Information specific to security backporting policies here: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/ https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/
throw7 10y ago
The Red Hat retail to Enterprise shift still leaves a little bitter taste in my mouth. I remember when they shut down public access to the rhel binaries and the beginnings of Centos. All legit to the letter of the license and no more. I get it though. Anyone know how Centos under Red Hat is nowadays?
- rayvd 10y ago
  Still thriving, to my knowledge. Scientific Linux is also out there as well. My recollection is that Red Hat was actually working directly w/ CentOS on some things to streamline their build processes. Red Hat doesn't see CentOS as a threat (as it did OEL).
  - Fomite 10y ago
    I've been quite happy with Scientific Linux.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    > Red Hat doesn't see CentOS as a threat (as it did OEL). Quite honestly I wonder if this was a big motivator for them to take CentOS under their wing. Why go with the totally unaffiliated community distribution when you can go with Oracle for free (somehow)? I've been using CentOS for some time now, and have never been happier as the release cadence has only gotten better since RH started supporting the project directly. There's no real reason I'd even consider Oracle Linux at this point as a result, considering neither comes with commercial support without purchasing a paid support subscription.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Better staffed and as healthy as ever. Also, Karanbir, the guy who runs CentOS and always has, seems a bit less stressed out. Notice how the release cadence and security updates in CentOS have increased in release speed massively. It was probably the best thing to happen to CentOS provided RedHat will continue letting them be an independent distribution.
- jaboutboul 10y ago
ElijahLynn 10y ago
Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago. Absolutely love working for this company! Especially that most engineers use GNU/Linux of some sort. Great to see this!
- rsync 10y ago
  "Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago." I have something I'd like to ask you ... Two years ago, at the RSA convention, I ran into a redhat employee and was chatting about (unix) and I mentioned that I was the founder of rsync.net with the expectation that he knew exactly who we were and what we did. He had no idea and had never heard of us. I felt like I had uncovered an enormous flaw in my outreach and relations efforts if someone at redhat had no idea who we were. But now I'm not so sure ... I have a feeling that somehow the redhat ecosystem and the people that use it are quite a bit differently focused than the HN crowd and people that are UNIX enthusiasts for the sake of UNIX. I wonder what you think ?
  - ElijahLynn 10y ago
    Yeah, there are quite a diverse set of people working at Red Hat. There are a lot of different areas to be involved in as well. For instance, I am in the marketing department and am a software engineer for www.redhat.com. Nothing to do really with the engineering of the product itself. I have knowledge of rsync.net (even emailed with you once I think) but that was for personal hobbyish reasons, zfs syncing of my desktop. I could see many people never hearing of rsync.net though, until you have the need you usually don't know about stuff. Well, unless you are on HN, but even then I gloss over a lot of stuff that currently isn't in my "need" bucket.
  - jaboutboul 10y ago
    The make up of the employees is pretty diverse and not everyone there is knowledgeable about every piece that ships. In fact some solutions engineers are hyper-specialized at only their specific piece of the puzzle that they may not even be familiar with more than a few specific products or pieces of products that Red Hat ships. It's not a bad thing though. It allows them to be super-expert at whatever it is they know and leverage that knowledge to assist customers. So someone who is deep into encryption may not necessarily know what Rsync does, he is not devops after all and might have never maintained a server, and doesn't keep local backups (shame on them though) to need to use rsync. There are also marketing people and finance people, etc.
redshat 10y ago
"What makes us Red Hat" - We hodge podge together 40 different open source projects into a monumental turd of an "enterprise" product (call it something space related) and sell it to unsuspecting managers for their Systems Administrators to deal with. There are a lot of talented people working at this company, without a doubt. But these are the same people that brought you systemd and SATELLITE. Has anyone here ever USED Satellite (6.x) ?! Get this off my news feed.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > Has anyone here ever USED Satellite (6.x) ?! The supported, RHEL-released version? No. I have used Katello though, we ended up just going with Foreman+Ansible though since the lack of errata in the CentOS update feed made all of the extra features pretty useless. What problems exactly have you seen? If I was running a proper RHEL shop I would pick it up in a heartbeat along with CloudForms.
ElijahLynn 10y ago
Something I just learned recently after I started working for Red Hat and is the tldr; of the article: "Red Hat also commits to keeping our commercial products 100% pure open source. Even when we acquire a proprietary software company, we commit to releasing all of its code as open source." I had no idea this was the case, pretty cool!
- uggedal 10y ago
  Where is the source of Ansible Tower?
  - maxamillion 10y ago
    I heard at AnsibleFest is that it's undergoing legal review and export compliance, no official timeline yet though.
    - smarterclayton 10y ago
      Export compliance is a huge PITA for red hat. Most open source projects and libraries are not very well set up to meet requirements from the US gov. It sucks down a ton of time, making sure everything is above board.
  - ElijahLynn 10y ago
    Not out yet, but you can go to https://www.ansible.com/open-tower https://www.ansible.com/open-tower for updates. The cool thing is that even though it isn't out yet, it will be, because that is the Red Hat way.
- crizzooo 10y ago
  Can you elaborate on this for a Linux noob? I spent an entire weekend setting up Ubuntu, and then wss extremely jaded when I could barely get anything to work, and even getting Flash in the browser was a huge pain in the ass. So I only use my windows side partition now, and its just easier.... Still mostly do everything on my Mac anyway
rsync 10y ago
Where is the redhat ecosystem trending with regard to CoW filesystems ? Are people regularly using ZFS-on-linux with redhat ? Or is there an officially sanctioned CoW choice from redhat ? Or is that not on the radar at all right now ?
- merb 10y ago
  Well RedHat defaults to XFS which has experimental support for CoW. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=0cbbc422d56668528f6efd1234fe908010284082 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Came in 4.9 and 4.8 (the commit provides the building block). And I also think Dave Chinner (works at RH) put a lot of effort into it? (but I'm not 100% sure)
  - lima 10y ago
    XFS is one of the most robust filesystems, too. The xfstests testing suite is basically the standard for filesystem testing, even for non-XFS filesystems.
- bonzini 10y ago
  For RHEL7, XFS is the recommended filesystem. It has a lot of backports so don't be fooled by the 3.10 kernel version---but not CoW. Btrfs is not mature enough. ZFS-on-linux is not supported and I've never seen a customer using it.
educar 10y ago
Does anyone know of a redhat style model but not for enterprise? Like small businesses and individuals.
- ymse 10y ago
  I'm trying to start one. Small to mid-scale system integration and consulting services, using only free software. Can you elaborate on your use case?
Apocryphon 10y ago
From Orion's Arm, online massive sci-fi collaborative project http://orionsarm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Information_Age_(novel)/Characters_and_timeline_of_Information_Age http://orionsarm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Information_Age_(novel)/...: 2015/46 - visual and tactile bodysuits enable advancement in personal Virtual Realities, which begin to take the market share from TV, radio, films, and other media. 2017/48 - first universal operational machine 'Harvey' constructed by a team lead by Peter Shor at Bell labs, with funding from IBM, Lycos, RedHat and Pepsi. That bit from the timeline was probably written around 1999-2001 or so. Kind of amazing that out of the tech companies mentioned, RedHat is the one that's still doing pretty well.
jaboutboul 10y ago
I proudly worked for Red Hat for almost a decade and I can honestly say that they've got pretty much everything right, from culture to work ethic to vision and execution, all throughout its done with the community at the forefront. It really is part of the company's DNA and they don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk. A great company, culture and a great place to work.
- kerny 10y ago
  Why would you leave such a great place to work?
xorblurb 10y ago
I thought what makes them RH was their support contract asking for money for (unsupported) CentOS installs, forbidding to republishing kernel patch series if you want to continue to be supported, and the like. But I've read that text, and have been utterly converted to RH. RH is the ultimate good, go with them, and accept their demands.
legulere 10y ago
I really like the products not projects mantra. It kind of explains both the problems that open source projects have, but also the failure of so many Google projects.
Safety1stClyde 10y ago
This article seemed directionless and boring to me.
gerdesj 10y ago
Redhat: I clicked on the link and was presented with a wall of words. Oh and there was a bloody great piccy above the words that I had to scroll past. It looked a bit rubbish. Is that really the best that a multi billion dollar company's S&M department can come up with? Back in the day, after I'd farted around with Slackware, Yggdrasil, Mandrake etc I'd come back to RH but that was a long time ago and now is now. Should I bother to read the blurb ... had a go ... had another go ... ... got bored ... didn't finish - soz. I believe that RH are an important component of the (GNU)Linux ecosystem but I am not exactly fired up by this effort. I am fired up by software in general and Libre software in particular. OK ... another go at the marketing thing ... oh, apparently RH are the leading force in open source software. Piss off. Open source software looks after itself. Feel free to include say the kernel devs amongst your "life blood" Feel free to read LWN's articles that describe how stuff is done There is no doubt that RH has contributed to open source software in a significant way but they are not on my radar these days. Cheers Jon
rkv 10y ago
OT: Does anyone know how to get an open-source kernel module signed by RedHat and be included in the CentOS kernel? Do they have a form/contact for this sort of request?
digi_owl 10y ago
RH have really been on a self-congratulating roll recently. Feeling some pressure in the revenue stream from Oracle perhaps?

280 points by swonderl 10y ago

It's this mindset that makes me want to support Red Hat as a company. As good as the Fedora 25 experience has been for me, I'd love to see Linux laptop vendors (especially Dell) make it an installed option soon. Maybe CentOS laptops would make more sense for them from a sheer "stability for support sake" experience.

kbenson 10y ago
There's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there (or at least, there has been in the past. I've been out of the loop on this for a few years). CentOS/RHEL are definitely the stable, long-term distros, but they don't always map exactly to a specific Fedora release, so you can't necessarily just build RPMs for the last few Fedora versions and also support CentOS/RHEL. Historically, when looking for software that wasn't already in a repo but packages were provided, you would often see Ubuntu and Fedora packages but not RHEL (and thus CentOS) packages. RHEL's release schedule is really optimized around server and workstation time scales, not desktop time scales. Ubuntu's is much more amenable to desktop use, where you get an LTS release every 24 months. RHEL regularly goes 3-4 years now (with point release refreshes, but that's not too exciting for desktop users). The flip side is that RHEL and CentOS have a much longer support lifecycle.
- bonzini 10y ago
  Point RHEL releases are certainly exciting for desktop users. You get lots of driver and filesystem updates, and some point releases even rebased Mesa, X11 and GNOME. Plus, Software Collections such as Red Hat Developer Toolset provide updated MySQL/MariaDB, Ruby, Python, GCC, etc.
jhasse 10y ago
The advantage of Ubuntu LTS is that you can upgrade it to a non-LTS. Also good for branding that both are "Ubuntu". I'd love if CentOS / RHEL would become Fedora LTS.
- TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
  I disagree. Red Hat's brand is pretty powerful in the corporate linux world. If anything, Fedora should be renamed to RHEL Unstable or something.
  - jhasse 10y ago
    That would also work :)
vacri 10y ago
A rolling distro should never be used by a hardware vendor, at least not for a 'general release' bit of hardware.

schoen 10y ago

More than 15 years ago, I worked for a Linux services company that competed with Red Hat. We sometimes saw them or were invited to see them rather negatively (as the competition), and I particularly remember that an ad agency that wanted our business once shipped us a box containing a burnt red hat (!). Time has shown that Red Hat really knows what they're doing, on many different levels, and they're the most successful free software business in history.

xapata 10y ago
I hope you hired that ad agency.
- xapata 10y ago
  Funny, both the top and bottom comment in this little thread branch are saying the same thing.
rrdharan 10y ago
> they're the most successful free software business in history. Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.
- oddevan 10y ago
  Automattic comes to mind: AFAIK they've built a pretty successful business on WordPress and related products.
  - 0xCMP 10y ago
    They aren't public, but yes I believe they are valued at 1bn+ too
    - bronson 10y ago
      There's a big difference between valuation and revenue.

m348e912 10y ago

Red Hat was primary reason it took me a lot longer to adopt Linux than it should have. Headbanging experiences with dependency hell and things not working as expected left me extremely discouraged. It wasn't until I dabbled a little with Solaris 7 and finally found Slackware that I realized that Linux could "just work". IMO Red Hat's success was primarily based on the critical mass of support behind it, not because it was the best distribution.

infodroid 10y ago
Have you considered the possibility that your poor experience with Red Hat was due to the fact you were new to Linux? Encountering dependency hell is usually a sign that you don't know what you're doing. Red Hat "just works" and has always enjoyed the reputation of being the most bulletproof distro if you could afford it.
- djaychela 10y ago
  What timeframe are you talking about? I remember it didn't "just work" for me when I first started experimenting with it (V4.2, IIRC). Yes, I was new, but it wasn't the easy-install experience that it now is, for sure.
  - sevensor 10y ago
    I started at around the same time -- Red Hat Linux 4 era. Yum didn't exist yet. I was also quite new to Linux, but I'm reasonably sure there really wasn't something that would do dependency resolution for you. You either had to find an RPM that had the right version, or you had to find a tarball somewhere and run configure and make yourself.
- notalaser 10y ago
  Back when Solaris 7 was a thing, dependency hell was very much a thing.
  - infodroid 10y ago

dhemmerling 10y ago

This is a pretty timely statement of values and development ideology apropos Canonical's sudden pivot from fragmenting the Linux desktop community.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tux1968 10y ago
What are you referring to?
- dhemmerling 10y ago
  Ditching Unity + Mir, and returning to Gnome. Convergence is good. https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/ https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cl...
  - houst0n_ 10y ago
    Canonical are ditching Mir? I must have missed this one. Was this discussed here? Page won't load for me but my first thought was this was a poor taste April fools ;)
    - houst0n_ 10y ago
      Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631 Can't find a cached version of the actual ubuntu article though. Edit: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6qrnNnWg1IJ:https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6qrnN... No mention of mir though?
    - keithpeter 10y ago
      "I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS." I checked the date of the post really carefully as well. That is certainly a change of direction.

jjirsa 10y ago

Spending most of my time near the JVM, the work they've done with Shenandoah (and previously Netty) has been really incredible. Love Redhat's OSS work.

digitalshankar 10y ago

Red Hat or the Microsoft of Linux is the face palm of linux distros, forget dependency hell, how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system or distros like Ubuntu? People just buy it for the support even if the Red Hat they use is Gnome 2 and Firefox V.3.0. Then finally RHCA/RHCE courses, i should get certified from this distro to prove my Linux skills for the companies even though i am a debian guy? No Thanks.

kbenson 10y ago
> how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system So, what makes the Debian package system superior? Having built multiple specs in the past, but not any debs, I'm curious. Given that you can often convert debs to RPMs and vice-versa, and can use the different package managers on either type of repository, it's not obvious where one has any specific benefit.
- chousuke 10y ago
  I've built both Debian packages and RPMs, and I feel that RPMs are somewhat easier to wrap your head around. It's been a while since I did Debian package building, though. It's also undeniably true that there was a time when APT + dpkg blew Red Hat's "equivalent" tools out of the water, but that's not the case anymore. One thing I like in particular about dnf/rpm is that I can install packages by using functions, so eg. telling yum to install perl(Net::DNS) will work and installs the perl-Net-DNS package. I'm not sure if apt can do this.
  - lima 10y ago
    And SPEC files are much easier to work with than Debian's folder full of different files.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      This is my biggest gripe with debian packaging. Also, the use of make files and the magic that goes on behind the scenes with debhelper (which you probably want to use) makes packaging much less transparent. It took me days to grok how to make a proper debian package nearly a decade ago when I first did it - writing my first .spec file took an hour or so and now I can hammer most of them out in 15 minutes or less.

dumindunuwan 10y ago

> The Next Red Hat Please build officially Red Hat backed Fedora Tables. This will be a win to win situation for both sides.

fs111 10y ago
There is probably a market of 10 such devices. Why would you waste money on developing that?

yuhong 10y ago

OT, but I wonder when Lennart Poettering was hired at Red Hat.

bonzini 10y ago
I think about 10 years ago. I was hired 8 years ago and he had been around for a while.
- yuhong 10y ago
  Which would be after PulseAudio but before systemd.
  - bonzini 10y ago
    Definitely before systemd. PulseAudio became default in Fedora 8 (August 2007 [1]), and the feature page lists Lennart as the owner, [2] so the time checks out. [1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-August/msg01196.html https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-Augus... [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio

johnny_1010 10y ago

What is so great about RH? When i had opportunity to use it, it look so bad mostly because lack of current/decent software in repo. Maybe their support is amazing?

jajern 10y ago
Yes, support and peace of mind. Packages that make it into their repository are fully tested and supported by RH. Almost all of them are old but they are pretty much guaranteed stable and Red Hat will support the software until the EOL of whichever RH version you are running, even if the developers of the package do not support a version of the package anymore.
- nvarsj 10y ago
  Sometimes being old is a double edged sword. For instance, RHEL7 has a lot of problems on AWS because the kernel is too old to properly support many of the virtualisation features AWS provides. On bare metal RHEL7 is great, though.
  - rayvd 10y ago
    Red Hat is pretty good about back-porting features like this into the kernel and rest of the platform. It would surprise me if the issues you describe aren't on the roadmap to address. We have no issues running RHEL7 under VMware.
  - jeremyeder 10y ago
    Can you be more specific about this please? Disclaimer, I happily work for RH and today's blog has me ear-to-ear grinning.
    - maxamillion 10y ago
      Information about feature/errata backporting here: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/ https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/ Information specific to security backporting policies here: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/ https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/

throw7 10y ago

The Red Hat retail to Enterprise shift still leaves a little bitter taste in my mouth. I remember when they shut down public access to the rhel binaries and the beginnings of Centos. All legit to the letter of the license and no more. I get it though. Anyone know how Centos under Red Hat is nowadays?

rayvd 10y ago
Still thriving, to my knowledge. Scientific Linux is also out there as well. My recollection is that Red Hat was actually working directly w/ CentOS on some things to streamline their build processes. Red Hat doesn't see CentOS as a threat (as it did OEL).
- Fomite 10y ago
  I've been quite happy with Scientific Linux.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  > Red Hat doesn't see CentOS as a threat (as it did OEL). Quite honestly I wonder if this was a big motivator for them to take CentOS under their wing. Why go with the totally unaffiliated community distribution when you can go with Oracle for free (somehow)? I've been using CentOS for some time now, and have never been happier as the release cadence has only gotten better since RH started supporting the project directly. There's no real reason I'd even consider Oracle Linux at this point as a result, considering neither comes with commercial support without purchasing a paid support subscription.
SEJeff 10y ago
Better staffed and as healthy as ever. Also, Karanbir, the guy who runs CentOS and always has, seems a bit less stressed out. Notice how the release cadence and security updates in CentOS have increased in release speed massively. It was probably the best thing to happen to CentOS provided RedHat will continue letting them be an independent distribution.
jaboutboul 10y ago

ElijahLynn 10y ago

Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago. Absolutely love working for this company! Especially that most engineers use GNU/Linux of some sort. Great to see this!

rsync 10y ago
"Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago." I have something I'd like to ask you ... Two years ago, at the RSA convention, I ran into a redhat employee and was chatting about (unix) and I mentioned that I was the founder of rsync.net with the expectation that he knew exactly who we were and what we did. He had no idea and had never heard of us. I felt like I had uncovered an enormous flaw in my outreach and relations efforts if someone at redhat had no idea who we were. But now I'm not so sure ... I have a feeling that somehow the redhat ecosystem and the people that use it are quite a bit differently focused than the HN crowd and people that are UNIX enthusiasts for the sake of UNIX. I wonder what you think ?
- ElijahLynn 10y ago
  Yeah, there are quite a diverse set of people working at Red Hat. There are a lot of different areas to be involved in as well. For instance, I am in the marketing department and am a software engineer for www.redhat.com. Nothing to do really with the engineering of the product itself. I have knowledge of rsync.net (even emailed with you once I think) but that was for personal hobbyish reasons, zfs syncing of my desktop. I could see many people never hearing of rsync.net though, until you have the need you usually don't know about stuff. Well, unless you are on HN, but even then I gloss over a lot of stuff that currently isn't in my "need" bucket.
- jaboutboul 10y ago
  The make up of the employees is pretty diverse and not everyone there is knowledgeable about every piece that ships. In fact some solutions engineers are hyper-specialized at only their specific piece of the puzzle that they may not even be familiar with more than a few specific products or pieces of products that Red Hat ships. It's not a bad thing though. It allows them to be super-expert at whatever it is they know and leverage that knowledge to assist customers. So someone who is deep into encryption may not necessarily know what Rsync does, he is not devops after all and might have never maintained a server, and doesn't keep local backups (shame on them though) to need to use rsync. There are also marketing people and finance people, etc.

redshat 10y ago

"What makes us Red Hat" - We hodge podge together 40 different open source projects into a monumental turd of an "enterprise" product (call it something space related) and sell it to unsuspecting managers for their Systems Administrators to deal with. There are a lot of talented people working at this company, without a doubt. But these are the same people that brought you systemd and SATELLITE. Has anyone here ever USED Satellite (6.x) ?! Get this off my news feed.

snuxoll 10y ago
> Has anyone here ever USED Satellite (6.x) ?! The supported, RHEL-released version? No. I have used Katello though, we ended up just going with Foreman+Ansible though since the lack of errata in the CentOS update feed made all of the extra features pretty useless. What problems exactly have you seen? If I was running a proper RHEL shop I would pick it up in a heartbeat along with CloudForms.

ElijahLynn 10y ago

Something I just learned recently after I started working for Red Hat and is the tldr; of the article: "Red Hat also commits to keeping our commercial products 100% pure open source. Even when we acquire a proprietary software company, we commit to releasing all of its code as open source." I had no idea this was the case, pretty cool!

uggedal 10y ago
Where is the source of Ansible Tower?
- maxamillion 10y ago
  I heard at AnsibleFest is that it's undergoing legal review and export compliance, no official timeline yet though.
  - smarterclayton 10y ago
    Export compliance is a huge PITA for red hat. Most open source projects and libraries are not very well set up to meet requirements from the US gov. It sucks down a ton of time, making sure everything is above board.
- ElijahLynn 10y ago
  Not out yet, but you can go to https://www.ansible.com/open-tower https://www.ansible.com/open-tower for updates. The cool thing is that even though it isn't out yet, it will be, because that is the Red Hat way.
crizzooo 10y ago
Can you elaborate on this for a Linux noob? I spent an entire weekend setting up Ubuntu, and then wss extremely jaded when I could barely get anything to work, and even getting Flash in the browser was a huge pain in the ass. So I only use my windows side partition now, and its just easier.... Still mostly do everything on my Mac anyway

rsync 10y ago

Where is the redhat ecosystem trending with regard to CoW filesystems ? Are people regularly using ZFS-on-linux with redhat ? Or is there an officially sanctioned CoW choice from redhat ? Or is that not on the radar at all right now ?

merb 10y ago
Well RedHat defaults to XFS which has experimental support for CoW. https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=0cbbc422d56668528f6efd1234fe908010284082 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... Came in 4.9 and 4.8 (the commit provides the building block). And I also think Dave Chinner (works at RH) put a lot of effort into it? (but I'm not 100% sure)
- lima 10y ago
  XFS is one of the most robust filesystems, too. The xfstests testing suite is basically the standard for filesystem testing, even for non-XFS filesystems.
bonzini 10y ago
For RHEL7, XFS is the recommended filesystem. It has a lot of backports so don't be fooled by the 3.10 kernel version---but not CoW. Btrfs is not mature enough. ZFS-on-linux is not supported and I've never seen a customer using it.

educar 10y ago

Does anyone know of a redhat style model but not for enterprise? Like small businesses and individuals.

ymse 10y ago
I'm trying to start one. Small to mid-scale system integration and consulting services, using only free software. Can you elaborate on your use case?

Apocryphon 10y ago

From Orion's Arm, online massive sci-fi collaborative project http://orionsarm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Information_Age_(novel)/Characters_and_timeline_of_Information_Age http://orionsarm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Information_Age_(novel)/...: 2015/46 - visual and tactile bodysuits enable advancement in personal Virtual Realities, which begin to take the market share from TV, radio, films, and other media. 2017/48 - first universal operational machine 'Harvey' constructed by a team lead by Peter Shor at Bell labs, with funding from IBM, Lycos, RedHat and Pepsi. That bit from the timeline was probably written around 1999-2001 or so. Kind of amazing that out of the tech companies mentioned, RedHat is the one that's still doing pretty well.

jaboutboul 10y ago

I proudly worked for Red Hat for almost a decade and I can honestly say that they've got pretty much everything right, from culture to work ethic to vision and execution, all throughout its done with the community at the forefront. It really is part of the company's DNA and they don't just talk the talk, they walk the walk. A great company, culture and a great place to work.

kerny 10y ago
Why would you leave such a great place to work?

xorblurb 10y ago

I thought what makes them RH was their support contract asking for money for (unsupported) CentOS installs, forbidding to republishing kernel patch series if you want to continue to be supported, and the like. But I've read that text, and have been utterly converted to RH. RH is the ultimate good, go with them, and accept their demands.

legulere 10y ago

I really like the products not projects mantra. It kind of explains both the problems that open source projects have, but also the failure of so many Google projects.

Safety1stClyde 10y ago

This article seemed directionless and boring to me.

gerdesj 10y ago

Redhat: I clicked on the link and was presented with a wall of words. Oh and there was a bloody great piccy above the words that I had to scroll past. It looked a bit rubbish. Is that really the best that a multi billion dollar company's S&M department can come up with? Back in the day, after I'd farted around with Slackware, Yggdrasil, Mandrake etc I'd come back to RH but that was a long time ago and now is now. Should I bother to read the blurb ... had a go ... had another go ... ... got bored ... didn't finish - soz. I believe that RH are an important component of the (GNU)Linux ecosystem but I am not exactly fired up by this effort. I am fired up by software in general and Libre software in particular. OK ... another go at the marketing thing ... oh, apparently RH are the leading force in open source software. Piss off. Open source software looks after itself. Feel free to include say the kernel devs amongst your "life blood" Feel free to read LWN's articles that describe how stuff is done There is no doubt that RH has contributed to open source software in a significant way but they are not on my radar these days. Cheers Jon

rkv 10y ago

OT: Does anyone know how to get an open-source kernel module signed by RedHat and be included in the CentOS kernel? Do they have a form/contact for this sort of request?

digi_owl 10y ago

RH have really been on a self-congratulating roll recently. Feeling some pressure in the revenue stream from Oracle perhaps?