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Man have I really enjoyed CoreOS/Container Linux, etcd and generally all the work the CoreOS guys have done, and boy have I hated Red Hat's business practices.

Man have I really enjoyed CoreOS/Container Linux, etcd and generally all the work the CoreOS guys have done, and boy have I hated Red Hat's business practices. I moved away from Red Hat back when they split the OS into Enterprise and Fedora flavors. I was a big fan of Red Hat back when they were leading the way in the early days of linux with things like application packaging, and a general vision towards simplicity. This is the same thing that attracted me to CoreOS' elegant engineering. I don't object to companies focusing more on revenue, as Red Hat's Enterprise move clearly was. But I cannot abide the erosion of vision in pursuit of profits. In particular when elegance and simplicity are replaced with complexity, and user hostile design to increase switching costs. I realize there is probably a natural selection process at work here, and user hostile design is clearly a more profitable strategy, but I can't keep from hoping that one of these times the well engineered, simplicity focused, user centric design will find the right business model and survive... vision intact.

freedomben 9y ago
Interesting, I totally disagree. The split of Fedora and RHEL was a great move for users IMHO. Serving the needs of desktop users and enterprise (servers) with the same distro just isn't doable. They have wildly different and incompatible needs. I've been a happy fedora user for years. Red Hat has also done tons of things that directly fly in the face of a company seeking profits. Like continuing to release your full source code, even when punks like Oracle just rip it off and sell it for less. They even directly support the CentOS project, even tho it cannabalizes people who might otherwise buy RHEL. Red Hat is an amazing company that has poured countless millions of dollars in both money and time to make all of our lives better. Even the Gnome project may not be a thing without Red Hat's contributions, and everybody on linux benefits from that work. I wish there were more companies out there like Red Hat. Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with Red Hat. I'm just an appreciative observer and beneficiary.
- simonh 9y ago
  Companies that dont want to pay would simply use another free Linux, or maybe BSD. Centos keeps Red Hat relevant to those users and ensures they have an easy path to commercial Red Hat. It also makes sure accademics and students have an option to get familiar with it and provides a platform for developing skilled Red Hat aware talent. I'd be surprised if it costs them much more than 1% of sales, and as a free taster Im sure brings in much more.
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    Then there’s projects like OpenShift, we deployed OpenShift Origin on a cluster of CentOS Atomic VM, just over a year ago - at this point we are looking at buying dedicated hardware and OCP licenses from Red Hat now that we’ve used it in production for a while and need/want support when things go awry. “Free taster” is certainly an apt anaology, I know there’s plenty of people who will never buy the supported products but there are likely a lot of other organizations like us that decide to buy in AFTER trying the upstream projects first.
- lima 9y ago
  Recent example: they open sourced Ansible Tower. They must've lost quite a few sales, but even after only a few months community contributions started flowing in.[1] Red Hat really believes in the power of open source. It must be a great place to work at. [1]: https://github.com/ansible/awx https://github.com/ansible/awx I wish more companies had that kind of courage.

freedomben 9y ago

Interesting, I totally disagree. The split of Fedora and RHEL was a great move for users IMHO. Serving the needs of desktop users and enterprise (servers) with the same distro just isn't doable. They have wildly different and incompatible needs. I've been a happy fedora user for years. Red Hat has also done tons of things that directly fly in the face of a company seeking profits. Like continuing to release your full source code, even when punks like Oracle just rip it off and sell it for less. They even directly support the CentOS project, even tho it cannabalizes people who might otherwise buy RHEL. Red Hat is an amazing company that has poured countless millions of dollars in both money and time to make all of our lives better. Even the Gnome project may not be a thing without Red Hat's contributions, and everybody on linux benefits from that work. I wish there were more companies out there like Red Hat. Disclaimer: I have zero affiliation with Red Hat. I'm just an appreciative observer and beneficiary.

simonh 9y ago
Companies that dont want to pay would simply use another free Linux, or maybe BSD. Centos keeps Red Hat relevant to those users and ensures they have an easy path to commercial Red Hat. It also makes sure accademics and students have an option to get familiar with it and provides a platform for developing skilled Red Hat aware talent. I'd be surprised if it costs them much more than 1% of sales, and as a free taster Im sure brings in much more.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  Then there’s projects like OpenShift, we deployed OpenShift Origin on a cluster of CentOS Atomic VM, just over a year ago - at this point we are looking at buying dedicated hardware and OCP licenses from Red Hat now that we’ve used it in production for a while and need/want support when things go awry. “Free taster” is certainly an apt anaology, I know there’s plenty of people who will never buy the supported products but there are likely a lot of other organizations like us that decide to buy in AFTER trying the upstream projects first.
lima 9y ago
Recent example: they open sourced Ansible Tower. They must've lost quite a few sales, but even after only a few months community contributions started flowing in.[1] Red Hat really believes in the power of open source. It must be a great place to work at. [1]: https://github.com/ansible/awx https://github.com/ansible/awx I wish more companies had that kind of courage.