7 ms·

Your question is from a long-gone era, when it was all about the "Linux distribution" as such (a time when I myself still worked for one of those big Linux comp

Your question is from a long-gone era, when it was all about the "Linux distribution" as such (a time when I myself still worked for one of those big Linux companies). These days that's just a necessary but in the end secondary item. Instead the business is all about "enterprise stuff": clusters, storage, cloud, SAP, devops, HPC - i.e. "solutions". The Linux distribution merely is the vehicle and the basis, the actual business is well on top of it though, on another level. Check out what redhat.com and suse.com present on their respective homepages (no need to go deep, just the headlines - the SuSE pages show it a bit better I think, open the "Products & Solutions" menu on suse.com for an overview). I follow a few people I knew at SuSE and whenever they post something on social media it's cluster these, high availability stuff that, distributed storage here, containers there. It's never about the "boring" Linux OS level any more, always about software and solutions on top of it. By the way, I just checked the job listings (https://www.suse.com/company/careers/ https://www.suse.com/company/careers/) to see what they are up to, and there are 320 open positions? Really? Did they grow that much? When I left the Linux world almost 15 years ago that was about the total size of that company, that was just a few years after Novell had acquired it. It confirms the impression I had from loosely following some SuSE engineer's social media posts, getting handed over to new owners again and again does not seemed to have hindered them from growing quite a bit. Wikipedia says they have a thousand employees now.

Waterluvian 8y ago
It's fractal, I think? Novel technology becomes optimized and ubiquitous and newer more complex technology is built on top of it. Then the same happens to that tech.
- clon 8y ago
  That is a really good way to visualize that! Once you zoom out you can see the repeating patterns though..
zapita 8y ago
> The Linux distribution merely is the vehicle and the basis, the actual business is well on top of it though, on another level. Check out what redhat.com and suse.com present on their respective homepages Those homepages are a picture of where Red Hat and Suse want their business to go - not where it actually is. In practice both companies have struggled to diversify into broader “enterprise solutions”. After 20+ years, the vast majority of Red Hat’s revenue still comes from the good old RHEL subscription. Everything else - storage, java, openstack, containers, IDEs - is still far behind. They seem to be betting everything on Kubernetes being the new Linux, but we tend to forget just how huge Linux was in the late 90s... And how huge Red Hat was in the Linux world. This time they’re a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized pond. Kubernetes is cool, but is it cool enough to get Red Hat from $3B to $10B in revenue, with hundreds of vendors pushing their own Kubernetes service? Personally I don’t see it. As a point of comparison, Vmware is nearing $8B and has successfully diversified into storage and networking. It’s a testament to the incredible momentum of Linux adoption on the server, that even Suse (a distant second in the business of commercial Linux) has survived this long without any meaningful diversification. Personally I think we’ll see Red Hat getting acquired in the next 5 years, while they can still a good multiple on the “cloud native” hype. If they wait too late, the reality will set in that Openshift revenue can’t grow fast enough to offset a shrinking RHEL business. If they wait too long, they will end up like Suse.
- yuhong 8y ago
  Yea, I mentioned Novell in my essay and how its revenue declined quickly after they moved away from NetWare, including that both NetWare and Windows used Client Access Licenses that Linux lacked.
  - johnvanommen 8y ago
    Novell is still around. HPE sold off a bunch of their software assets to their parent company. Their specialty seems to be nurturing software that's been around for quite a while, that a lot of people take for granted, but is still a big part of many many enterprises. Micro Focus also owns Attachmate, a company that was big in the 90s.
- 8y ago

Waterluvian 8y ago

It's fractal, I think? Novel technology becomes optimized and ubiquitous and newer more complex technology is built on top of it. Then the same happens to that tech.

clon 8y ago
That is a really good way to visualize that! Once you zoom out you can see the repeating patterns though..

zapita 8y ago

> The Linux distribution merely is the vehicle and the basis, the actual business is well on top of it though, on another level. Check out what redhat.com and suse.com present on their respective homepages Those homepages are a picture of where Red Hat and Suse want their business to go - not where it actually is. In practice both companies have struggled to diversify into broader “enterprise solutions”. After 20+ years, the vast majority of Red Hat’s revenue still comes from the good old RHEL subscription. Everything else - storage, java, openstack, containers, IDEs - is still far behind. They seem to be betting everything on Kubernetes being the new Linux, but we tend to forget just how huge Linux was in the late 90s... And how huge Red Hat was in the Linux world. This time they’re a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized pond. Kubernetes is cool, but is it cool enough to get Red Hat from $3B to $10B in revenue, with hundreds of vendors pushing their own Kubernetes service? Personally I don’t see it. As a point of comparison, Vmware is nearing $8B and has successfully diversified into storage and networking. It’s a testament to the incredible momentum of Linux adoption on the server, that even Suse (a distant second in the business of commercial Linux) has survived this long without any meaningful diversification. Personally I think we’ll see Red Hat getting acquired in the next 5 years, while they can still a good multiple on the “cloud native” hype. If they wait too late, the reality will set in that Openshift revenue can’t grow fast enough to offset a shrinking RHEL business. If they wait too long, they will end up like Suse.

yuhong 8y ago
Yea, I mentioned Novell in my essay and how its revenue declined quickly after they moved away from NetWare, including that both NetWare and Windows used Client Access Licenses that Linux lacked.
- johnvanommen 8y ago
  Novell is still around. HPE sold off a bunch of their software assets to their parent company. Their specialty seems to be nurturing software that's been around for quite a while, that a lot of people take for granted, but is still a big part of many many enterprises. Micro Focus also owns Attachmate, a company that was big in the 90s.
8y ago