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> In practice both companies have struggled to diversify into broader “enterprise solutions” I don't call growing to a thousand people from the low few hundred

> In practice both companies have struggled to diversify into broader “enterprise solutions” I don't call growing to a thousand people from the low few hundred that I knew "struggling". RedHat is well over ten thousand employees. If the Linux distribution really was the center they would only have a few hundred both, which they had when the Linux distribution was not just at the center, it WAS the center of the business. So clearly this is no longer the case.

zapita 8y ago
That makes no sense. They had a few hundred employees because their Linux business was small. Now their Linux business is huge, so they can afford to hire more people. Some of those people are sustaining and growing the core Linux business, and others are working to develop new businesses like storage, openstack, middleware, configuration management, containers etc. None of those new businesses are anywhere near self-sufficiency. They are all funded primarily by the core Linux business. If you look at their 2017Q4 results, it’s very telling: out of $772M of revenue, the combination of Openshift, Openstack, Ansible, Java middleware, IDEs and every other product in the “application development and emerging technologies” group added up to $173M. That’s 22.4% of their revenue coming from their entire “next-generation” portfolio combined. Everything else is basically RHEL. Hopefully this gives you a better picture of how they pay for their 10,000+ employees.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  > That makes no sense. To me your reply is what makes no sense. I worked for one of those Linux companies. A few hundred people is all it takes to have a Linux distribution business. More people than that is what makes no sense. So if they now have sooo many more people it means that most of them do things not related to the Linux distribution business itself. Yes, the Linux still is at the core, but I don't count people supporting computing center operations as doing work for the Linux distribution - that is an entirely new layer well above it. Your accounting seems to be based on the idea that just because it's all centered around the Linux distribution it means you can call it all "Linux distribution business". I vehemently disagree, as I said, I consider that well above the level of merely selling Linux distributions. I saw how that business looked like from the inside, and what they do now does not remotely look like they do the same thing. Well, of course they still do, what I mean is the share of the overall activity of the company. The amount of people needed to build and maintain the Linux distribution has not changed significantly. They don't need more package maintainers or significantly more kernel hackers. The people they hired don't work on the Linux distribution but on things made on top of it, whether that's other software products or services.

zapita 8y ago

That makes no sense. They had a few hundred employees because their Linux business was small. Now their Linux business is huge, so they can afford to hire more people. Some of those people are sustaining and growing the core Linux business, and others are working to develop new businesses like storage, openstack, middleware, configuration management, containers etc. None of those new businesses are anywhere near self-sufficiency. They are all funded primarily by the core Linux business. If you look at their 2017Q4 results, it’s very telling: out of $772M of revenue, the combination of Openshift, Openstack, Ansible, Java middleware, IDEs and every other product in the “application development and emerging technologies” group added up to $173M. That’s 22.4% of their revenue coming from their entire “next-generation” portfolio combined. Everything else is basically RHEL. Hopefully this gives you a better picture of how they pay for their 10,000+ employees.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
> That makes no sense. To me your reply is what makes no sense. I worked for one of those Linux companies. A few hundred people is all it takes to have a Linux distribution business. More people than that is what makes no sense. So if they now have sooo many more people it means that most of them do things not related to the Linux distribution business itself. Yes, the Linux still is at the core, but I don't count people supporting computing center operations as doing work for the Linux distribution - that is an entirely new layer well above it. Your accounting seems to be based on the idea that just because it's all centered around the Linux distribution it means you can call it all "Linux distribution business". I vehemently disagree, as I said, I consider that well above the level of merely selling Linux distributions. I saw how that business looked like from the inside, and what they do now does not remotely look like they do the same thing. Well, of course they still do, what I mean is the share of the overall activity of the company. The amount of people needed to build and maintain the Linux distribution has not changed significantly. They don't need more package maintainers or significantly more kernel hackers. The people they hired don't work on the Linux distribution but on things made on top of it, whether that's other software products or services.