7 ms·

RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will experien

RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will experience vendor hate to a high degree. But, RH is based on open source. A replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.

cb504 8y ago
This is great news for Canonical.
Kye 8y ago
Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Every new cloud thing touted its pre-configured Ubuntu images, for example. Even Microsoft started with Ubuntu with WSL. Maybe that's why a still multi-billion dollar company decided to cash out even as Linux seems to be making inroads. People used Red Hat for the same reason they used IBM: it was corporate, understood corporate needs, and knew how to serve them. Now it seems like corporations are offloading IT to AWS and friends with Ubuntu. Everyone talks about what Canonical did for the desktop while missing what they did for friendly apt-based Linux on the server with SLAs and LTSes and support contracts from a company that speaks corporation. And if all the paying customers switch to Debian-based distributions... The writing is on the wall.
- rvense 8y ago
  Red Hat is a lot more than the distros, isn't it?
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    Working for a competing company (Pivotal), I can say that yes, Red Hat does more than RHEL.
- tapoxi 8y ago
  You'll see a lot of preconfigured CentOS images, not RHEL because of the licensing. Red Hat's recent (and sensible) play has been on-prem Kubernetes with OpenShift.
- rodgerd 8y ago
  > Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Ubuntu don't have JBoss or OpenShift, amongst other things. Neither do SuSE, unfortunately.
  - unethical_ban 8y ago
    Ubuntu has its own orchestration toolsets, and I wonder if RHAT only had the upper hand with being the incumbent in the US and buying things like Ansible and OpenShift and CoreOS. Ubuntu runs Systemd, it's a modern distro - if someone wants to take Openshift core and other components and run it on Ubuntu, it will happen.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      A nitpick: OpenShift is a project founded directly by Red Hat.
      - bonzini 8y ago
        These days OpenShift is Kubernetes, there is no code left from the Makara acquisition.
- jabl 8y ago
  RH back in the day made a lot of hay by being the go-to option for enterprises migrating proprietary UNIX workloads to x86+Linux. But I guess that market is mostly saturated by now. What I worry about is not the fate of RHEL per se, in the end it's just a distro among others. What I worry about, as a huge FOSS fan, is the fate of RH engineering which is certainly one of the biggest individual upstream FOSS contributors on a lot of places in the stack. By comparison, the Canonical engineering team is absolutely puny. If the work that RH does disappears, we're going to see a lot slower progress in the FOSS ecosystem.
- lima 8y ago
  Ubuntu has a long way to go before they reach Red Hat levels of quality assurance.
sz4kerto 8y ago
RHEL is just a small piece of the Red Hat puzzle that is sold to enterprises. In some way Red Hat is an exception -- there have been no multi-billion dollar businesses built purely on open source except them. (Or maybe I have missed something.)
beatgammit 8y ago
Well yeah, there's CentOS, so a company just needs to step up and provide the level of support RHEL customers expect. I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in. I really don't understand this acquisition.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
theandrewbailey 8y ago
At least they didn't get bought by Oracle. All the important people Sun had left within ~6 months of Oracle buying Sun.

cb504 8y ago

This is great news for Canonical.

Kye 8y ago

Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Every new cloud thing touted its pre-configured Ubuntu images, for example. Even Microsoft started with Ubuntu with WSL. Maybe that's why a still multi-billion dollar company decided to cash out even as Linux seems to be making inroads. People used Red Hat for the same reason they used IBM: it was corporate, understood corporate needs, and knew how to serve them. Now it seems like corporations are offloading IT to AWS and friends with Ubuntu. Everyone talks about what Canonical did for the desktop while missing what they did for friendly apt-based Linux on the server with SLAs and LTSes and support contracts from a company that speaks corporation. And if all the paying customers switch to Debian-based distributions... The writing is on the wall.

rvense 8y ago
Red Hat is a lot more than the distros, isn't it?
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  Working for a competing company (Pivotal), I can say that yes, Red Hat does more than RHEL.
tapoxi 8y ago
You'll see a lot of preconfigured CentOS images, not RHEL because of the licensing. Red Hat's recent (and sensible) play has been on-prem Kubernetes with OpenShift.
rodgerd 8y ago
> Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Ubuntu don't have JBoss or OpenShift, amongst other things. Neither do SuSE, unfortunately.
- unethical_ban 8y ago
  Ubuntu has its own orchestration toolsets, and I wonder if RHAT only had the upper hand with being the incumbent in the US and buying things like Ansible and OpenShift and CoreOS. Ubuntu runs Systemd, it's a modern distro - if someone wants to take Openshift core and other components and run it on Ubuntu, it will happen.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    A nitpick: OpenShift is a project founded directly by Red Hat.
    - bonzini 8y ago
      These days OpenShift is Kubernetes, there is no code left from the Makara acquisition.
jabl 8y ago
RH back in the day made a lot of hay by being the go-to option for enterprises migrating proprietary UNIX workloads to x86+Linux. But I guess that market is mostly saturated by now. What I worry about is not the fate of RHEL per se, in the end it's just a distro among others. What I worry about, as a huge FOSS fan, is the fate of RH engineering which is certainly one of the biggest individual upstream FOSS contributors on a lot of places in the stack. By comparison, the Canonical engineering team is absolutely puny. If the work that RH does disappears, we're going to see a lot slower progress in the FOSS ecosystem.
lima 8y ago
Ubuntu has a long way to go before they reach Red Hat levels of quality assurance.

sz4kerto 8y ago

RHEL is just a small piece of the Red Hat puzzle that is sold to enterprises. In some way Red Hat is an exception -- there have been no multi-billion dollar businesses built purely on open source except them. (Or maybe I have missed something.)

beatgammit 8y ago

Well yeah, there's CentOS, so a company just needs to step up and provide the level of support RHEL customers expect. I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in. I really don't understand this acquisition.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

theandrewbailey 8y ago

At least they didn't get bought by Oracle. All the important people Sun had left within ~6 months of Oracle buying Sun.