4 ms·

> no other public standalone companies Well, SUSE isn't public, but they're mostly "standalone". And there are plenty of other companies based around a single

> no other public standalone companies Well, SUSE isn't public, but they're mostly "standalone". And there are plenty of other companies based around a single open source platform. Sure, they aren't $1B+ companies, but they don't need to be.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
idm_guru 8y ago
I'm recording a podcast, called Open Source Underdogs, focusing on open source business models. You can find it on iTunes, Google, Stitcher, etc or on the website https://opensourceunderdogs.com https://opensourceunderdogs.com IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business. What about Cloudera? What about Automattic? What about MongoDB? What about MariaDB? The podcast has 9 episodes, and we have about 20 more in the queue for 2018-2019. Tune in... Some of the gurus of open source software share some valuable insights.
- jldugger 8y ago
  > IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business. It's more about sustaining the business. Redhat's most recently reported quarterly earnings growth was negative. Did they sell now because IBM approached them with an absurdly high price? Or did Redhat executives need to shop around for a buyer, because they felt they were near a local maxima and things were starting to go downhill? edit: that said, this is a subject I care about and will be adding your podcast shortly. Hopefully you figure out podcast sustainability as well =)
  - bonzini 8y ago
    Wait, are you really looking at the second derivative of the revenue? Q2 revenue (September 2018) was up 14% against September 2017. Red Hat would probably have reached a local maximum sooner or later, so it's probably a mix of the two, but I don't think it's correct to say that growth was negative.
    - jldugger 8y ago
      > Wait, are you really looking at the second derivative of the revenue? Q2 revenue (September 2018) was up 14% against September 2017. Just going by yahoo finance data: Quarterly Earnings Growth (yoy) -10.50%
      - bonzini 8y ago
        Oh I see that now. That was explained by the company as basically a single very large contract that was lost to a competitor, plus a very very strong second quarter the previous year (when you earnings growth was over 40%). However earnings per share were actually above the analysts expectations.
        jldugger 8y ago
        Yea, I imagined it could be a one-off but didn't bother to dig into the situation further. The point is simply that we don't fully know the motivation to sell. Or for that matter, the motivation to buy. For all we know, that competitor is continuing to squeeze RHT's margins. Or maybe Oracle (purveyors of Oracle Unbreakable Linux) approached the board with an offer to buy and someone walked it over to IBM with a note saying 'care to beat this offer from Oracle?' None of this is evidence suggesting there will be another standalone open source vendor. The model seems to be converging towards taking open source technologies, buying a bunch of servers and sysadmins, and renting them out to customers on an ad-hoc basis. In which case, I won't call it winner-take-all but there's obvious economies of scale to be had. If we look at the recent Redis and MongoDB relicensing debacles, it seems like a direct acknowledgement that the cloud service model is eating their lunch.
anaxag0ras 8y ago
Canonical is another one.
- kklimonda 8y ago
  But Canonical (and I assume SuSE as well) has quite a few proprietary bits (definitely more than RedHat), with some of their offerings being more or less "Open Core" (for examples, see comparison of MAAS free vs commercial, or how to distribute software to Ubuntu Core systems). That kinda matches what the article is saying.
  - cyphar 8y ago
    I can comment on the SUSE bit. In the past we had some proprietary products (SUSE Studio comes to mind), but they've all been sunset a long time ago. Now-a-days everything we work on is FOSS, and for almost all of our history the major products we've had also were FOSS. You could even call up SUSE in the old days and ask for a CD with all of the source code for SLES without being a customer. These days you can download all the SLES sources from OBS (it's what openSUSE Leap is based on), and SLES has a Factory-first policy that requires all new changes to first be sent into openSUSE. All of our products (to my knowledge) are FOSS licensed and we provide the source code for all of them as source RPMs -- even if they aren't copyleft -- and on GitHub in most cases. I would very much argue that Red Hat and SUSE can easily trade blows on which is the "more open" company in this regard. For instance, SLES sources are far easier to get access to and work with than RHEL sources in my experience (and our kernel sources are actually separate patches rather than a single patch blob). But that really doesn't matter at the end of the day -- we both work diligently on free software and contribute upstream consistently. Canonical I'm not as sure about, but from my experience collaborating with them they also do an absolutely immense amount of upstream work. In the past, they were quite sheltered and didn't contribute back, but this changed significantly many years ago. [I work at SUSE, and all of my work is upstream and free software work. I've never touched nor seen a single piece of proprietary code in my 3 years of working here.]
    - xorcist 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

idm_guru 8y ago

I'm recording a podcast, called Open Source Underdogs, focusing on open source business models. You can find it on iTunes, Google, Stitcher, etc or on the website https://opensourceunderdogs.com https://opensourceunderdogs.com IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business. What about Cloudera? What about Automattic? What about MongoDB? What about MariaDB? The podcast has 9 episodes, and we have about 20 more in the queue for 2018-2019. Tune in... Some of the gurus of open source software share some valuable insights.

jldugger 8y ago
> IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business. It's more about sustaining the business. Redhat's most recently reported quarterly earnings growth was negative. Did they sell now because IBM approached them with an absurdly high price? Or did Redhat executives need to shop around for a buyer, because they felt they were near a local maxima and things were starting to go downhill? edit: that said, this is a subject I care about and will be adding your podcast shortly. Hopefully you figure out podcast sustainability as well =)
- bonzini 8y ago
  Wait, are you really looking at the second derivative of the revenue? Q2 revenue (September 2018) was up 14% against September 2017. Red Hat would probably have reached a local maximum sooner or later, so it's probably a mix of the two, but I don't think it's correct to say that growth was negative.
  - jldugger 8y ago
    > Wait, are you really looking at the second derivative of the revenue? Q2 revenue (September 2018) was up 14% against September 2017. Just going by yahoo finance data: Quarterly Earnings Growth (yoy) -10.50%
    - bonzini 8y ago
      Oh I see that now. That was explained by the company as basically a single very large contract that was lost to a competitor, plus a very very strong second quarter the previous year (when you earnings growth was over 40%). However earnings per share were actually above the analysts expectations.
      - jldugger 8y ago
        Yea, I imagined it could be a one-off but didn't bother to dig into the situation further. The point is simply that we don't fully know the motivation to sell. Or for that matter, the motivation to buy. For all we know, that competitor is continuing to squeeze RHT's margins. Or maybe Oracle (purveyors of Oracle Unbreakable Linux) approached the board with an offer to buy and someone walked it over to IBM with a note saying 'care to beat this offer from Oracle?' None of this is evidence suggesting there will be another standalone open source vendor. The model seems to be converging towards taking open source technologies, buying a bunch of servers and sysadmins, and renting them out to customers on an ad-hoc basis. In which case, I won't call it winner-take-all but there's obvious economies of scale to be had. If we look at the recent Redis and MongoDB relicensing debacles, it seems like a direct acknowledgement that the cloud service model is eating their lunch.

anaxag0ras 8y ago

Canonical is another one.

kklimonda 8y ago
But Canonical (and I assume SuSE as well) has quite a few proprietary bits (definitely more than RedHat), with some of their offerings being more or less "Open Core" (for examples, see comparison of MAAS free vs commercial, or how to distribute software to Ubuntu Core systems). That kinda matches what the article is saying.
- cyphar 8y ago
  I can comment on the SUSE bit. In the past we had some proprietary products (SUSE Studio comes to mind), but they've all been sunset a long time ago. Now-a-days everything we work on is FOSS, and for almost all of our history the major products we've had also were FOSS. You could even call up SUSE in the old days and ask for a CD with all of the source code for SLES without being a customer. These days you can download all the SLES sources from OBS (it's what openSUSE Leap is based on), and SLES has a Factory-first policy that requires all new changes to first be sent into openSUSE. All of our products (to my knowledge) are FOSS licensed and we provide the source code for all of them as source RPMs -- even if they aren't copyleft -- and on GitHub in most cases. I would very much argue that Red Hat and SUSE can easily trade blows on which is the "more open" company in this regard. For instance, SLES sources are far easier to get access to and work with than RHEL sources in my experience (and our kernel sources are actually separate patches rather than a single patch blob). But that really doesn't matter at the end of the day -- we both work diligently on free software and contribute upstream consistently. Canonical I'm not as sure about, but from my experience collaborating with them they also do an absolutely immense amount of upstream work. In the past, they were quite sheltered and didn't contribute back, but this changed significantly many years ago. [I work at SUSE, and all of my work is upstream and free software work. I've never touched nor seen a single piece of proprietary code in my 3 years of working here.]
  - xorcist 8y ago