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Red Hat made a gamble and it may turn out to be a miscalculation. By buying CentOS and leaving it be, they had tighter control over it's release cycle (how fas

Red Hat made a gamble and it may turn out to be a miscalculation. By buying CentOS and leaving it be, they had tighter control over it's release cycle (how fast patches and newer versions were made available etc) as well as metrics on who was using it. Additionally, all of the CentOS users were still "in the Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open for future conversions/sales. They threw that all away now, they don't have any control over these forks and have wasted a lot of goodwill on short term profit. Red Hat should've gone with the Ubuntu model instead and maybe even change to usage based pricing instead of a yearly subscription too, IMO.

Kwpolska 4y ago
> Additionally, all of the CentOS users were still "in the Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open for future conversions/sales. How? When Ubuntu tried advertising Ubuntu Pro via apt-get, everyone was outraged, and rightly so. How else could Red Hat talk to a CentOS user to convince them to pay up?
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  By providing value beyond just support. Ubuntu does this via Landscape, Red Hat is still trying to figure this out with Insights and the obtuse licensing for Satellite IMO. Packaging software has a high level of effort but really low value in customers eyes due to how many Linux variants are out there (again, IMO), so putting that behind a paywall these days is dumb. Containers exasperate this problem as most folks don't care if RHEL ships with PostgreSQL, they'll just run the Debian-based container. For support, folks need enterprise support contracts. Maybe not everyone, maybe not every system, but folks that need it will pay whatever for it, it's the cost of doing business. Charge accordingly.
  - mroche 4y ago
    > the obtuse licensing for Satellite Out of curiosity, which aspect of the subscription terms do you find obtuse? Simply put, any system managed by Satellite needs to have a Smart Management subscription. You can get these individually, or bundled with a RHEL purchase as the add-on. For consumers of the public cloud marketplace RHEL images, they include the client-side aspect of Smart Management (no Satellite infra, but you can request this) so you don't need extra subscriptions to cover those.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Another mistake Red Hat has made over a long is having a "talk to the hand" attitude about doing anything differently. As an example of the pathology, there is a long standing bug in GTK that causes the positions of things to be off by few pixels if you are running an X server like xming in multiwindow mode. It doesn't sound like much but it can make it impossible to click on menu items for menus at the top of a window. The people involved at Red Hat would say in no uncertain words that they couldn't care less if it worked when you were running a multiwindow X server on Windows -- out of nothing but pure hate for Microsoft and people who use a Microsoft OS.
- bitwize 4y ago
  The supported use case is GNOME on Wayland. Everybody else can go suck eggs.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  Nobody takes the linux desktop seriously anyways
  - cies 4y ago
    Only because you do not consider ChromeOS and Andoid to be Linux. Also, if some country/university thinks out loud about ditching Windoze for Linus desktops they get a huge discount -- so MS takes it serious. > Nobody takes the linux desktop seriously anyways I expect you are using OSX (or what ever it is called nowadays), which is a more polished desktop product, and usable by devs. If you are on windows: you do not take Linux desktop serious enough. If you are on a Linux desktop: you forgot to count yourself. :)
    - RedShift1 4y ago
      I've used a Linux desktop for years, back in the KDE 3.x days (2005 something) where everything worked well. Then KDE 4 came, GTK 3 and Gnome and that's when I left because it was just unusable and went to Windows. ChromeOS and Android are nice but are not desktop user interfaces. I do have a Macbook Pro but only use it for testing purposes. It works well but I only use it for running Safari so can't really say how it works for a power user.
realgeniushere 4y ago
Ah, if only they’d thought of that. The longtime successful and solidly profitable (~$500 million a year) Red Hat corporation should copy the business model of Canonical, which makes 1% as much profit. Do you charge by the hour for this kind of advice?

Kwpolska 4y ago

> Additionally, all of the CentOS users were still "in the Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open for future conversions/sales. How? When Ubuntu tried advertising Ubuntu Pro via apt-get, everyone was outraged, and rightly so. How else could Red Hat talk to a CentOS user to convince them to pay up?

candiddevmike 4y ago
By providing value beyond just support. Ubuntu does this via Landscape, Red Hat is still trying to figure this out with Insights and the obtuse licensing for Satellite IMO. Packaging software has a high level of effort but really low value in customers eyes due to how many Linux variants are out there (again, IMO), so putting that behind a paywall these days is dumb. Containers exasperate this problem as most folks don't care if RHEL ships with PostgreSQL, they'll just run the Debian-based container. For support, folks need enterprise support contracts. Maybe not everyone, maybe not every system, but folks that need it will pay whatever for it, it's the cost of doing business. Charge accordingly.
- mroche 4y ago
  > the obtuse licensing for Satellite Out of curiosity, which aspect of the subscription terms do you find obtuse? Simply put, any system managed by Satellite needs to have a Smart Management subscription. You can get these individually, or bundled with a RHEL purchase as the add-on. For consumers of the public cloud marketplace RHEL images, they include the client-side aspect of Smart Management (no Satellite infra, but you can request this) so you don't need extra subscriptions to cover those.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Another mistake Red Hat has made over a long is having a "talk to the hand" attitude about doing anything differently. As an example of the pathology, there is a long standing bug in GTK that causes the positions of things to be off by few pixels if you are running an X server like xming in multiwindow mode. It doesn't sound like much but it can make it impossible to click on menu items for menus at the top of a window. The people involved at Red Hat would say in no uncertain words that they couldn't care less if it worked when you were running a multiwindow X server on Windows -- out of nothing but pure hate for Microsoft and people who use a Microsoft OS.

bitwize 4y ago
The supported use case is GNOME on Wayland. Everybody else can go suck eggs.
RedShift1 4y ago
Nobody takes the linux desktop seriously anyways
- cies 4y ago
  Only because you do not consider ChromeOS and Andoid to be Linux. Also, if some country/university thinks out loud about ditching Windoze for Linus desktops they get a huge discount -- so MS takes it serious. > Nobody takes the linux desktop seriously anyways I expect you are using OSX (or what ever it is called nowadays), which is a more polished desktop product, and usable by devs. If you are on windows: you do not take Linux desktop serious enough. If you are on a Linux desktop: you forgot to count yourself. :)
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    I've used a Linux desktop for years, back in the KDE 3.x days (2005 something) where everything worked well. Then KDE 4 came, GTK 3 and Gnome and that's when I left because it was just unusable and went to Windows. ChromeOS and Android are nice but are not desktop user interfaces. I do have a Macbook Pro but only use it for testing purposes. It works well but I only use it for running Safari so can't really say how it works for a power user.

realgeniushere 4y ago

Ah, if only they’d thought of that. The longtime successful and solidly profitable (~$500 million a year) Red Hat corporation should copy the business model of Canonical, which makes 1% as much profit. Do you charge by the hour for this kind of advice?