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I was at Red Hat very early on. Red Hat has been remarkably consistent throughout its journey once it graduated from selling boxes of software at book stores (w
by huslage 3y ago
I was at Red Hat very early on. Red Hat has been remarkably consistent throughout its journey once it graduated from selling boxes of software at book stores (which was a necessary step). Red Hat only astook venture money once it was ready to go public and never before. The philosophy of Red Hat was to "make the pie bigger" and still largely is, therefore it supports open source first before anything else. This works because it provides product-market fit at scale and by nature. The thought that "all" Red Hat sells is software support, certifications, and subscriptions to updates is so short sighted and misses the point.
Red Hat created an industry and all of the successful enterprise Linux distros have followed its model to some extent or another (Canonical, SUSE, etc). You don't need "open core" (which is a misnomer if there ever was one) if you continue down a path that creates and maintains communities of software authors out there in the world that will constantly feed value back into the ecosystem.
A virtuous cycle of community maintained software alongside a thriving and growing business is still achievable, no one seems to have the guts to do it.
(edited for typo)
- commandersaki 3y agoI find Redhat jumped the shark when it started selling its distribution with different licensing options that let you use different number of CPU cores.
- nine_k 3y agoI kept thinking that Red Hat's Linux offerings are properly FOSS, and the stuff you buy is support contracts. What are some per-CPU offers from them? (Because that's what I'd expect from Oracle, and hardly from RH.)
- snuxoll 3y agoPer-core licensing is more or less limited to JBoss stuff and the likes. Stuff like RHEL, OpenShift Enterprise, etc. is typically licensed by socket-pair.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoAlmost no corporations pay for RHEL in any meaningful quantity. It's corp IT who pays for support and subscriptions, not production webops. Cell phone manufacturers and social media companies run collectively around 100M CentOS servers that I know if directly.
- ungamedplayer 3y agoThis is so anecdotal it hurts.
- aftbit 3y agoPerhaps this is why RedHat is declaring CentOS end-of-life: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/fastest-road-centos-linux-red-hat-enterprise-linux https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/fastest-road-centos-linux-red...
- bonzini 3y agoPartly it is, but there wasn't much hope to convert those to RHEL. The plan was: 1) to offload the production of the releases (effectively what is now Alma Linux). Because there's so much use of CentOS, it was pretty much a given that somebody would pick up the slack. Most of those companies weren't running stock CentOS anymore, they had their own downstream repositories 2) to give more insight into the making of RHEL minor release to CentOS SIGs and to companies that run CentOS derivatives Facebook for example does not use the RHEL kernel and was one of the early adopters of CentOS Stream even before CentOS Linux 8 was terminated.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoNB CentOS was given the EoL date in 2020[0] There is a difference between CentOS and CentOS Stream https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/ https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
- IceWreck 3y agoI know of companies with millions of servers that switched to CentOS stream instead.
- froh 3y agoone detail > Red Hat created an industry and all of the successful enterprise Linux distros have followed its model to some extent or another (Canonical, SUSE, etc) IBM created that industry, by lifting Linux into their supported platforms portfolio. and the first Enterprise Linux ever was suse linux enterprise for s/390, followed by x86 releases at about the time RH released their first RHEL.
- pastage 3y agoThey deserve credit but while IBM did spend lots of money on Linux around 2000, and that helped legitimize Linux. I feel that RH has always been the leader in this industry, and RH Linux was well entrenched in the enterprise long before IBMs big push. So IBM helped but they did not create it, in my view.
- xyzd23345 3y agoI would disagree with RHEL being entrenched by the time of IBMs big push. At the time, you were still more likely to see commercial Unix than Linux at large companies. Red Hat becoming entrenched wasn't a guarantee in my mind until IBM made that big push. If you could point to a single event that made it likely Linux would take over, without a shadow of a doubt it would be the blessing it received from IBM. There were an enormous number of bigcorps that made initial investment in Linux after that.
- jzb 3y agoIBM did not create that industry, though they certainly helped it along. Red Hat didn't create the industry single-handed, either. They deserve a lot of credit but Linux succeeded because it was a group effort where there was a chance for a lot of players to make money (and opportunity to displace others).
- froh 3y agoIBM did a 1bn USD investment creating the market for Linux based enterprise infrastructure, "vendor independent" on all their server products (PPC, s390 itanic and once available x68 based servers), with all IBM software products (db/2, websphere, ...) available "certified" on sles, RHEL and some Asian localized Linux variants. this created an immense Push on HP, dell, Dec, sgi, ... to follow suit and oracle, sap, Software AG, anything serious. this push and commitment b IBM was.so.relevant because it established Linux as a serious platform with enterprise level SLAs and mutual commitments for the full stack. the 4d chess was to establish a solid consulting business for "consolidation" on the "single platform" and it paid off immensely for IBM --- and for most others. given the IBM market position around 2000 this was pivotal and prophetic.