6 ms·

I think this is a key part of where they've been aiming for years. Since the '00s, even. Maybe earlier, IDK. I just have their public behavior to go on, but it

• tester756 3y ago
  >You are Linux for much of the market. You own it. Profit. What a twist! So after all it wasn't Microsoft EEEing Linux, but actual "Linux Companies"?!
  • anyoneamous 3y ago
    Microsoft tried and failed because their product is strictly inferior for the market which Linux has ended up dominating. Marketing and evil behaviour can definitely win out over technical quality, but we were fortunate that it didn't go that way in this case.
    • progmetaldev 3y ago
      I'm not sure if that argument holds water. You have Azure which is hugely successful, and Linux is still not anywhere close to becoming a standard desktop environment beyond the type of people you find on HN. Microsoft contributes quite a bit to Linux now, because they see the future. Becoming a leader in open source gives you the ability to steer where technology goes, and Red Hat definitely was able to play that hand as well (but under IBM seems to be losing quickly).
      • anyoneamous 3y ago
        I'm not sure that any of your post actually contradicts mine; MS have accepted the dominance of Linux in the server market and have moved on to exploiting it where they can. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have rather had everyone running on Windows, if they could have pulled it off.
• freedomben 3y ago
  At the (current) top levels, you might be right. I don't think it's been going on longer than 10 years though. I'd guess maybe 5 or 6. The bulk of engineering doesn't like this, but sadly for a while now it's been a sales-driven company, and the IBM influence has certainly not helped. Sales doesn't give a shit about the health of Linux, or even the long-term health of Red Hat. They want their commission and promotion, and pesky open-source ideological things get in the way.
  • TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
    How about since July 9th, 2019?
    • hosteur 3y ago
      What happened then?
      • TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
        That's when IBM bought RedHat.
  • mrighele 3y ago
    I would say at least since udev was merged into systemd and gnome adding an hard dependecy on systemd-logind [2], both in 2012 so I would say more than 10 years. To me that this was an act to force a Redhat-led project through other Redhat-led projects. [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ [2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-settings-daemon/-/commit/a1ab95fae75dd61fd50165b4d8a08b5588245273 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-settings-daemon/-/commi...
• jacooper 3y ago
  Gnome and Wayland are the last worries for any enterprise customer.
  • bamfly 3y ago
    Gnome's part of the play to make it painful for other distros to avoid Systemd, which does concern ~all enterprise customers. And I'm sure some of those enterprise customers are paying for graphical workstations, besides, even if it's a minority. [EDIT] If I'm not communicating this well, consider: if Red Hat steers several key projects that basically all other serious distros are stuck with (in no small part due to Red Hat maneuvering that sure looks like it was designed to bring this situation about on purpose), how can another vendor ever be anything more than a knock-off of Red Hat? Ubuntu tried to fight them on each of these points, and others, and lost every time. Result: if you're running Ubuntu, much of your system is defined by, and the future development of it steered by, Red Hat. You're practically running a Red Hat knock-off, aside from their dead-man-walking FlatPack competitor, Snap. May as well just pay for support from a budget RHEL vendor... oh, wait, those just got cut off, guess you'll be paying Red Hat. It dramatically increases their moat and the cost of building a credible competitor that's not basically just off-brand Red Hat with less ability to steer the future of the platform.
    • charcircuit 3y ago
      systemd makes enterprise customer's lives easier. It's more reliable and it's easier to write your own units and timers than what came before.
      • bamfly 3y ago
        Systemd's a lot more than an init system, and that's no accident. Red Hat now determines where Linux goes in some very important ways, and I think they believe they've finally got a solid lock on that, after years of effort, if they're making this move. Why go with a competitor (if you're a paying customer, which is who matters) that's just following in Red Hat's wake? And now, the options for RHEL-in-a-different-label will be gone. Who's left? Nobody, you're gonna pay Red Hat or eat extra (perceived, if not actual) risk. [EDIT] Nb that for the above it doesn't even matter if Systemd's better than the pile of interchangeable daemons and programs it replaced. I have opinions on that, but it's irrelevant to Red Hat's market maneuvers, aside from that it was important to them that it not be easy & safe to cleanly replace, in part or whole.
• zh3 3y ago
  You missed 'deprecating the alternatives' :) Somewhat jaded opinion after many years in the business, but these companies exploiting OSS for profit have learnt from how Microsoft's moves have played out over the years (and are now making their own mistakes). Given the only way they make money is by providing support, obviously they're going to go the MS route (make operation arcane and complex, as per your first point).
  • kelnos 3y ago
    > You missed 'deprecating the alternatives' I don't want to disagree too hard with this, because I, too, have been uncomfortable with the march toward making it very difficult to build a Linux system without things like systemd (I actually don't have all that much of a problem with systemd anymore, but I also value choice). But no one company can deprecate anything. The source is all there, under permissive licenses. If people want sysvinit or openrc (etc.) to work well in order to build systems without systemd (for example), they are free to maintain, support, and evangelize them. And this happens, to some degree. If it's not happening to the degree we're all happy with, then we should pitch in to help, either with our labor, or financially. Otherwise we don't really get a say.
    • bamfly 3y ago
      They just have to make it hard/risky/expensive to keep using things they've declared deprecated, or to avoid the software they're pushing & steering. Which they've done pretty damn effectively (again, if this were all somehow accidentally, holy shit, it shouldn't have been, because, wow, it's been a highly-successful-and-effective set of business maneuvers executed over a span of years) Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd replaced (and with which it is incompatible)—it matters that any commercial competitor's only realist option, short of a massive and risky investment, is offering the same things Red Hat does, but with less influence on those projects. They want it to be expensive to build a competitor that's not a Red Hat knockoff—and if that's not what they wanted, well, somehow they took a whole bunch of steps over a span of years to make it happen anyway, by accident I suppose, but the outcome's the same.
• IntelMiner 3y ago
  That sounds a lot more like Canonical's (attempted) strategies 1) Be the defacto "new user" or "newbie friendly" distro for two decades 2) Keep making asinine attempts to monetize your users (Amazon search bar comes to mind) 3) Try to pivot and break core Linux functionality so software only works on you (Keeping Upstart after everyone else abandoned it, Mir instead of Wayland and the horrendous amount of forking done to GTK and others to get that hideous 'Unity' desktop going)
  • progmetaldev 3y ago
    I think you can really only use this assumption if you are talking about desktop Linux. Using the Ubuntu server version is mostly giving you Debian with more packages available (and all the benefit and downsides to that).
  • rlpb 3y ago
    > Keeping Upstart after everyone else abandoned it... False. Ubuntu switched to systemd as soon as its upstream (Debian) did. See https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316
    • IntelMiner 3y ago
      Not false :) Ubuntu offered Upstart starting in 6.10 (2006) through 15.04 (2015) after Debian's (admittedly very politicized) switch to systemd forced their hand RHEL 6 (2010) included it for a single release before switching to systemd in RHEL 7 (2014) (though in balance, systemd was started by a Red Hat employee) No other distros switched to it, and the ones that offered it as an option were very second-class citizens
      • thayne 3y ago
        So, they were one year after RHEL on switching to systemd to the default (and it was available as on option before that). The first LTS version of Ubuntu released after RHEL7 had systemd as the default. I wouldn't really say that they were using it "after everyone else abandoned it". I'd characterize it more as they developed an alternative init system that never really caught on.
• busterarm 3y ago
  a.k.a. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Few of us have careers long enough to remember purchasing SCO or HP-UX or similar and what that whole experience was like. We're positively blessed compared to how things were in the '90s. Red Hat's leadership forgets what made them successful in the first place and wants those bad old days back badly.
  • kbenson 3y ago
    When you're not at the top you want competition, since you are competition. When you're at the top you want to choke competition and gate as much as you can. It's a story as old as trade itself.
• jzb 3y ago
  "Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland are key plays here" GNOME and Wayland are utterly non-strategic for most of Red Hat's business. If your theory of Red Hat's long-term strategy hinges on those being strategic, then you need to go back to the drawing board. You could fairly cite systemd, I suppose, but Wayland and GNOME not so much. On point 3 - that's not really controversial. All the Linux vendors have tried to "be" Linux in the public market. Canonical has certainly tried to be the brand-name Linux for most users. To the extent Red Hat has tried to steer the market w/r/t its tech stack, it's done so pretty honestly and by trying to persuade others to adopt its tech stack and by doing the work in the open. This is the opposite approach of Canonical which has tried to push lots of NIH technologies to silo people to Ubuntu and continues to fail at it over and over again.
  • justinclift 3y ago
    Yeah. To me, this just seems like IBM feeling like their existing (corporate) sales funnel is big enough that the consequence of this (reducing OSS users based sales funnel) aren't going to meaningfully matter. Or, at least they won't matter while the current decision makers are still at IBM. It could be a problem for future IBM leaders, who will probably just attempt to buy SuSE or Canonical or something at that point. ;)
  • wkat4242 3y ago
    GNOME was pretty instrumental in forcing systemd to becoming a GNU/Linux-wide standard though, by creating some dependencies there. > This is the opposite approach of Canonical which has tried to push lots of NIH technologies to silo people to Ubuntu and continues to fail at it over and over again. Agreed, Canonical is worse. The whole closed snap store (where only canonical can use it) is an obvious play on milking the commercial software market. That doesn't mean that what RH is doing is great though.
  • bamfly 3y ago
    Gnome and Wayland countered Ubuntu's attempts to "own" competitor projects in those areas (the current fight is Snap/Flatpack). Gnome, in particular, was important as a lever used to make it expensive for distros to avoid Systemd, forcing it into de facto standard status more quickly than it may have achieved on its own merits (if it ever would have—and maybe it would!), from which point they've started using Systemd to eat other system services & daemons, increasing their control over the platform and cementing their status as, effectively, the "first party" vendor for Linux itself—not literally the kernel, but enough of the system that you've got to go pretty far into here be dragons territory, by the standards of enterprise, at least, not to be using Red Hat-steered software in key parts of your system—so if you want a say in the direction of Linux, as you experience it, or priority bugfixes from the best-possible source, or to talk to experts who write that software for a living, for advice or training, you're short on options other than... Red Hat. Which is the whole point.
• kelnos 3y ago
  > Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland are key plays here Systemd, sure, but I would assume that the vast majority of Red Hat's support contracts would be for server use, where GNOME and Wayland are irrelevant.
  • bamfly 3y ago
    Gnome was a major lever in making it hard for other distros to avoid systemd, early on. The way Wayland's been structured and that... transition, such as it is, has been managed, smells a whole lot like a fire-and-motion move, and besides, dominance there was necessary to keep Mir from winning as the successor to X-Window and making it possible for Ubuntu to follow Red Hat's playbook and use it to push some of their other, deeper-in-the-stack projects (they'd have been neatly positioned to interfere with both Systemd and Gnome, had they won). I don't think Red Hat would let Ubuntu push anything of note, at this point, without countering it, for (justified!) fear of their own tactics being turned on them. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ Systemd's the main body of Red Hat's army here, if you will—no doubt that's the most important part of all this—but other projects have played other important roles in supporting or defending it, at times.
    • xorcist 3y ago
      It's not like Red Hat planned and schemed to execute on Wayland as a plan for domination, but their decision to support Wayland as an existing project with technical merit staffed by skilled people might well have been tactical for the reason you mention. Some people tend to imagine the first situation and rightly dismiss it as a post facto conspiration but the second situation is utterly realistic. They may even not have realized until much later how right they got. And I say that as someone who is convinced we need something like Wayland, the sooner the better. But we also have to avoid being naive about how business is done.