2 ms·

I had a meeting with our RH reps last week, as a followup to Red Hat Summit and to talk about a potential purchase with them. I had a discussion about how we u

I had a meeting with our RH reps last week, as a followup to Red Hat Summit and to talk about a potential purchase with them. I had a discussion about how we use free RHEL derivatives, and have for almost 30 years (when Red Hat itself was free), and we might have used one of the first public releases (I do know we were running 5.2 in '99). In explaining our position I told them we use the free products (which meant CentOS until stream, and now Rocky), I noted how I'm sure they have their own reasons for what they did, but the Stream change made us seriously consider other distros like Ubuntu, and while we settled on Rocky in the end after it came out, if we had chosen Ubuntu we wouldn't be having a discussion about possibly spending $100k with them now and more in the future, so that's how they're hurting themselves. Then again, from attending Red Hat Summit, it's apparent that they're really aiming at the enterprise and government anyway. I would estimate attendance was 60% government and education (including a lot of government contractors), 30% enterprise (Adobe, etc), and 10% small to medium business (and I'd bet many of them are partners offering services and want to support Red Hat). To me it looks like people making short sighted moved to increase their hold on their enterprise customers (this might be aimed more at Oracle Linux than Rocky or Alma), but at the expense of the surrounding ecosystem. The knock-on effects might be that they kill the ramp to RHEL and the training of admins in its use except for those companies willing to actually shell out for official training programs, as there will be little to no regular use by non-enterprise customers anymore if they keep this up.

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
>> there will be little to no regular use by non-enterprise customers anymore if they keep this up. They are slowing transforming RHEL to become the new AIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX).
leokennis 3y ago
What is that line? “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”? I think the main appeal for enterprises is that if their VM’s start going down and thousands flush through the drain every second, someone at Red Hat is there to pick up the phone and hop on a call with their engineers. It makes them and their regulators happy and no other Linux distro offers that. I don’t think they care about open source at all.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > What is that line? “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”? It's a wildly common saying in enterprise, and it basically means, "if you choose a startup or unknown product, it might go really well or it might be a bomb that gets you fired. If you choose IBM, you'll spend more, get less of a product with less quality, but you'll never get fired for it because IBM is a 'safe choice'" > I think the main appeal for enterprises is that if their VM’s start going down and thousands flush through the drain every second, someone at Red Hat is there to pick up the phone and hop on a call with their engineers. It makes them and their regulators happy and no other Linux distro offers that. I don’t think they care about open source at all. Correct, enterprises don't care at all about open source. This is IMHO a bit part of why Red Hat is stopping caring as much. Now that said, when I was a consultant with Red Hat I worked with a ton of RH customers and there were individual engineers who did care. Not nearly as many as I hoped, but there were at least some.

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago

>> there will be little to no regular use by non-enterprise customers anymore if they keep this up. They are slowing transforming RHEL to become the new AIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX).

leokennis 3y ago

What is that line? “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”? I think the main appeal for enterprises is that if their VM’s start going down and thousands flush through the drain every second, someone at Red Hat is there to pick up the phone and hop on a call with their engineers. It makes them and their regulators happy and no other Linux distro offers that. I don’t think they care about open source at all.

freedomben 3y ago
> What is that line? “No one ever got fired for buying IBM”? It's a wildly common saying in enterprise, and it basically means, "if you choose a startup or unknown product, it might go really well or it might be a bomb that gets you fired. If you choose IBM, you'll spend more, get less of a product with less quality, but you'll never get fired for it because IBM is a 'safe choice'" > I think the main appeal for enterprises is that if their VM’s start going down and thousands flush through the drain every second, someone at Red Hat is there to pick up the phone and hop on a call with their engineers. It makes them and their regulators happy and no other Linux distro offers that. I don’t think they care about open source at all. Correct, enterprises don't care at all about open source. This is IMHO a bit part of why Red Hat is stopping caring as much. Now that said, when I was a consultant with Red Hat I worked with a ton of RH customers and there were individual engineers who did care. Not nearly as many as I hoped, but there were at least some.