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"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-t
by 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 agoYeah. 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 agoGNOME 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 agoGnome 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.
- anyoneamous 3y ago> the current fight is Snap/Flatpack I work with enterprise customers every day who use RHEL, it's free variants, and Ubuntu - I can promise that none of them give a single shit about Flatpak or Snap. They will never use either of them. Those tools are only relevant to Linux on the desktop - the small size of that market is exactly why both companies (mostly Canonical) have gotten away with being a nuisance on this front.
- dizhn 3y agoFlatpak is very relevant on the immutable OS space which is being pushed hard as the future. It is mostly an enterprise (server/vm) thing too.
- anyoneamous 3y agoI just don't see people caring about an immutable OS in the enterprise space. The central requirement is already addressed by containers, and all of the security and compliance stuff enterprises do is predicated on having a "normal" OS - even if an immutable deployment is technically more secure, that doesn't help you if your auditors can't understand whether it checks the requisite boxes.
- sho_hn 3y agoGnome is a healthy non-profit foundation with the majority of its organizational capacity (and income) not associated with Red Hat. Red Hat hasn't been dominant in Wayland for years. It's very much a community effort, including governance and maintainership. systemd is currently mostly developed by employees of Microsoft, Meta and Suse, aside from I guess Frantisek. Red Hat does a lot, and I'm sure they have thoughts about where they spend their money, but I don't think people really understand how decoupled these projects and communities are.
- admax88qqq 3y agoIt's funny how people view GNOME/systemd as some sort of conspiracy rather than it just being what the people who contribute want to work on.