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Why did Red Hat's previous model stop working now, after 25 years of success? I'm not angry about what Red Hat is doing. I'm just puzzled and I suspect that its

Why did Red Hat's previous model stop working now, after 25 years of success? I'm not angry about what Red Hat is doing. I'm just puzzled and I suspect that its a very stupid move. What Red Hat is doing now will probably increase their license sales in the short term. But they will do so by cannibalizing the entire Red Hat-compatible ecosystem. All the "freeloaders" provide RHEL with most of its share in the distro market. Kill them off and it will become a technical backwater, all the small and medium users will go somewhere else and there will be no on-ramp for new customers (as Red Hat is too technically different from what they have). It can take a while, they might get RHEL for their old systems but they'll go SUSE/Debian/Ubuntu for new stuff. I'd say that they are literally doing what Travis CI and other companies have done in the past, they have no vision of growing their market anymore, now its all about cost cutting and squeezing the most out of their existing share while the music is playing. So no, I'm not angry about it, but on the other hand I can't see it as anything but a sign of irreversible decline.

jabl 3y ago
For a somewhat simplistic explanation, RHEL became very successful as a tool to replace proprietary RISC Unix servers (often running Oracle DB) with x86(-64) and Linux, offering a traditional "enterprise" support model those proprietary UNIX customers were used to. So what has changed? 1. The above market is pretty much "saturated" in the sense there aren't many proprietary UNIX systems left to convert to x86+RHEL. So not much growth potential there. 2. Oracle has their own RHEL rebuild that they aggressively(?) market to Oracle customers. And I guess it makes sense if you have a server to run Oracle DB on, to also use the Oracle RHEL rebuild to avoid the situation where you have a problem and Oracle and Redhat point fingers at each other and nobody takes charge of solving the issue. 3. Cloud. Cloud is obviously big these days, and it seems for one or another reason cloud deployments often choose some other distro than RHEL, be it one of the free rebuilds (CentOS, Alma, Rocky, OEL), or something else entirely like Ubuntu. While I'm not privy to any RH internal info, it wouldn't surprise me if they're worried about the above trends continuing. Whether this recent change to make life for rebuilds a bit harder will materially affect anything, and if so how, remains to be seen.
- rincebrain 3y ago
  re:3, In a previous thread about this, someone said that RHEL only would make deals with cloud providers to run RHEL licenses prepackaged if the whole stack was RHEL, and obviously, if the cloud provider is not already running RHEL everywhere, that doesn't work out so well. (I have no personal experience trying to run anything like this, this is purely citing a previous comment made.)
  - bonzini 3y ago
    I'll (mostly) copy my reply from there: RHEL guests are supported on RHEL host but also on Windows, ESX, Amazon and Google clouds, and a few more. Non-RHEL hosts are only supported is Red Hat has someone to talk to at the vendor or cloud provider, so that they can debug stuff that breaks only in their environment and can't be reproduced. This is done to cannot guarantee the level of support that customers expect but very few cloud provider can provide that. I am not even sure that IBM's cloud made the short list. On other unsupported hosts we will ask the customer to reproduce on a supported host if we think the host is the culprit.
    - SSLy 3y ago
      >I am not even sure that IBM's cloud made the short list. Probably not https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/certified-cloud-and-service-providers https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/certified-cloud-and-servi...
- _ea1k 3y ago
  This move doesn't fundamentally fix any of those issues.
- bbatha 3y ago
  This strategy is doubling down on the real reason that 3 is killing them: price. Their pricing structure in fundamentally incompatible with cloud native workloads. We treat workloads like cattle scaling them quickly and on demand to OS counts never dreamed of decades ago.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
awill 3y ago
But the model didn't stop working. Red Hat is more profitable than ever. It's about wanting EVEN MORE.

jabl 3y ago

For a somewhat simplistic explanation, RHEL became very successful as a tool to replace proprietary RISC Unix servers (often running Oracle DB) with x86(-64) and Linux, offering a traditional "enterprise" support model those proprietary UNIX customers were used to. So what has changed? 1. The above market is pretty much "saturated" in the sense there aren't many proprietary UNIX systems left to convert to x86+RHEL. So not much growth potential there. 2. Oracle has their own RHEL rebuild that they aggressively(?) market to Oracle customers. And I guess it makes sense if you have a server to run Oracle DB on, to also use the Oracle RHEL rebuild to avoid the situation where you have a problem and Oracle and Redhat point fingers at each other and nobody takes charge of solving the issue. 3. Cloud. Cloud is obviously big these days, and it seems for one or another reason cloud deployments often choose some other distro than RHEL, be it one of the free rebuilds (CentOS, Alma, Rocky, OEL), or something else entirely like Ubuntu. While I'm not privy to any RH internal info, it wouldn't surprise me if they're worried about the above trends continuing. Whether this recent change to make life for rebuilds a bit harder will materially affect anything, and if so how, remains to be seen.

rincebrain 3y ago
re:3, In a previous thread about this, someone said that RHEL only would make deals with cloud providers to run RHEL licenses prepackaged if the whole stack was RHEL, and obviously, if the cloud provider is not already running RHEL everywhere, that doesn't work out so well. (I have no personal experience trying to run anything like this, this is purely citing a previous comment made.)
- bonzini 3y ago
  I'll (mostly) copy my reply from there: RHEL guests are supported on RHEL host but also on Windows, ESX, Amazon and Google clouds, and a few more. Non-RHEL hosts are only supported is Red Hat has someone to talk to at the vendor or cloud provider, so that they can debug stuff that breaks only in their environment and can't be reproduced. This is done to cannot guarantee the level of support that customers expect but very few cloud provider can provide that. I am not even sure that IBM's cloud made the short list. On other unsupported hosts we will ask the customer to reproduce on a supported host if we think the host is the culprit.
  - SSLy 3y ago
    >I am not even sure that IBM's cloud made the short list. Probably not https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/certified-cloud-and-service-providers https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/certified-cloud-and-servi...
_ea1k 3y ago
This move doesn't fundamentally fix any of those issues.
bbatha 3y ago
This strategy is doubling down on the real reason that 3 is killing them: price. Their pricing structure in fundamentally incompatible with cloud native workloads. We treat workloads like cattle scaling them quickly and on demand to OS counts never dreamed of decades ago.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

awill 3y ago

But the model didn't stop working. Red Hat is more profitable than ever. It's about wanting EVEN MORE.