5 ms·

A billion thanks to the open source community from Red Hat

107 points by taylorbuley 15y ago

bmelton 15y ago
I'm seeing a lot of comments that equate to nitpicking over how little RH is giving back to the community. Despite how uninformed I might consider that opinion to be, given how many open source developers are on payroll, and how many projects get many of their patches from RH, the other little thing that RH has done was effectively legitimize Linux as a sellable resource. Without the RedHat sales team getting RH in the doors of enterprises around the world, Linux would be significantly further back in terms of performance, compatibility, scalability, etc.
- ughugh 15y ago
  I used RH and liked it in the 90s, but since then I don't see why a RHEL-based distribution for server isn't a good enough option. I understand that is just being parasitic, but it is free after all- why pay for it? So, I think Linux is strong and will be strong with or without RH. Sure it's great that they provide a major paid option for customers that feel like they have to pay something, but I don't respect any tech company that pays for Linux because they feel they need to just to have the support. If they like the distribution and want to support them, fine. But, don't do it because you feel that you have to have support. Also, I interviewed for RH several years ago and was not impressed. Their employees seemed fairly unmotivated, and despite the number of people I interviewed with, it didn't seem very well thought out. I didn't like their distro at that point, so it was a bad idea in hindsight to interview with them. I just didn't believe in RH anymore, and going there only solidified that.
  - bmelton 15y ago
    Ironically enough, that is exactly the reason most people buy it. However, I believe you underestimate the criticality of support. If you're a tech-savvy startup, then sure, you just put a few guys on staff, but if you are most other kinds of businesses, then you'll employ some 'good-enough' administrators for the day to day operations, but you won't be able to necessarily employ a full team for something that isn't core to your business. Another common scenario is in government, or large companies. Especially in government, we, as tax-payers, would consider it wasteful if the gov were hiring top notch tech engineers to maintain their file shares and directory servers. They are also completely unwilling to put a system in place with a company that not only will be available for same-day support on critical systems, but will also have to be relatively certain that company will be around in 10 years when they are still running those systems. In short, support is probably more important than you're giving it credit for, but even for customers where it isn't, RH's credibility has opened the doors for every other Linux distribution and their ability to do work inside the Enterprise.
    - jvdongen 15y ago
      Personally I would be delighted if the government hired (as in permanent, not by the hour) top-notch tech engineers to maintain their IT infra. It would most likely cut down IT costs enormously while at the same time making things running a lot smoother ...
      - bmelton 15y ago
        Government work would just infuriate any top-notch engineers by moving too slow. Simple changes move slowly, and hard changes take forever. Naturally, it isn't a limitation of the equipment, but the bureaucracy in place. I've been involved with projects where, after having already spent money on hardware and software procurement and over 3 months worth of man hours on actual implementation, the project stopped because a DNS change request form was filled out incorrectly. Correcting the form and getting it reapproved took four weeks to correct what was literally a one character correction.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - reidrac 15y ago
    I've always been a strong advocate of Red Hat support, and it never ceases to amaze me how many free software (as in freedom, and as in gratis) that I use in my day to day exists thanks to Red Hat. That said, "self-support subscription" per $349/year doesn't feel right to me. May be the old basic support option wasn't that good, but it WAS support you were paying for. It doesn't change all the good things around Red Hat, but I must admit it's very disappointing. EDIT: typo
  - screwt 15y ago
    I think you underestimate the necessity for reliable support, especially in some sectors. E.g. for Telcos, where any outages must be fixed within specified (short) timescales in order to be allowed to sell telco service. It's less risk for a business to say we pay X per year, and if the shit hits the fan we can just pick up the phone. The other thing offered by RH is to say: here is a distro, we've tested it and can sign off on it being stable. That is also worth a lot in some sectors.
pilom 15y ago
Interesting that none of the recipients will be actual projects that Red Hat is built upon. No donation to the Linux Kernel, nothing to Gnome, nothing to GNU at all, etc. I think that some people might be upset about that but I view it as extremely forward thinking. These other Free Software supporting organizations provide support to the community in ways that are much more difficult to quantify than simply lines of code. Without them the "free/libre" community would have a much harder time being taken seriously.
- cagenut 15y ago
  redhat "donates" to all those project you mentioned in the form of payroll
  - shuzchen 15y ago
    To further clarify this point, if you look at the reports here, you'll find that RedHat is the largest corporate contributor to both the kernel and to gnome: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/ http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/
- bkor 15y ago
  Red Hat employs various people who seem to solely work on GNOME related technology. Red Hat further sponsors the GNOME conference, and sponsors the GNOME foundation annually (seperate from just conferences). Giving more money to GNOME: always welcome, but they already do loads.
drostie 15y ago
Okay, does anyone else have the unfortunate problem of automatic numeracy? After a lot of physics tests, basically comparing numbers and subtracting exponents is something I do almost automatically. Like, I enjoy that they're donating at all, and I know that their staff often contribute in the form of patches and commits -- really one of the key ways contributions should go -- but somehow the numbers seemed a little dramatically understated. They're literally saying, "Free software made us billionaires, so we're paying them a 0.01% commission." It just sounds like, "I earned $4 000 from homeless people and then gave four of them each a dime." I mean, I'm sure you made their lives better and helped them to help you, but still, the gap between the numbers is a little startling. ^_^
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  Your ignoring the fact that the homeless people are no longer homeless and able to support themselves now.
  - sciurus 15y ago
    I assume you meant to highlight that Red Hat pays a lot of developers to work on open source projects. I don't think that came across clearly, which is probably why you're being downvoted.
    - jasonlotito 15y ago
      And not just that. Not only are they paying developers to work on these projects, but that in turn contributes directly back to the projects both code and attention. To continue with the homeless analogy, Red Hat helped a bunch of "homeless" people, and continue to do so today, but are not going the extra step of helping other people help homeless people.
- pornel 15y ago
  Those numbers aren't comparable. While FOSS was a key component that allowed Red Hat to make those profits, it wasn't the only one. It wouldn't happen without RH's employees, expertise, marketing/brand, etc. It's not like RH took the enormous value of FOSS and given only little of it back. They took that value and created even more value on top of that.
brianbreslin 15y ago
This might be nitpicking, but them donating only $100k (even if its to each) still seems paltry in my opinion. You hit a billion, donate a full million bucks!
Jach 15y ago
To add a little perspective since people seem to be losing their heads at "one billion dollars!", their annual GAAP net income was only $146.6 million. [1] How much did omgpop get bought for again? Anyway, congrats RedHat. Who knows where Linux and FLOSS in general would be without them. I tip my...(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) hat to them. [1] http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2012/3/red-hat-reports-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2012-results http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2012/3/red-ha...
- ajross 15y ago
  How is equating and/or confusing revenue, profit and market capitalization in the space of a two-sentence post "adding perspective"? Clearly Red Hat isn't going to be the next Apple (or even IBM, to whom they have a closer business model). But I'd be shocked beyond belief if Draw Something does a billion in revenue this year.
  - JonnieCache 15y ago
    >But I'd be shocked beyond belief if Draw Something does a billion in revenue this year. I think that was Jach's point: that omgpop was overvalued.
mark_l_watson 15y ago
Good for them, and nice that they are contributing a bit of their profits. There are a few negative comments here, and it is cool for everyone to have their say. In response, I would like to say that Red Hat supports some projects like Hibernate, JBoss, etc. that are useful and help me earn my living as a consultant - so thanks to them for that.
cpeterso 15y ago
A more accurate title might be "100,000 thanks to the open source community from Red Hat."
anyonecanhere 15y ago
Thanks, Red Hat, for the donation. It is a gesture, but an important one. I can appreciate treading the fine line of meeting market (ie, Wall Street) is demanding and keeping alive the ethos of the open source mantra at the same time is challenging. You've hired open source developers and people who's passion is in writing code and doing it well. I remember how Red Hat offered shares when they IPOed (http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N30/30redhat.30n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N30/30redhat.30n.html) to open source developers. Red Hat did not have to, but they did. So, thanks for doing this. It does mean a lot.

107 points by taylorbuley 15y ago

I'm seeing a lot of comments that equate to nitpicking over how little RH is giving back to the community. Despite how uninformed I might consider that opinion to be, given how many open source developers are on payroll, and how many projects get many of their patches from RH, the other little thing that RH has done was effectively legitimize Linux as a sellable resource. Without the RedHat sales team getting RH in the doors of enterprises around the world, Linux would be significantly further back in terms of performance, compatibility, scalability, etc.

ughugh 15y ago
I used RH and liked it in the 90s, but since then I don't see why a RHEL-based distribution for server isn't a good enough option. I understand that is just being parasitic, but it is free after all- why pay for it? So, I think Linux is strong and will be strong with or without RH. Sure it's great that they provide a major paid option for customers that feel like they have to pay something, but I don't respect any tech company that pays for Linux because they feel they need to just to have the support. If they like the distribution and want to support them, fine. But, don't do it because you feel that you have to have support. Also, I interviewed for RH several years ago and was not impressed. Their employees seemed fairly unmotivated, and despite the number of people I interviewed with, it didn't seem very well thought out. I didn't like their distro at that point, so it was a bad idea in hindsight to interview with them. I just didn't believe in RH anymore, and going there only solidified that.
- bmelton 15y ago
  Ironically enough, that is exactly the reason most people buy it. However, I believe you underestimate the criticality of support. If you're a tech-savvy startup, then sure, you just put a few guys on staff, but if you are most other kinds of businesses, then you'll employ some 'good-enough' administrators for the day to day operations, but you won't be able to necessarily employ a full team for something that isn't core to your business. Another common scenario is in government, or large companies. Especially in government, we, as tax-payers, would consider it wasteful if the gov were hiring top notch tech engineers to maintain their file shares and directory servers. They are also completely unwilling to put a system in place with a company that not only will be available for same-day support on critical systems, but will also have to be relatively certain that company will be around in 10 years when they are still running those systems. In short, support is probably more important than you're giving it credit for, but even for customers where it isn't, RH's credibility has opened the doors for every other Linux distribution and their ability to do work inside the Enterprise.
  - jvdongen 15y ago
    Personally I would be delighted if the government hired (as in permanent, not by the hour) top-notch tech engineers to maintain their IT infra. It would most likely cut down IT costs enormously while at the same time making things running a lot smoother ...
    - bmelton 15y ago
      Government work would just infuriate any top-notch engineers by moving too slow. Simple changes move slowly, and hard changes take forever. Naturally, it isn't a limitation of the equipment, but the bureaucracy in place. I've been involved with projects where, after having already spent money on hardware and software procurement and over 3 months worth of man hours on actual implementation, the project stopped because a DNS change request form was filled out incorrectly. Correcting the form and getting it reapproved took four weeks to correct what was literally a one character correction.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- reidrac 15y ago
  I've always been a strong advocate of Red Hat support, and it never ceases to amaze me how many free software (as in freedom, and as in gratis) that I use in my day to day exists thanks to Red Hat. That said, "self-support subscription" per $349/year doesn't feel right to me. May be the old basic support option wasn't that good, but it WAS support you were paying for. It doesn't change all the good things around Red Hat, but I must admit it's very disappointing. EDIT: typo
- screwt 15y ago
  I think you underestimate the necessity for reliable support, especially in some sectors. E.g. for Telcos, where any outages must be fixed within specified (short) timescales in order to be allowed to sell telco service. It's less risk for a business to say we pay X per year, and if the shit hits the fan we can just pick up the phone. The other thing offered by RH is to say: here is a distro, we've tested it and can sign off on it being stable. That is also worth a lot in some sectors.

pilom 15y ago

Interesting that none of the recipients will be actual projects that Red Hat is built upon. No donation to the Linux Kernel, nothing to Gnome, nothing to GNU at all, etc. I think that some people might be upset about that but I view it as extremely forward thinking. These other Free Software supporting organizations provide support to the community in ways that are much more difficult to quantify than simply lines of code. Without them the "free/libre" community would have a much harder time being taken seriously.

cagenut 15y ago
redhat "donates" to all those project you mentioned in the form of payroll
- shuzchen 15y ago
  To further clarify this point, if you look at the reports here, you'll find that RedHat is the largest corporate contributor to both the kernel and to gnome: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linux-foundation http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/ http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/
bkor 15y ago
Red Hat employs various people who seem to solely work on GNOME related technology. Red Hat further sponsors the GNOME conference, and sponsors the GNOME foundation annually (seperate from just conferences). Giving more money to GNOME: always welcome, but they already do loads.

drostie 15y ago

Okay, does anyone else have the unfortunate problem of automatic numeracy? After a lot of physics tests, basically comparing numbers and subtracting exponents is something I do almost automatically. Like, I enjoy that they're donating at all, and I know that their staff often contribute in the form of patches and commits -- really one of the key ways contributions should go -- but somehow the numbers seemed a little dramatically understated. They're literally saying, "Free software made us billionaires, so we're paying them a 0.01% commission." It just sounds like, "I earned $4 000 from homeless people and then gave four of them each a dime." I mean, I'm sure you made their lives better and helped them to help you, but still, the gap between the numbers is a little startling. ^_^

jasonlotito 15y ago
Your ignoring the fact that the homeless people are no longer homeless and able to support themselves now.
- sciurus 15y ago
  I assume you meant to highlight that Red Hat pays a lot of developers to work on open source projects. I don't think that came across clearly, which is probably why you're being downvoted.
  - jasonlotito 15y ago
    And not just that. Not only are they paying developers to work on these projects, but that in turn contributes directly back to the projects both code and attention. To continue with the homeless analogy, Red Hat helped a bunch of "homeless" people, and continue to do so today, but are not going the extra step of helping other people help homeless people.
pornel 15y ago
Those numbers aren't comparable. While FOSS was a key component that allowed Red Hat to make those profits, it wasn't the only one. It wouldn't happen without RH's employees, expertise, marketing/brand, etc. It's not like RH took the enormous value of FOSS and given only little of it back. They took that value and created even more value on top of that.

brianbreslin 15y ago

This might be nitpicking, but them donating only $100k (even if its to each) still seems paltry in my opinion. You hit a billion, donate a full million bucks!

Jach 15y ago

To add a little perspective since people seem to be losing their heads at "one billion dollars!", their annual GAAP net income was only $146.6 million. [1] How much did omgpop get bought for again? Anyway, congrats RedHat. Who knows where Linux and FLOSS in general would be without them. I tip my...(•_•) ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) hat to them. [1] http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2012/3/red-hat-reports-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2012-results http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2012/3/red-ha...

ajross 15y ago
How is equating and/or confusing revenue, profit and market capitalization in the space of a two-sentence post "adding perspective"? Clearly Red Hat isn't going to be the next Apple (or even IBM, to whom they have a closer business model). But I'd be shocked beyond belief if Draw Something does a billion in revenue this year.
- JonnieCache 15y ago
  >But I'd be shocked beyond belief if Draw Something does a billion in revenue this year. I think that was Jach's point: that omgpop was overvalued.

mark_l_watson 15y ago

Good for them, and nice that they are contributing a bit of their profits. There are a few negative comments here, and it is cool for everyone to have their say. In response, I would like to say that Red Hat supports some projects like Hibernate, JBoss, etc. that are useful and help me earn my living as a consultant - so thanks to them for that.

cpeterso 15y ago

A more accurate title might be "100,000 thanks to the open source community from Red Hat."

anyonecanhere 15y ago

Thanks, Red Hat, for the donation. It is a gesture, but an important one. I can appreciate treading the fine line of meeting market (ie, Wall Street) is demanding and keeping alive the ethos of the open source mantra at the same time is challenging. You've hired open source developers and people who's passion is in writing code and doing it well. I remember how Red Hat offered shares when they IPOed (http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N30/30redhat.30n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V119/N30/30redhat.30n.html) to open source developers. Red Hat did not have to, but they did. So, thanks for doing this. It does mean a lot.