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We make our money on support. A nontrivial amount of bugs fixed upstream are found and reported against in-support versions of RHEL. But in a broader sense, th
by evol262 11y ago
We make our money on support.
A nontrivial amount of bugs fixed upstream are found and reported against in-support versions of RHEL. But in a broader sense, there's no "immediate return on investment" pressure here.
We work with upstream communities. So there are upstream planning meetings which set feature development, which anyone is free to participate in, or we directly participate in apache/openssl/gnome/openstack/whatever meetings. New features are set and developed by the upstream product, where we (as developers) spend a lot of our time. We're not doing it in-house and pushing it back.
We try to make sure they're tested and stable through CI and QE testing (foo-1.2.3.noarch gets marked as the version in which bug #1234 is fixed in -- QE tests and verifies this before release).
There's some emphasis there because Satellite, Openstack, RHEV, and other "server" product entitlements and support are our revenue stream, but there's a significant desktop team, and kernel team, etc. We as a company are much less focused on what makes money and more interested in "what's the best tool for this job" and "how can we push Linux forward".
To that end, there's a heavy lean towards GTK/GNOME solutions over QT, but that's more culture than corporate direction. And there's a "disproportionate" amount of effort towards server products because that's what people use Linux for and that's what we work on, but the community drives our priorities, not the other way around. We're a relatively small company (for our revenue), and people work in one area. If I'm working on Openstack (upstream and downstream), pretty much all my effort is going there and none is going towards Firefox (or whatever). But being on a product team/niche isn't any different at Red Hat than anywhere else.
- kbenson 11y agoI didn't mean to make it sound like a business strategy (entirely), I mean it more as a natural progression of how people function. If as an engineer you are spending a lot of time working on Openstack, I'm sure you want to see the new advances and features in the product that you've invested so much time and effort into get into the distro ASAP, as long as they are stable (egg on your face is much worse than delays). I just view that as a facet of human nature, and one that has worked for Red Hat's advantage (whether on purpose or serendipitously) quite well.
- evol262 11y ago> I didn't mean to make it sound like a business strategy (entirely), I mean it more as a natural progression of how people function. If as an engineer you are spending a lot of time working on Openstack, I'm sure you want to see the new advances and features in the product that you've invested so much time and effort into get into the distro ASAP, as long as they are stable That's not really up to us, though. We still have product managers and project managers and project leaders who decide that Feature XYZ is going into Openstack Zeta, which comes back around to the original issue. If I'm an engineer spending a lot of time working on Openstack, it's likely that I'm spending all of my time (other than hobby projects and side projects) on Openstack, just like you may be spending it on whatever your mainline product is (if you're a dev). All devs probably want to see their features hit stable as soon as possible with wide consumption, but Openstack is a good analogue to Fedora, in the sense that things are operating on a schedule. We aren't releasing new versions of Nova/Neutron/whatever whenever we want or whenever we think it's stable or cool. We try to orchestrate that. Fedora tries to orchestrate projects.