Red Hat CEO Talks About State Of Open Source (techcrunch.com) 64
To mark Red Hat's 25th anniversary, TechCrunch spoke with the company's CEO Jim Whitehurst to talk about the past, present and future of the company, and open-source software in general. An excerpt: "Ten years ago, open source at the time was really focused on offering viable alternatives to traditional software," he told me. "We were selling layers of technology to replace existing technology. [...] At the time, it was open source showing that we can build open-source tech at lower cost. The value proposition was that it was cheaper." At the time, he argues, the market was about replacing Windows with Linux or IBM's WebSphere with JBoss. And that defined Red Hat's role in the ecosystem, too, which was less about technological information than about packaging. "For Red Hat, we started off taking these open-source projects and making them usable for traditional enterprises," said Whitehurst.
About five or six ago, something changed, though. Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because they didn't look at some of the infrastructure technologies they opened up as competitive advantages. Instead, having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that. "The biggest part is it's not just Google and Facebook finding religion," said Whitehurst. "The social tech around open source made it easy to make projects happen. Companies got credit for that." He also noted that developers now look at their open-source contributions as part of their resume. With an increasingly mobile workforce that regularly moves between jobs, companies that want to compete for talent are almost forced to open source at least some of the technologies that don't give them a competitive advantage.
In October, Whitehurst also answered questions from Slashdot readers.
About five or six ago, something changed, though. Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because they didn't look at some of the infrastructure technologies they opened up as competitive advantages. Instead, having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that. "The biggest part is it's not just Google and Facebook finding religion," said Whitehurst. "The social tech around open source made it easy to make projects happen. Companies got credit for that." He also noted that developers now look at their open-source contributions as part of their resume. With an increasingly mobile workforce that regularly moves between jobs, companies that want to compete for talent are almost forced to open source at least some of the technologies that don't give them a competitive advantage.
In October, Whitehurst also answered questions from Slashdot readers.
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Whitehurst is no contributor to open source. He hasn't done s**t for Linux, except for the fact that he allowed/allows the systemd scourge to continue -- and he avoids dealing with the issue when someone confronts him with it.
Not sure why you brought up Shuttleworth, but at least he actually helped Linux and open source somewhat by heavily promoting Ubuntu. On the other hand, he definitely has had serious lapses in judgement by accepting systemd into Ubuntu, and by suddenly killing several promising proje
How do these companies profit? (Score:3)
Large corporations, including Google and Facebook, started open sourcing their own projects because...having them out in the open allowed them to profit from the ecosystems that formed around that.
I'm happy that this has happened, but I'm unclear why. I read the article, and it didn't explain. How did Google profit from open sourcing Angular? How did Twitter profit from Bootstrap?
Re:How do these companies profit? (Score:5, Informative)
My best guess is that having and using these as a standard allows more applications to easily connect to their services. Microsoft's open source projects and other non-commercial products tend to be targeted at bringing in more developers for the windows family products or management tools that make adopting microsoft easier.
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A company that must build infrastructure can release it as open source with the idea that a healthy open source ecosystem can reduce its development costs. Reduced costs means more profit, simple as that.
Re:How do these companies profit? (Score:5, Informative)
When you create an in-house library, you have to have your folks do documentation, train new employees to the library, have your people not only develop off that library but patch it as well. Now that's not everything there but those are some major tick marks in the world. Open Sourcing reduces those to different degrees. However, it's not a panacea. It's important to have a business model based on a service and then open source the tools you use to have new hires already up to speed on what you all do before they get in the door.
That doesn't make you money, but it saves you money. However, it all means nothing if you don't have a service to sell first.
It also doesn't really matter (Score:3)
The company that built the product is going to automatically hold a strong majority of the mindshare around it unless they really behave like assholes. Case in point: don't be like Joyent viz a viz Node.JS (savagely attack core contributors on your corporate blog over pronoun politics). Be like Facebook with React (actually show you care about the community's concerns for the most part).
Re:Systemd (Score:5, Interesting)
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Monolithic systemd-based systems are harder to maintain and debug in many cases. But even more problematic is the difficulty to vary and switch components, to experiment and try out new things, since systemd "swallows" so much of your base system. Also, a small group of people have effective control over this key part of the system.
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Yep, if I wanted some black box that's a pain in the ass to debug, I'd just use a docker container. Systemd makes linux much less attractive. Like having herpes.
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Linux was already strong and rising, and systemd was/is a corrupt, polluting and aggressive attempt to take over Linux in that rise.
The utterly arbitrary, hard-coded dependencies to systemd that were created overnight are some of the many signs of the corruption. The way that systemd was railroaded through Debian is another indication of the corruption.
A lot of folks have moved to BSD, but we are starting to see somewhat of a recovery from the systemd scourge, with more substantial Linux distros adopting o
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I think that you are reading way too much into that post. Proposing something to be blessed as an external dependency is how you do when you work with Gnome, so this is just him proposing this, not forcing any one. And the main dependency (i.e the very one that made people fear that Gnome would not work on BSD anymore) was done earlier than this and not by any push from Poettering at all.
And no these dependencies are not hardwired for systemd, it's still only a dependency on D-BUS namespaces and the major o
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Not a fan of systemd, but how has it ruined the ecosystem?
Change for the sake of change breaking everything is ruinous.
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I see a continued rise with Linux taking over just about everything.
25+ years in, people are still trying to convince themselves this is true.
Re: Systemd (Score:2)
I see a continued rise with Linux taking over just about everything.
Except, of course, the desktop.
The cloud changed (Score:5, Interesting)
Open Source Software especially the GNU variety, tends to limit on ways people can profit off of GNU Software (Where selling the actual software is near impossible when people can get it legally for free).
Now what the cloud did was having this software for free, but who really cares, because you can put it in a server farm data center mega infrastructure, and you just pay for the computing that you use. Sure you can have the software and its source, because chances are you will not have the millions of dollars to implement the massive data center to fully utilize it.
Where a decade back. We were operating with small server farms (normally for a fair size organization) having a couple of racks of servers where each one was doing one or two jobs. Meaning the software sales were important, because people are not going to pay a monthly fee to run it on their servers, when they can buy the software and the servers themselves and run it over a long period of time.
So Open Source is more palatable because it doesn't conflict with their business model.
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Software sales uses to be a big business model. However the issue is they moved to the cloud, for funding, just to fight piracy much easier.
The support business model assumes the following. The product is hard/complex to use by a normal user (a normal marketing negative). The product isn't of high quality so it will break a lot and require a lot of fixing.
The Companies like Microsoft and Adobe use use to make their money selling software, had moved to a subscription based cloud offering, where you don't nee
Re: The cloud changed (Score:2)
You literally have no idea what you are talking about.
Have you ever read Gate's letter to hobbyists?
The miracle of Microsoft, the thing that propelled them into near total market dominance was started with MS BASIC in ROM on every PC (Radio Shack, atari, commodore, etc), then IBM picked MS-DOS over CP/M, and then Windows server sealed the deal - it was stable enough, had a huge developer base, and had a major support organization behind it. Unix was fractured across multiple companies and everything else wa
Five or six ago (Score:3)
About five or six ago, something changed
Five or six what ago? Releases? CEOs? Doctor Whos?
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You do realize you're intended to read the entire thing and not just start at a random sentence, right? 'Cause there's context in the first paragraph that tells you what they're referring to.
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What? There's very clearly a missing word in that sentence. No amount of "context" stops it being an error.
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Don't fire him - fire at him!
Red Hat == Microsoft (Score:2)
Really no difference between the two partner companies any more.