Biggest Linux Company of Them All Still Pushing To Become Cloud Power (theregister.com) 23
An anonymous reader shares a report: For Red Hat, which turned 30 on March 27, it was a cause for celebration. From a business that got started in one of its co-founder's wife's sewing room, it became the first billion-dollar pure-play open-source company and then the engine driving IBM. It has been a long strange trip. Sure, today, the tech world is dominated by Linux and open source software, but in 1993, Linux was merely an obscure operating system known only to enthusiasts. Red Hat played a significant role in transforming the "just a hobby" operating system into today's major IT powerhouse. Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, who previously ran a rental typewriter business, was one of those who became intrigued by Linux. In 1993, he established ACC Corporation, a catalog company that distributed Slackware Linux CDs and open-source software.
[...] In 2003, Paul Cormier, then Red Hat's vice president of engineering and now the company's chairman, spearheaded the shift from the inexpensive prosumer Red Hat Linux distribution to the full business-oriented Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). At the time, many Linux users hated the idea. Even inside Red Hat, Cormier said that many engineers were initially opposed to the new business model, causing some to leave the company while others stayed. The change also upset many users who felt Red Hat was abandoning its original customers. However, enterprise clients had a different perspective. Whitehurst, who became Red Hat CEO in 2008, said, "Once RHEL was in the market, we had to fully support it to make it truly consumable for the enterprise." They succeeded, and Red Hat continued to grow. This is the model that turned Red Hat into the first billion-dollar-a-quarter pure open-source company. Impressive for a business built around an operating system once considered suitable only for the "lunatic fringe." Then, in 2018, IBM acquired Red Hat for a cool $34 billion. There was nothing crazy about that move.
[...] Another change that was already present in Red Hat, a shift towards supporting the cloud, has accelerated. Today, while RHEL remains the heart of the business, the Linux-powered cloud has become increasingly important. In particular, Red Hat OpenShift, its Kubernetes-powered hybrid cloud application platform, is more important than ever. Where does Red Hat go from here? When I last talked to Cormier and Red Hat's latest CEO, Matt Hicks, they told me that they'd keep moving forward with the hybrid cloud. After all, as Cormier pointed out, "the cloud wouldn't be here" without Linux and open source. As for Red Hat's relationship with IBM, Cormier said, "The red lines were red, and the blue lines were blue, and that will stay the same."
[...] In 2003, Paul Cormier, then Red Hat's vice president of engineering and now the company's chairman, spearheaded the shift from the inexpensive prosumer Red Hat Linux distribution to the full business-oriented Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). At the time, many Linux users hated the idea. Even inside Red Hat, Cormier said that many engineers were initially opposed to the new business model, causing some to leave the company while others stayed. The change also upset many users who felt Red Hat was abandoning its original customers. However, enterprise clients had a different perspective. Whitehurst, who became Red Hat CEO in 2008, said, "Once RHEL was in the market, we had to fully support it to make it truly consumable for the enterprise." They succeeded, and Red Hat continued to grow. This is the model that turned Red Hat into the first billion-dollar-a-quarter pure open-source company. Impressive for a business built around an operating system once considered suitable only for the "lunatic fringe." Then, in 2018, IBM acquired Red Hat for a cool $34 billion. There was nothing crazy about that move.
[...] Another change that was already present in Red Hat, a shift towards supporting the cloud, has accelerated. Today, while RHEL remains the heart of the business, the Linux-powered cloud has become increasingly important. In particular, Red Hat OpenShift, its Kubernetes-powered hybrid cloud application platform, is more important than ever. Where does Red Hat go from here? When I last talked to Cormier and Red Hat's latest CEO, Matt Hicks, they told me that they'd keep moving forward with the hybrid cloud. After all, as Cormier pointed out, "the cloud wouldn't be here" without Linux and open source. As for Red Hat's relationship with IBM, Cormier said, "The red lines were red, and the blue lines were blue, and that will stay the same."
All well and good.... (Score:3)
Young recognized that while he couldn't market Linux as superior, faster, or more feature-rich than Unix at that time, he could sell the advantage of user customization.
That is all well and good, but they forgot the biggest draw, Linux was very cheap and ran on cheap hardware.
So, want to own the cloud ? Make the service cheap and stable. But his is now IBM, its pricing would do the Byzantine Empire proud. It is impossible to get a real solid price from IBM on anything, including a pencile :)
Fix that and then you will have a good chance.
But What does IBM even do now days? (Score:2)
But What does IBM even do now days?
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Typing IBM into your address bar, and going to their website, would have required less effort of you than typing that question into Slashdot. AND it would have actually given you quite a lot of information on that topic.
Check it out! [ibm.com]
Re: But What does IBM even do now days? (Score:3)
Yep, a company's own marketing fodder is of course going to accurately represent how the market perceives their offerings....
A company's own website represents what they wished they did, not what they actually do. With particular emphasis generally in the very things they underperform at (to try to "fix" the poor showing).
Re:But What does IBM even do now days? (Score:4, Interesting)
I checked it. "See how businesses are using AI-powered software like IBM Turbonomic to produce and deliver products more efficiently" then "What if your apps could meet demand without demanding more of you?"
The wording reminds me of the "business on-demand" funny IBM commercials from the early 2000s. I still have no more idea what it is about than I had when watching them on TV back then, so I guess I'm just not trained in the right area to understand what IBM does.
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Re:But What does IBM even do now days? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But What does IBM even do now days? (Score:5, Informative)
They lose a lot of money most quarters? This chart https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net] shows their quarterly profit for the last 12 years. There are exactly 2 quarters where they had any loss at all.
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IBM killed it (Score:3)
I remember the switch (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the switch from Community driven development to RHEL, they really did abandoned their core community. I switch to Debian and BSD and have never looked back. This event lead to Ubuntu growing up and taking over the desktop mantle for a bit, which has more of the open source ethos than Red Hat.
They eventually brought back the community driven development but by then almost half the developers have left. They really should have just made a second product for the business community, and not dropped the original intent. No one would have cared if they did that. Red Hat really squandered what good will they had in the community.
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This event lead to Ubuntu growing up and taking over the desktop mantle for a bit, which has more of the open source ethos than Red Hat.
Yeah, but now Ubuntu is pushing that snap crap.
Devuan is nice...
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Ubuntu has announced that Snap will be ditched for V24.
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Now if they would just drop systemd I would care.
I moved to Devuan, and it's actually working better for me than Ubuntu was. Admittedly it was much harder to get it working how I wanted, but now I'm there.
Re:I remember the switch (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really. Red Hat was nice, but RPM Hell was always a thing and thees were the days before yum. Debian had apt (then only implemented as apt-get) at the time which meant installing packages was trivially easy.
This was a big reason people when given the option migrated away from Red Hat.
Red Hat at the time was for the new users - it was the most "newbie friendly" distribution aside from RPM hell. Debian was for hard core Linux users. Then Ubuntu came out which offered the friendliness of Red Hat with the ease to install software using apt since it was based on Debian.
I remember when I started at my first company - we used Red Hat 6 on all the machines, and when it came time to test stuff, I had to reformat a PC and install Red Hat 6 from CD. Then we moved away from Linux development for about 10 years and then it was all Ubuntu. I think I had an Ubuntu 6 or 7 machine for a time because there would be odd job that required Linux, but most of the company went away from Linux development.
I think this was well before RedHat turned into RHEL and they turned what was RedHat into Fedora. Either way, Ubuntu took over because it was literally very user friendly - easy to install without the hardcore freedom mode of Debian so it had access to a lot of proprietary drivers and blobs so you had a good chance of getting your hardware working right off the bat.
But the fact that RPM Hell existed was a major reason people moved away the instant they could - Debian was still hardcore so Ubuntu was it.
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Early 2000's I actually had more dependency problems with Debian and had to redo a whole project with Redhat (a novel Kerberos4 application).
Debian made huge improvements to Apt and actually embraced upgrades.
Fedora went the other way and took a stance that upgrades were unsupported (I did anyway - one machine started as Redhat 7i 386 and ended with Fedora 24 amd64 - all upgrades in between).
Midway in between a (european?) computer scientist fixed the Yum algorithm ... and Redhat refused his patches. It wa
Would RedHat's cloud... (Score:1)
... run Debian?
Clouds really ought to be technology neutral and allow the customer to decide.
Re: Would RedHat's cloud... (Score:1)
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Yes and no. If you want to run certified operators with OpenShift, you have to base them on Red Hat's containers (UBI, etc). So the OpenShift itself and all its operators are RH. But from there as a customer you can run any kind of container you want. It's OS agnostic in that you can run any OS as long as one of them is RHEL. :-(
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There are windows containers and they are supported in Openshift. You can make operators based on any OS.
Openshift can also run VMs running most OSen
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You can't get certified operators that aren't based on RHEL/UBI. You're free to make whatever operators you want yourself. But if you want a third party to publish them on Red Hat's registry you have some additional requirements. They're pure business bullshit and there's not technical reason that OpenShift can't run on any distro.