Red Hat's 30th Anniversary: How a Microsoft Competitor Rose from an Apartment-Based Startup (msn.com) 47
For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles.
In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market. "How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software.
"Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...."
Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together."
Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees."
But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath."
Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies." By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.
In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said.
"But there was always pride."
In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.
In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market. "How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software.
"Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...."
Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together."
Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees."
But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath."
Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies." By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.
In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said.
"But there was always pride."
In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.
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Memories of python 2.2 based system. (Score:1)
I have bad memories of the OS being based around a crappy Python 2.2 install that fought everything new for a long time. When C++11 hit the scene their compilers were way old in gcc pre 4.6 days. It was like the stone age trying to get software onto a stock redhat box.
I always felt like CentOS/Fedora was such an alien OS to me. Slackware and Gentoo were more my way.
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Red Hat is rarely the best option for a desktop or standalone workstation install (although I did run Red Hat 7 on my Dell Inspiron laptop back around the turn of the millennium). But if you have a bunch of servers, Slack and Gentoo aren't gonna scale nearly as well.
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For new GCCs (covering also C++11) running on old RHELs (incl. running the compiled code with latest C++ features old old RHELs) look at: Developer Toolset (DTS) [redhat.com]
For Python 3 running on old RHELs look at: Python [redhat.com] out of Software Collections (RHSCL) [redhat.com]
DTS belongs to RHSCL
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I just build updated versions of GCC myself. It isn't that hard.
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Nope, you can either build GCC so it compiles against the system libstdc++ (at the cost of potentially not having certain functionality from newer versions of the C++ standard available) as RH does, or you can package an updated libstdc++ to install in /opt or somewhere. If you take the second option, you need to package your own versions of any other libraries that depend on the C++ standard library ABI as well, but it's quite manageable if you have proper dependency management in place.
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And DTS is using a third option combining advantages of the previous two without (most of the) disadvantages of the previous two. DTS is using system shared libstdc++ for features which were already available in that old RHEL. And DTS is using small static libstdc++ addon for features not available in old RHEL.
So you see DTS has advantages you cannot trivially reproduce on your own. Unfortunately these advantages are already more than a user (despite being developer in this case) can understand which is wh
Red Hat, my first Linux (Score:2)
You never forget your first lilo.
I got involved a teeny-tiny bit with either support or debugging back in the day, and they offered me (along with a lot of other folks) an opportunity to buy stock at opening price when it went public. I didn't do it, but I was there, dangit.
Yeah yeah, I know: pics or it didn't happen.
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I got The Letter, and was too dumb to buy it as well. You are not the only person who missed that boat.
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My first distribution was Mandrake Linux 5.3. It had a bad kernel driver for my SATA disk controller, which caused the hard drive to corrupt itself on reboot randomly.
Red Hat was the first distribution that I used that actually WORKED out of the box.
As a Slashdot member back then, I can attest that there was more than a little gloating when they took server market share away from Microsoft.
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If You Know What You Are Doing... (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need Redhat. Corporations just feel better about themselves if they invest in other corporations. Gives them someone to point the finger at when something goes wrong.
Re: If You Know What You Are Doing... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's much older than you think, kid.
"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was the saying.
And as someone who works for a corporation, yeah, give me the useless "support contracts" because otherwise the one to blame is me, even if I'm not at fault.
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Never needed them. Metal up your ass!!
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I am. Until I'm not. That all depends on the input received.
Re:If You Know What You Are Doing... (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. My experience with Red Hat for enterprise support is also pretty bad. First, had to go through a "representative" and then the "supporter" did not know enough to even understand the question. Had to solve my problem myself by running some experiments and doing some reverse engineering. Of course, with a good distro those problems would not even have existed, it was some Red Hat specific stuff.
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Have to agree. Their support has always kinda sucked for a larger enterprise. Try getting support for the included "service mesh" for OpenShit. A complete fiasco.
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I had a completely opposite experience. Was dealing with an issue, and the RHEL support guy immediately looked at the attached files and logs, found a solution, and got things fixed up almost at once.
Of course, my beef with Red Hat is the fact they bet the farm on Stratis, so they have no enterprise filesystems on RHEL (XFS does not checksum data, leaving things vulnerable to bit-rot). If you want bit-rot protection, you have to slip a dm-integrity layer beneath the LVM. If you want snapshots, you use St
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OpenZFS is the best answer, but due to licensing and philosophy reasons, it isn't really something Red Hat can bundle and commercially support.
Okay, so install it yourself [github.io]. Might not be able to put root there, so you may have to use all that other stuff, although there is a howto for rocky linux [github.io] and that could potentially work for redhate.
I just can't stand RPM. apt is bad enough.
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I could easily fetch the RPM or just use the dnf repository, but it not being supported by RH is a big reason not to do it. Definitely not in production. I tried it in a test environment, and had cases where no data would be lost, but would have I/O that would hang indefinitely when given a specific hardware combination.
Hopefully, dnf has addressed some of the worst points of yum/rpm issues.
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Yes, that sucks. But you know what? Having RH support does not make it suck less. It just puts the blame someplace else. The problem still needs to be solved and it is probably you that needs to do it in the end.
The way to deal with hardware compatibility is to either use only known good hardware or (often cheaper) plan, say 30% of cost for tests and possible replacement hardware. That requires some flexibility on the procurement side and I am aware that many enterprises stupidly have removed that because t
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You basically lose support for that part if you do it. Of course, getting "genuine RH support" is basically a fetish by management. You can get competent Linux support for any mainstream distro and any config from smaller companies and if you are large enough you can have your own Linux expert or even expert team on staff. Just document everything well and you you do not even have a single-person dependency or a single-vendor dependency at all.
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I had a completely opposite experience. Was dealing with an issue, and the RHEL support guy immediately looked at the attached files and logs, found a solution, and got things fixed up almost at once.
You probably were asking for something they already had in their list of "supported issues". I did not. I asked for something that required actual knowledge. Which in the end I had to supply myself. Not that I mind, but this did cost the customer something like $10'000 in my time and that is just fraud on RH side when they sold them "enterprise support".
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No, but roll your own stuff sucks if it's done by one person who departs without documenting it at all. My friend changed jobs because the previous IT director unfortunately left the surely bonds of Earth and inherited an environment which was basically completely home grown. And since his predecessor's departure was wholly unplanned,
To be fair, RH is not any better than crappy MS (Score:2)
Just smaller. Fortunately, unlike the trash from Redmont, with Linux you have a lot of choice and can even do a lot of things yourself if you want to. The one time I had to use Red Hat Linux, I felt like back in the stone age. Everything intransparent, source code hard to get, commercial and otherwise restricted crap mixed in, etc.
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It is binary compatible
No. CentOS Stream has replaced CentOS, it is if anything, binary compatible only with the forthcoming RHEL, not any current release, and there is no guarantee that third parties will support it in the same way they did with old CentOS.
Third party vendors *may* support the actual binary compatible distros such as Alma and Rocky.
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Was not my choice. RH was enterprise policy with no exceptions (Fortune 100 bank).
I did end up doing experiments and source-code analysis using the corresponding CentOS in the end on my own hardware to find the issue, so your advice _is_ good.
And it was GPL, the horror! (Score:1)
Pick one: jumped the shark, or screwed the pooch (Score:3, Insightful)
Red Hat's best days are behind them. Their new owners' boneheaded decisions have destroyed the brand.
$dayjob$ is on track to migrate all remaining CentOS virtual machines to Ubuntu, by the end of the year. From a bean-counter's perspective, the CentOS seats were not generating any revenue, so why not "encourage" CentOS users, who need an enterprise-level OS, to cough up for RHEL?
This might've worked ten years ago. But these days Ubuntu is a viable alternative. So what, the bean-counter say, Red Hat hasn't lost any revenue, right? Right. What they are losing is mind-share. More and more people will choose to pick up Ubuntu-specific knowledge and skills.
P.S. Rocky is not an option, I'm afraid. Until third party vendors (VMWare, etc...) make Rocky a supported platform, it's not an option.
Re:Pick one: jumped the shark, or screwed the pooc (Score:4, Informative)
Red Hat started slipping in the late RHEL 7.x days, when previous, they would do a minor upgrade a year, and a major release every 5+ years. 7.x had issues where a machine installed from media of 7.1 and updated via `yum upgrade` would have a lot of differences than a machine installed from 7.4 media and updated. This meant added time in troubleshooting, and having to "standardize" on a version of install media, with the next step being a 'yum upgrade'.
RHEL still has a niche, it has a solid security focus, and it is a commercial OS that has all the certifications needed for government work. It is one of a relative few Linux distributions supported by a bunch of third party apps. It can be updated offline for air-gap work fairly easily, and it ticks the boxes, being a US company. However, Ubuntu is starting to eat their lunch, because Ubuntu is offering similar security as a commercial offering.
the road to hell is paved with good intentions (Score:5, Informative)
Alas poor Red Hat, I knew him (Score:4, Informative)
Jim Whitehurst, who recently became President at IBM: “I was at RH for more than a decade, from the Matthew through Jim, and I saw the changes coming when Jim came on board. He never really seemed to grasp was the core value was that Red Hat offered. He didn’t use our products (used a Mac, along with other members of the executive management team), allowed RH to dump open source solutions for our own business to move things to Google’s services (which is a huge message to our very clients of “we don’t value or trust open source, so why should you?”) and the top-down view shifted away from what made Red Hat special and valuable and more towards what would make us value to another company who would want to buy us. [techrights.org]
Competitor. (Score:2)
Red Hat is a Microsoft competitor? In which market? I ask this as my desktop is Fedora since some 20 years already. Servers? It seems they target different market segments, cloud the same, different market segments. Desktop and productivity? RH does not even tries. Hardware, games, entertainment, online services? No.
womp womp (Score:1)
"How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer,
...is sensationalism. The magazine said we were more important than Microsoft is absolutely the dumbest metric upon which to claim success.
I started with Redhat when it had a sense of humor (Score:1)