
Will there ever be another Red Hat? - thomasjames
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2015/04/28/will-there-ever-be-another-red-hat/
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camperman
> Red Hat didn’t have to pay for the bulk of the development of Linux. As soon
> as it was clear how Linux could change the world of computing, IBM, Oracle,
> SAP, Intel, and many other companies added full time developers to the
> project. If Red Hat had to pay for all the development of Linux, it would
> never have become what it is today.

This is a misunderstanding of how the development of Linux works. It's not a
project in the conventional sense and never has been. Anyone can contribute as
long as their code is good enough and solves a problem or adds a feature. But
because the code is under the GPL, no-one can take others' work and make it
proprietary. It creates a level playing field for customers because OS
development is not their core business but rather just a cost of doing said
business.

It's also a misunderstanding of the value Red Hat brought - and still brings -
to enterprise software. A subscription buys you enterprise support,
certification with third party vendors and the guarantee that Red Hat will
distribute improvements to the kernel in a predictable way for you.

~~~
fragmede
> Red Hat will distribute improvements to the kernel in a predictable way for
> you.

I'd hope that means you just get read access to their linux.git if you're
paying them.

If you're _not_ paying them, in order to get access to the Red Hat 7 kernel
source, there's git repo that houses a reference to a xz-compressed tarball
that you download from another site which you piece back together to get a
.src.rpm - inside of which is a the raw kernel.org source and a monolithic
patch file.

I _would_ also call that predictable (and thus, thankfully scriptable)
process, but it's pretty convoluted. Actual git access to kernel source would
be preferable.

~~~
camperman
I wasn't really thinking of source access because I don't think the vast
majority of their customers need it. I was thinking more from an enterprise
point of view where you're a large customer who wants confidence that Red Hat
has done a bunch of testing and validation on new kernels for their particular
environments.

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kijin
The licensing model is another thing that is going to be a big issue as the
world moves into the cloud.

So far, many of the big names in FOSS, such as MySQL, have been using GPL to
their advantage. By forcing competitors to release their modifications under
the same license, GPL grants the copyright owner an effective monopoly on
proprietary features. RMS probably isn't very happy with this situation, but
it works.

GPL, however, is nearly useless in the cloud. You can add features to a GPL
program and offer it as a proprietary service running on your servers. Since
you're not distributing the program itself, you don't need to open-source your
changes! AGPL was designed to prevent that, but hardly anyone uses AGPL.

Moving in the other direction are LGPL, BSD, MIT, and a bunch of other
"permissive" licenses that are getting ever more popular among the cutting
edge of the tech scene. In an ideal world, this should lead to even more
freedom and better tools for everyone. But we don't live in an ideal world.

RMS has a knack of saying seemingly outrageous things that turn out to be
highly relevant 10-20 years later, so I wonder what consequences the current
proliferation of easy-to-convert-to-proprietary-software licenses will have on
the tech scene of the next generation. Will all the good features get locked
into walled gardens, or will companies continue to see value in releasing code
under a permissive license?

Today's FOSS culture didn't arise on its own. It owes its existence to a
dedicated group of people, such as RMS, ESR, Linus, Red Hat, MySQL, etc. who
provided a large and stable copyleft core for the rest of the ecosystem to
revolve around. But if the cloud makes the copyleft core largely irrelevant,
how will the rest of the ecosystem adjust? Will it even survive? I don't know.

~~~
bunderbunder
I think the situation isn't quite that dire, based on a couple factors:

First, keeping your own private fork of a GPL library isn't all that easy an
option if you also expect to be able to benefit from any further work done by
the project's maintainers. By going that route you're committing to spending a
lot of time and money on a lot of hairy merging.

Second, for most serious companies the open source libraries they rely on are
not a part of their secret sauce. You're really not maintaining a whole lot of
competitive advantage by closely holding that tweak to MySQL's query optimizer
that lets your social office supply reviewing site respond to requests with 1%
lower latency. Unless fractionally shorter response times is really what your
company has going for it, of course. In which case it's probably doomed
anyway.

I think these two factors in concert mean that it's generally much better for
a business to contribute back than to try and maintain an internal fork.

Of course, businesses only contribute back to projects that they've decided to
use in the first place. Using GPL code for your SASS product probably won't
cause any immediate problems. It can still be a huge strategic misstep,
though, because it does still limit your options for how you can pivot in the
future. If you're a startup that could also mean a big drop in your value in
the eyes of a potential suitor.

~~~
kijin
> _Using GPL code ... can still be a huge strategic misstep ... that could
> also mean a big drop in your value in the eyes of a potential suitor._

Yes, I think this explains the dearth of GPL contributions from recent
startups.

I didn't mean to imply that GPL was ever the perfect way to license code that
you also intend to use commercially. It's mediocre at best for that purpose,
and intentionally so. After all, why would RMS want to facilitate production
of proprietaty software?

What is undeniable is that the cloud and the startup scene are leading a new
trend in FOSS licensing. The recent Github statistics show more MIT/BSD/Apache
licensed projects than ever before. This shift will have far-reaching
consequences on the FOSS ecosystem in the long term, and I'm just not sure
whether those consequences will be good or bad. We've got too many idealists
and too many VC-chasers in the same room here ;)

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jordigh
I sure hope so, on a smaller scale. I fully plan to bite into Matlab's market
with GNU Octave. Wish me luck, folks!

~~~
brudgers
GNU Octave is a great project.

Yet, the replacement for MatLab appears, at least to me, to be Python. The
abundance of resources due to its general purposeness swamps Octave/MatLab's
niche tailoring. Python is a mire flexible tool for STEM because it supports a
broader array of applications.

~~~
jordigh
Python does not replace the Matlab language itself. For as long as we have
Matlab code, we will need Octave.

My hope is to make Octave as obsolete as Matlab itself, but so far neither is.
Matlab is _huge_ and Python has not unthroned it. It will take a combined
effort to do so. Octave is but another contributor to this effort.

~~~
brudgers
In that sense Linux doesn't replace other Operating Systems. But of course it
does and that's the sense in which I used the word "replace". As with Windows
and Linux, Python is used in lieu of MatLab frequently for new applications as
the total number of applications grows.

MatLab is also often replaced by R these days.

~~~
jordigh
Programming languages are not quite like operating systems (and even Linux has
Wine). When you have a large codebase written in some language, you can't just
easily throw it out and rewrite the whole thing in another language.
Programming languages never really die out: COBOL is still used these days.

There is a lot of Matlab code out there, and it needs something to run in
other than Matlab. That's why Octave is still important.

~~~
brudgers
I didn't suggest Octave wasn't important as an alternative for MatLab. I
stated my opinion that Python appears to be replacing MatLab in the niches
where it dominates. If there is a new project, Python is likely to be a
competitive alternative to MatLab or Octave.

------
hapless
There have already been two other Red Hats, and Red Hat bought them both:
JBoss and Cygnus.

If there's ever another breakout in enterprise open source, Red Hat will buy
that firm, too.

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mpdehaan2
Red Hat will probably stay the biggest one, but there's a huuuuge room for
applications in specific areas today that range far beyond the operating
system.

In particular, I think Big Data and Open Networking are two of those areas.

Do they need to get as big as Red Hat is now? Defintely not.

Levine's (linked) comment that OSS companies can't execute on Product
Management is incredibly short sighted, if done correctly, they have
infinitely _more_ data than their proprietary counterparts. But later on he
seems to be saying that there can't be another people keeping it as "pure" ...
well, no, Red Hat isn't really a product company. I'll get to that.

The first article itself doesn't seem to know what Red Hat _really_ is either,
saying "Red Hat has become a technology sommelier that selects the best of
open source infrastructure and development software and organizes it into
packages to solve enduring problems for enterprise computing.". It's more
about support of base OS. Really. All the packaging stuff makes that possible,
but the various products that Red Hat buys and sells are tiny in comparison.

Whether we like it or not, if you are building building-block software the
expectation is now that these components be OSS. Proprietary software is
generally viewed as acceptable in SaaS apps and end-user products, but is
growing less acceptable in application substrates, programming languages, and
the like.

Red Hat is doing well because of a lot of big (read: bank) customers needing
expertise on kernel/hardware related issues, other companies will likely grow
differently.

If people are asking for "another" Red Hat, what do they want? It's really a
meaningless phrase in a way. I don't think they want Red Hat's various
ancillary products, I think they mean something with the teeth of an operating
system company.

Red Hat is great, and in many ways still is. There are many more interesting
things to do instead. The comparison of thing-that-is-a-company-but-not-in-
the-same-space with Red Hat is typical VC meaningless-ness question.

Maybe it's asking "can something get so big without being an OS company". I
think it can, because the OS is largely a solved problem, and there is lots to
be done is going to appear on top of it - but I'd also rather companies didn't
try to get that big, and just concentrate on making one or two awesome things,
and there being lots of awesome things.

~~~
devonkim
Cloudera, Hortonworks, and Pivotal are shaping up to be possible contenders
and most of the large players are pretty openly announcing that they're
planning IPOs. Big Data platforms are a lot like OSes in how they'll schedule
jobs and allocate resources for you across nodes. What's bothered me a lot
about these stacks is how significant the overhead is and how little really
technical work has gone into them like we had developing kernels from the 70s
to even today. Most Big Data articles are... not exactly meant for developers
while mostly engineers cared about OS design back even to the early 90s as
Windows v. Macs v. OS/2 wars still were argued.

------
davidw
Probably not. Just like there has not been a new IBM, Microsoft, Google or
Facebook. New things will dominate new areas, not compete with existing
giants, until they're quite large already. Usually, at least.

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legulere
SuSE seems to me pretty much like another Red Hat

~~~
kornakiewicz
Really? Fedora is my first choice for desktop OS, worked for companies that
RedHat was their first choice for server OS, hosted some of apps on OpenShift
and currently I am setting up my Ghost installation, also on OpenShift.

Last time I used any of SuSE's products was about seven years ago (when I was
14), when I couldn't install Linux on my mother's PC and played around with
their LiveCD from a magazine.

~~~
pjc50
Sample size of 1!

SuSE seem to be much more popular in the parts of the linux community that do
not have English as a first language.

~~~
amk_
Particularly in Germany, where they are (were?) based.

------
boblmartens
SUSE is doing well and while not as large as Red Hat, continues to make
valuable contributions to OSS across the board.

~~~
mlinksva
According to Wikipedia by employee count Red Hat (7500) is 10x the size of
each of SUSE (750) and Canonical (700) but the SUSE and Canonical numbers
cited are a few years out of date.

Anyone have more up to date numbers or other ways to characterize overall size
or contribution to open source? Am also curious whether SUSE or Canonical do
any public policy, perhaps just as a side effect of selling to governments.
Red Hat apparently has a "Global Public Policy" department though there's
little info about it on the web. In theory a larger entity can reap more
benefits of policy activity including lobbying, so will do more of it.

~~~
boblmartens
I don't have any good answers to that, sorry. I know that SUSE and Red Hat
worked together on the live-kernel-patching stuff just shipping with kernel
4.0 and work together on a number of other open source projects as well.

There is no denying the size of Red Hat, and thus its influence. I'm just
thankful there are other out there doing the good work as well.

------
draugadrotten
Well, there will be another Red Hat, in the same sense that Apple and Samsung
is another Kodak.

------
alexandere
Isn't Microsoft slowly turning into another Red Hat?

~~~
bunderbunder
They're slowly turning into another IBM.

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matheweis
It's a smaller market, but I'd consider 3D Robotics to be another RedHat.
Arguably the most complex component in the drones is the flight controller,
and both the hard and software that 3DR uses for their FC is open-sourced.

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peter303
GitHub? But it's market is much smaller- just the 5% of computers that develop
code. The vast majority just consume apps.

~~~
walterbell
GitHub could extend their offerings to the broader market of
distributed/collaborative content creation.

~~~
protomyth
That's one of those fortresses for Microsoft and Sharepoint.

~~~
hub_
Or Google Docs...

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feld
Is Red Hat still primarily funded by US Military contracts? That's what
worries me most.

~~~
mhurron
What software company in the US isn't bringing in huge military contracts?

~~~
feld
but this is more alarming because of RHEL's influence back on the greater open
source community. Poettering is employed there. :-)

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amyjess
I think Sonatype's doing for Java what Red Hat did for Linux.

