

And Then There Was One: Red Hat - Garbage
http://ostatic.com/blog/and-then-there-was-one-red-hat

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forgotAgain
_...Novell and Sun were both once-mighty commercial open source-focused
companies..._

Rewrites history. Novell and Sun were both long past their brightest days when
they embraced open source. In fact they embraced open source in desperate
efforts to remain relevant in a world that had passed them by.

~~~
chrisaycock
Right! Novell was already hemorrhaging cash before they bought SUSE, and Linux
was replacing Solaris before Sun gave away the family jewels. Neither one of
those companies were known for their open-source contributions before Red Hat
started eating their lunch.

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Supermighty
The big difference, I see, between Red Hat and Sun and Novell is Red Hat is
younger as a company and has less emotional baggage. They have to compete
which makes them less complacent than Sun or Novell.

I see the future of open source as a service and support industry. It's
working for Red Hat also companies like Wordpress.

~~~
ams6110
Sun was a hardware company. When hardware became a commodity their unique
architectures could not find buyers, and there was not enough margin in x86 to
sustain the company.

Novell sold proprietary LAN software, and their market evaporated when Windows
starting having networking built-in, while at the same time Linux made open
networking standards available at no cost (for the software, at least).

~~~
michael_dorfman
Exactly. Of the three, Red Hat was the only one that was formed around open
source, and the only one whose open source business model wasn't born in the
desperation of a previous, successful closed source business model collapsing.

~~~
Supermighty
Sun and Novell were in the process of a pivot whereby they would have set
their business model around open source. They just didn't do it well enough.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Has anyone successfully made that particular pivot?

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chrisaycock
IBM, to some degree. They launched Global Services long before it was
fashionable. Louis Gerstner explains in _Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?_ that
there was tremendous doubt in the 1990's that consulting was the way to go,
but he realized early on that the world "didn't need another hard drive maker"
and decided that IBM could provide value best by acting as the integrator of
smaller companies' components.

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Tyrannosaurs
The other view of this is that it's the point at which OSS hit the mainstream
and was adopted as part of the business model of major for profit corporations
as part of their offerings.

Realistically the world wasn't going to divide neatly into OSS and closed
software, but merge as companies picked the best model for each sector,
product and market.

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user24
I'd hardly count Novell and Sun as 'every US open source company'...

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mtvartia
The article only considers public companies. Are they missing some?

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michael_dorfman
Quite the opposite. Considering Sun and Novell to be "open source companies"
obscures the fact that both of them had the bulk of their successes with their
closed source products, and only came to a business model related to open
source reluctantly. Red Hat is an outlier in that regard, and I suspect it is
the main reason that they are still around.

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jpcx01
Wait... what about Ubuntu?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)>

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Sandman
You mean Canonical? Well, the article was about public US companies. Canonical
is neither, it's private, and it's registered in the UK.

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mpk
> [..] registered in the UK.

Actually, it's registered in the Isle of Man, which is a self-governing island
that is not technically part of the UK.

~~~
Sandman
My mistake, I didn't know that. I looked for the information on where they are
registered on their legal page <http://www.canonical.com/legal>, and it simply
states 'United Kingdom'. Anyway, the point stands - they're not a US company.

