
What makes us Red Hat - swonderl
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/what-makes-us-red-hat?sc_cid=7016000000127NJAAY
======
schoen
More than 15 years ago, I worked for a Linux services company that competed
with Red Hat. We sometimes saw them or were invited to see them rather
negatively (as the competition), and I particularly remember that an ad agency
that wanted our business once shipped us a box containing a burnt red hat (!).

Time has shown that Red Hat really knows what they're doing, on many different
levels, and they're the most successful free software business in history.

~~~
rrdharan
> they're the most successful free software business in history.

Aren't they also the _only_ successful free software business in history?

Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it
depends on your definitions of success, of course.

~~~
SEJeff
There is no billion dollar open source company outside of Redhat, if a billion
dollars in revenue is your benchmark. On pure success financially from an OSS
company, they truly are unrivaled.

Otherwise, there are thousands of small open source companies that do quite
well for themselves. If you look at pure profit however, Redhat does abysmally
compared to say Microsoft or Apple, or any traditional proprietary software
company. Due to this, the valuation for a purely open source company have to
be lower which prevents a lot of the VC funding frenzy for "the next unicorn
company". If you want small and sustainable OSS can work. Otherwise, Redhat is
the black swan in that they pulled off something thought to be impossible.

~~~
flamedoge
What about Canonical?

~~~
danilocesar
Unlike most of Linux fans imagine, Canonical and Red Hat don't compete that
much in the corporate world.

~~~
kerneldeveloper
Besides that, from the open source perspective, RedHat's contribution is
greater than Canonical， especially the linux kernel.

~~~
SEJeff
Not just the Linux kernel. Canonical is primarily a consumer of open source
that does some really need value add ontop of it (see Juju for an outstanding
example). Redhat is primarily an excellent engineering company with good
enterprise sales and (compared to Canonical) lousy marketing.

------
ElijahLynn
Something I just learned recently after I started working for Red Hat and is
the tldr; of the article:

"Red Hat also commits to keeping our commercial products 100% pure open
source. Even when we acquire a proprietary software company, we commit to
releasing all of its code as open source."

I had no idea this was the case, pretty cool!

~~~
uggedal
Where is the source of Ansible Tower?

~~~
maxamillion
I heard at AnsibleFest is that it's undergoing legal review and export
compliance, no official timeline yet though.

~~~
smarterclayton
Export compliance is a huge PITA for red hat. Most open source projects and
libraries are not very well set up to meet requirements from the US gov. It
sucks down a ton of time, making sure everything is above board.

------
brightball
It's this mindset that makes me _want_ to support Red Hat as a company. As
good as the Fedora 25 experience has been for me, I'd love to see Linux laptop
vendors (especially Dell) make it an installed option soon. Maybe CentOS
laptops would make more sense for them from a sheer "stability for support
sake" experience.

~~~
kbenson
There's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there (or at least, there has been
in the past. I've been out of the loop on this for a few years). CentOS/RHEL
are definitely the stable, long-term distros, but they don't always map
exactly to a specific Fedora release, so you can't necessarily just build RPMs
for the last few Fedora versions and also support CentOS/RHEL. Historically,
when looking for software that wasn't already in a repo but packages were
provided, you would often see Ubuntu and Fedora packages but not RHEL (and
thus CentOS) packages.

RHEL's release schedule is really optimized around server and workstation time
scales, not desktop time scales. Ubuntu's is much more amenable to desktop
use, where you get an LTS release every 24 months. RHEL regularly goes 3-4
years now (with point release refreshes, but that's not too exciting for
desktop users). The flip side is that RHEL and CentOS have a much longer
support lifecycle.

~~~
bonzini
Point RHEL releases are certainly exciting for desktop users. You get lots of
driver and filesystem updates, and some point releases even rebased Mesa, X11
and GNOME. Plus, Software Collections such as Red Hat Developer Toolset
provide updated MySQL/MariaDB, Ruby, Python, GCC, etc.

------
m348e912
Red Hat was primary reason it took me a lot longer to adopt Linux than it
should have. Headbanging experiences with dependency hell and things not
working as expected left me extremely discouraged. It wasn't until I dabbled a
little with Solaris 7 and finally found Slackware that I realized that Linux
could "just work". IMO Red Hat's success was primarily based on the critical
mass of support behind it, not because it was the best distribution.

~~~
infodroid
Have you considered the possibility that your poor experience with Red Hat was
due to the fact you were new to Linux?

Encountering dependency hell is usually a sign that you don't know what you're
doing.

Red Hat "just works" and has always enjoyed the reputation of being the most
bulletproof distro if you could afford it.

~~~
duozerk
> has always enjoyed the reputation of being the most bulletproof distro if
> you could afford it.

I've always heard that said about Debian more than about Red Hat (though Red
Hat certainly is pretty stable).

Red Hat has a lot more success in businesses though because you can get
contractual support; which may not only be useful if you don't want to get the
skills in-house but also because your own customer may contractually require
it.

~~~
infodroid
Debian also has an impressive reputation for quality. In many cases it has
achieved, through its vast user and developer network, what Red Hat could only
achieve through paid staff and commercial resources.

But this is not true in all areas, especially in some aspects that matter to
companies such as training/certification and having good up-to-date
documentation.

And as a volunteer-driven project, I don't think Debian can ever be as
responsive to end-user problems or requirements as a commercial product can
be.

But it definitely gives Red Hat a good run for its money. For example, the
Debian LAMP stack has long been and still is the gold standard.

~~~
lima
Debian is truly a solid alternative. Ubuntu, less so. They're shipping an
impressive amount of new features, even on LTS releases, but their QA is
nowhere as good as Debian or Ubuntu's.

------
jaboutboul
I proudly worked for Red Hat for almost a decade and I can honestly say that
they've got pretty much everything right, from culture to work ethic to vision
and execution, all throughout its done with the community at the forefront. It
really is part of the company's DNA and they don't just talk the talk, they
walk the walk.

A great company, culture and a great place to work.

~~~
kerny
Why would you leave such a great place to work?

------
dhemmerling
This is a pretty timely statement of values and development ideology apropos
Canonical's sudden pivot from fragmenting the Linux desktop community.

~~~
tux1968
What are you referring to?

~~~
dhemmerling
Ditching Unity + Mir, and returning to Gnome. Convergence is good.
[https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-
cl...](https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-
iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/)

~~~
houst0n_
Canonical are ditching Mir? I must have missed this one. Was this discussed
here?

Page won't load for me but my first thought was this was a poor taste April
fools ;)

~~~
keithpeter
_" I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the
phone and convergence shell. We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to
GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS."_

I checked the date of the post really carefully as well. That is certainly a
change of direction.

~~~
houst0n_
I guess unity was the only thing driving Mir then? Is dropping one the same as
dropping both?

Seems like good news to me, having a significant player like canonical
contributing to the community instead of fragmenting without much benefit
can't be bad can it?

I don't use it on the desktop anyway, but I hope that moves in this direction
are rewarded by the community.

~~~
keithpeter
My (limited) understanding is that Gnome includes Wayland as an integral
component, and so reverting to Gnome as default desktop for 18.04 will
preclude use of the Mir graphical server.

~~~
snuxoll
Also, one of the "selling points" of Mir was its ability to use Android
drivers to make OEM adoption of Ubuntu Phone relatively easy.

If they're ditching mobile, there's literally no real benefit to Mir.

------
Apocryphon
From Orion's Arm, online massive sci-fi collaborative project
[http://orionsarm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Information_Age_(novel)/...](http://orionsarm.wikia.com/wiki/The_Information_Age_\(novel\)/Characters_and_timeline_of_Information_Age):

2015/46 - visual and tactile bodysuits enable advancement in personal Virtual
Realities, which begin to take the market share from TV, radio, films, and
other media.

2017/48 - first universal operational machine 'Harvey' constructed by a team
lead by Peter Shor at Bell labs, with funding from IBM, Lycos, RedHat and
Pepsi.

That bit from the timeline was probably written around 1999-2001 or so. Kind
of amazing that out of the tech companies mentioned, RedHat is the one that's
still doing pretty well.

------
throw7
The Red Hat retail to Enterprise shift still leaves a little bitter taste in
my mouth. I remember when they shut down public access to the rhel binaries
and the beginnings of Centos. All legit to the letter of the license and no
more.

I get it though. Anyone know how Centos under Red Hat is nowadays?

~~~
rayvd
Still thriving, to my knowledge. Scientific Linux is also out there as well.

My recollection is that Red Hat was actually working directly w/ CentOS on
some things to streamline their build processes. Red Hat doesn't see CentOS as
a threat (as it did OEL).

~~~
snuxoll
> Red Hat doesn't see CentOS as a threat (as it did OEL).

Quite honestly I wonder if this was a big motivator for them to take CentOS
under their wing. Why go with the totally unaffiliated community distribution
when you can go with Oracle for free (somehow)?

I've been using CentOS for some time now, and have never been happier as the
release cadence has only gotten better since RH started supporting the project
directly. There's no real reason I'd even consider Oracle Linux at this point
as a result, considering neither comes with commercial support without
purchasing a paid support subscription.

------
ElijahLynn
Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago. Absolutely love working for
this company! Especially that most engineers use GNU/Linux of some sort. Great
to see this!

~~~
rsync
"Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago."

I have something I'd like to ask you ...

Two years ago, at the RSA convention, I ran into a redhat employee and was
chatting about (unix) and I mentioned that I was the founder of rsync.net with
the expectation that he knew exactly who we were and what we did.

He had _no idea_ and had _never heard of us_. I felt like I had uncovered an
enormous flaw in my outreach and relations efforts if someone at redhat had no
idea who we were.

But now I'm not so sure ... I have a feeling that somehow the redhat ecosystem
and the people that use it are quite a bit differently focused than the HN
crowd and people that are UNIX enthusiasts for the sake of UNIX.

I wonder what you think ?

~~~
madhadron
To be fair, I've been developing on Linux for around twenty years now, and
I've never heard of rsync.net. Rsync, of course, but not rsync.net.

------
johnny_1010
What is so great about RH? When i had opportunity to use it, it look so bad
mostly because lack of current/decent software in repo. Maybe their support is
amazing?

~~~
rayvd
In the Enterprise world, we typically don't want latest and greatest. We want
stability for a long time. :)

~~~
systems
I think this is a myth, or at best relative, not all enterprises accept old
for stability

Many enterprises want up to date and stable software, and since you are paying
for stability, why shouldn't you get fairly recent and stable software

Most companies for example don't consider MS SQL 2016 as less stable than MS
SQL 2008 or 2012, most users expect the same level of stability from the
latest SQL Server than from earlier version, if not more because it's newer
and more advanced, might as well be more stable

I didnt use RedHat in a while, so I dont know how bad the situation is , I
hope it is not too bad

~~~
jjirsa
Nobody running a thousand of anything uses the first release of $X, whether $X
is a database or window manager or kernel or router firmware

SQL Server 2016 may be better than SQL Server 2008, but enterprises aren't
deploying it until it has baked a few months, and maybe sp1/sp2/some major
rollup ships for all the bugs the suckers find at rollout

~~~
lima
Exactly this.

We've hit more than one kernel regression in staging.

------
educar
Does anyone know of a redhat style model but not for enterprise? Like small
businesses and individuals.

~~~
ymse
I'm trying to start one. Small to mid-scale system integration and consulting
services, using only free software. Can you elaborate on your use case?

------
jjirsa
Spending most of my time near the JVM, the work they've done with Shenandoah
(and previously Netty) has been really incredible.

Love Redhat's OSS work.

------
xorblurb
I thought what makes them RH was their support contract asking for money for
(unsupported) CentOS installs, forbidding to republishing kernel patch series
if you want to continue to be supported, and the like.

But I've read that text, and have been utterly converted to RH. RH is the
ultimate good, go with them, and accept their demands.

------
rsync
Where is the redhat ecosystem trending with regard to CoW filesystems ?

Are people regularly using ZFS-on-linux with redhat ? Or is there an
officially sanctioned CoW choice from redhat ?

Or is that not on the radar at all right now ?

~~~
merb
Well RedHat defaults to XFS which has experimental support for CoW.

[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=0cbbc422d56668528f6efd1234fe908010284082)

Came in 4.9 and 4.8 (the commit provides the building block). And I also think
Dave Chinner (works at RH) put a lot of effort into it? (but I'm not 100%
sure)

~~~
lima
XFS is one of the most robust filesystems, too.

The xfstests testing suite is basically the standard for filesystem testing,
even for non-XFS filesystems.

------
rkv
OT: Does anyone know how to get an open-source kernel module signed by RedHat
and be included in the CentOS kernel? Do they have a form/contact for this
sort of request?

------
legulere
I really like the products not projects mantra. It kind of explains both the
problems that open source projects have, but also the failure of so many
Google projects.

------
digi_owl
RH have really been on a self-congratulating roll recently.

Feeling some pressure in the revenue stream from Oracle perhaps?

------
Safety1stClyde
This article seemed directionless and boring to me.

------
gerdesj
Redhat: I clicked on the link and was presented with a wall of words. Oh and
there was a bloody great piccy above the words that I had to scroll past. It
looked a bit rubbish. Is that really the best that a multi billion dollar
company's S&M department can come up with?

Back in the day, after I'd farted around with Slackware, Yggdrasil, Mandrake
etc I'd come back to RH but that was a long time ago and now is now.

Should I bother to read the blurb ... had a go ... had another go ... ... got
bored ... didn't finish - soz.

I believe that RH are an important component of the (GNU)Linux ecosystem but I
am not exactly fired up by this effort. I am fired up by software in general
and Libre software in particular.

OK ... another go at the marketing thing ... oh, apparently RH are the leading
force in open source software.

Piss off.

Open source software looks after itself.

Feel free to include say the kernel devs amongst your "life blood" Feel free
to read LWN's articles that describe how stuff is done

There is no doubt that RH has contributed to open source software in a
significant way but they are not on my radar these days.

Cheers Jon

------
yuhong
OT, but I wonder when Lennart Poettering was hired at Red Hat.

~~~
bonzini
I think about 10 years ago. I was hired 8 years ago and he had been around for
a while.

~~~
yuhong
Which would be after PulseAudio but before systemd.

~~~
bonzini
Definitely before systemd.

PulseAudio became default in Fedora 8 (August 2007 [1]), and the feature page
lists Lennart as the owner, [2] so the time checks out.

[1] [https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-
list/2007-Augus...](https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-
list/2007-August/msg01196.html)

[2]
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio)

------
dumindunuwan
> The Next Red Hat

Please build officially Red Hat backed Fedora Tables. This will be a win to
win situation for both sides.

~~~
fs111
There is probably a market of 10 such devices. Why would you waste money on
developing that?

------
digitalshankar
Red Hat or the Microsoft of Linux is the face palm of linux distros, forget
dependency hell, how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior
Debian package system or distros like Ubuntu? People just buy it for the
support even if the Red Hat they use is Gnome 2 and Firefox V.3.0. Then
finally RHCA/RHCE courses, i should get certified from this distro to prove my
Linux skills for the companies even though i am a debian guy? No Thanks.

~~~
kbenson
> how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package
> system

So, what makes the Debian package system superior? Having built multiple specs
in the past, but not any debs, I'm curious. Given that you can often convert
debs to RPMs and vice-versa, and can use the different package managers on
either type of repository, it's not obvious where one has any specific
benefit.

~~~
scrame
its not that .deb is a better than format than .rpm, but apt is better than
yum, as a dependency manager.

~~~
kbenson
I've actually never found that to be true, mostly due to a wird cognitive
disconnect between the desired outcome and the actions you need to perform.

Either use separate commands for different actions, or distinguish actions
with arguments, but don't do _both_. E.g. apt-get install, apt list, apt-file
update.

