My company (20,000+ employees) just started an engagement with Red Hat this week. We went with them for exactly what the article describes: open source software, packaged in an enterprise (i.e. expensive) fashion to make it palatable. We could have implemented these tools ourselves, but the executives appreciate the support contract and training, and I'm already seeing how we can benefit from the consultants' knowledge and clout.
Red Hat is making a very strong play in the microservices/container space. Openshift is a pretty dang good k8s distro, and they're also doing a lot in the API space (especially with 3scale).
Thanks for this. Makes sure such feedback gets back to your TSM, SDM, PM, etc. Email, CSat, or otherwise. We at Red Hat REALLY, REALLY appreciate all feedback. It is how we improve our services and products.
Im sceptic none the less- usually buying into enterprise software, they try to lock there customers into a walled garden, where they are the sole provider of upgrades, new software and tailored products.
I have yet to see the enterprise software, that takes the step back like steam did and provides a plattform for cutomers to trade sofware additions.
I think this comment is misleading; in many situation i believe you can upgrade to upstream if you want, simply you lose RH tech support.
In steam case they are not the one taking the blame when a game crashes (they take a image damage if they have too many unplayable games and they are getting criticism for it as of now for various reason) but the developer is expected to produce a game working on all platform it support as-is
That's funny how things are done in big shops. It's pretty much okay to spend a good six digit sum for some tool done by 3rd party, but just impossible to pay 100x less to someone in-house who could add a couple of features into existing in-house software on a weekend.
This is not how paid software development works (beyond maybe stealth mode/no customers start-ups- if you have no money then you do what you have to). If you have a going business, the trade-off is totally in favor of paying someone not at your company to do this sort of thing.
All up, even a new grad (= the cheapest you will find) in $NotSeattleOrSVButStillUS costs your company about one hundred fifty thousand dollars a year (more in SV or Seattle). You could have one of them spend several months coming up to speed on how to fix weird device driver issues necessary to get the latest kernel patches to run on your DB server, which costs you minimum 50k and gives you tremendous risk (what happens if a necessary security patch comes out while she is on vacation? If you train two people that's twice the costs.) Or you pay someone else to worry about that. Red Hat will charge you 2k for patches for a year for a standard server and if it doesn't work, will fix it.
If writing OS network stacks are a part of your company's core mission, go ahead and do it. If the one sentence description of where your companies money comes from doesn't mention anything in kernel land, having programmers spin up on that is a waste of their time and your money. You cut RH a check and get your programmers to write you something that does bring in money, because every minute they spend porting in patches is a minute they aren't earning you money.
As a side note, if your business plans for your developers to be working on a weekend you work for a terrible business and all the employees should leave and go to a place where they aren't exploited.
> but just impossible to pay 100x less to someone in-house who could add a couple of features into existing in-house software on a weekend.
They don't spend more money for fun. They do it because they've had experiences of many on-a-weekend projects become critical-path nightmares.
Owning your own bespoke platform is a giant money hole. The arguments in favour of doing so are plug interchangeable with "let's write our own operating system kernel / database / programming language / HTTP server / CPU architecture / web framework".
I also think it's a bit rude to assume that Red Hat has hundreds of brilliant engineers just phoning it in. I work for Pivotal and we are flat. out. every. day. writing this stuff, because it turns out that this stuff is a lot harder than it looks from the outside.
And the reason it looks easier is because we did the hard work for you.
> They don't spend more money for fun. They do it because they've had experiences of many on-a-weekend projects become critical-path nightmares.
yet strangely these sorts of straw-man organizations adamantly refuse to open source any such projects even if they have nothing to do with their business because of the perceived loss of intellectual property value..
Because strangely, it's really expensive to audit your code, it's really expensive to get sued if you flub it, it's expensive to replace all the bits you can't opensource and it buys you approximately nothing in return except a comment on Hacker News accusing you of some ulterior motive.
if you're a business with capital-M-Money, and you put "hello world" up on github, if someone wipes out their machine running it they're going to sue you. Doesn't matter what license you put on it, you're going to need the lawyers and they cost more money than you would have theoretically gained by putting your crappy "hello world" with the accidental "rm -fr" command in it up on github.
Often times, if the work is critical enough, you could argue paying the 3rd party with a track record, insurance or a strict contract for delivery, support is the logical choice. Sure someone in-house could do it, but if they screw up or create something that bites you down the line, is it going to end up costing more.
The cynical way to interpret this behavior though is the old "No one got fired for buying IBM". Paying a big name outside company is the safe choice because you can always blame them, but if you decided to go with the in house guy, there's no one else to blame.
You got downvoted for the hyperbole, but there's a lot of truth to this, in my experience. I don't think this is limited to big shops, either. There is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to place more value on things that have cost them more; I've experienced this myself when I've purchased a new vehicle—all of a sudden, it's the best vehicle on the market (it must have been, since I made the decision to buy it). The same thing happens with large business contracts.
As an in-house employee, it is incredibly frustrating when a vendor is automatically more credible than me, even though I've spent years building knowledge of my own company's business and systems. But I have experienced this both at my current 20,000+ employee enterprise, and a previous company where there were 5 employees.
Red Hat is making a very strong play in the microservices/container space. Openshift is a pretty dang good k8s distro, and they're also doing a lot in the API space (especially with 3scale).