Comment by Kye

7 years ago

Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Every new cloud thing touted its pre-configured Ubuntu images, for example. Even Microsoft started with Ubuntu with WSL.

Maybe that's why a still multi-billion dollar company decided to cash out even as Linux seems to be making inroads. People used Red Hat for the same reason they used IBM: it was corporate, understood corporate needs, and knew how to serve them. Now it seems like corporations are offloading IT to AWS and friends with Ubuntu.

Everyone talks about what Canonical did for the desktop while missing what they did for friendly apt-based Linux on the server with SLAs and LTSes and support contracts from a company that speaks corporation.

And if all the paying customers switch to Debian-based distributions...

The writing is on the wall.

9 comments

Kye

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jabl  7 years ago

RH back in the day made a lot of hay by being the go-to option for enterprises migrating proprietary UNIX workloads to x86+Linux. But I guess that market is mostly saturated by now.

What I worry about is not the fate of RHEL per se, in the end it's just a distro among others. What I worry about, as a huge FOSS fan, is the fate of RH engineering which is certainly one of the biggest individual upstream FOSS contributors on a lot of places in the stack. By comparison, the Canonical engineering team is absolutely puny. If the work that RH does disappears, we're going to see a lot slower progress in the FOSS ecosystem.

tapoxi  7 years ago

You'll see a lot of preconfigured CentOS images, not RHEL because of the licensing. Red Hat's recent (and sensible) play has been on-prem Kubernetes with OpenShift.

lima  7 years ago

Ubuntu has a long way to go before they reach Red Hat levels of quality assurance.

rodgerd  7 years ago

> Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention.

Ubuntu don't have JBoss or OpenShift, amongst other things. Neither do SuSE, unfortunately.

  • unethical_ban  7 years ago

    Ubuntu has its own orchestration toolsets, and I wonder if RHAT only had the upper hand with being the incumbent in the US and buying things like Ansible and OpenShift and CoreOS.

    Ubuntu runs Systemd, it's a modern distro - if someone wants to take Openshift core and other components and run it on Ubuntu, it will happen.