Comment by sz4kerto
7 years ago
Guys, this is not just, or mainly not RH Linux. :(
- kernel development
- Ansible
- JBoss (I know HN hates Java, especially Java EE, but it was and is an important factor in enterprise OSS adoption)
- OpenShift
- Ceph, Gluster
All these are in danger, not just RHEL. I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS. Canonical is way behind Red Hat in terms of revenue (1/20).
Sad.
Also in practice glibc, systemd, GNOME, etc. have a ton of maintainers from Red Hat, even if they're not Red Hat-owned the way Ansible or Ceph is.
Yeah the whole freedesktop.org stack is to a large extent RedHat folks.
Not to mention LibreOffice.
Maybe they just bought redhat to kill off systemd. Ah, one can hope...
I don't know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS.
Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they're not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.
WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.
I'm happy for you, really. But you being in 6th place with 50M$ in revenue says worries me about the market.
big typo on your home page "by using our our open source"
1 reply →
Nice to see WSO2 represented here!
Congrats!
SUSE? They make a big song and dance (literally) of being open source, but I don't know if they're exclusively OSS.
[I work for SUSE.]
Nowadays, yes. SUSE Studio was the main proprietary thing we had in recent memory, and it was sunlit a few years ago with KIWI being its successor.
As far as I know, everything we develop is free software. You can get the full sources for any package in SLES or openSUSE (which isn't really SUSE but SUSE engineers work a lot on openSUSE) using zypper.
Personally, not only is everything I work on free software, I also exclusively work upstream-first (and I maintain several upstream projects like runc and some OCI projects). To be clear, this is not a company-wide thing -- many of my colleagues do not consistently contribute upstream -- but regardless all of our products' sources can be downloaded under free licenses. In fact you can get the sources from OBS (it's what openSUSE Leap is directly based on).
Now, there are some things that we distribute which are proprietary to certain customers (think flash or the NVIDIA drivers), but these are mostly because customers pay us to repackage other peoples proprietary code. We don't develop them. Personally I'd prefer if we didn't do this, but it is a very small part of our business.
1 reply →
Is openshift really open source? I was under the impression that nobody really runs origin on its own since it's far too hard. It seemed more like they just wanted to point out but it's open source, but you need support and a lot of know-how to actually use it.
OpenShift comes in two variants: Enterprise and Origin. Everything you can do in Enterprise can be done in Origin (Origin is ahead of Enterprise), but Enterprise comes with support.
I run Origin for my employer. It's pretty easy these days since you can do all of it with openshift-ansible and other related tools.
I know there are plenty of others like that, as well.
4 replies →
I help maintain a Chef recipe that installs both - it's quite feasible but not for the casual user.
https://github.com/IshentRas/cookbook-openshift3
Collabora?
Add Fedora to the list - while technically a community project, Red Hat is the main contributor.
It seems to me that Red Hat is based on Fedora. Fedora being the fast release gratis community version and Red Hat the slow release commercial corporate version.
Then CentOS would the community gratis version of Red Hat.
That's basically how Red Hat describes it:
Fedora - Community Innovation
RHEL - Commercial Production
CentOS - Community Adoption
Also with RH's recent acquisition of CoreOS, that suite will also be in IBM's arena. I work for "a corporate". We used to be big IBM shops (AIX, IBM Java, websphere, etc, etc...). But AIX is now hardly used and neither is websphere. It's mostly off the shelf k8s, wildfly and other open source projects deployed on RHEL (not my personal favorite since its kernel is way behind the times). I think this is IBMs way of playing catch up in the arena. I worry how they will handle entrenched "political interests" - e.g. Webpshere/AIX/etc.. and the more open source friendly RedHat suite. Pretty sure its going to be one big mess in a few years time.
They _did_ pay a lot of money to acquire them, so there's a reason to believe they're committed to fully integrating RH technology. Considering Jim, who certainly has an interest in the survival of open source software, signed this off also gives some hope.
Just because the people in charge sign off doesn’t mean they won’t later be fucked over anyway. E.g. Instagram & Whatsapp.
The OpenShift folks sit on a ton of critical posts in the Kubernetes project. I'd suspect this is what IBM wants, but it's a risk that they stop contributing to the open source project.
It goes much deeper than that, Red Hat maintains or contributes regularly to a wide swath of the Linux ecosystem. They also have a policy of open sourcing acquisitions. If the deal goes through, it's a dark day for open source software.
- kernel development
- OpenShift
I very much doubt these 2 are in any danger. In fact, I'd say these are the golden eggs IBM wants.
Agreed. Seems that most $largeco I come across used to use IBM AIX and are switching to RHEL. This seems more strategic than surface level only.
You might want to read up on your Aesop’s fables ;)
Red Hat's Open Source only approach does mean that none of these projects can be closed down, though: AFAIK, IBM are acquiring people and a brand, but no significant proprietary IP. If higher-ups at IBM turn out to be as clueless as Oracle, then key engineers will just walk and continue working on those projects elsewhere.
Where elsewhere? The landscape of options to be paid for your OSS has just become a barren field.
Yes, OSS as a concept can survive only on gratis work. However I'm not sure the portfolio of projects supported largely by Red Hat maintainers could. If maintainers are forced to start walking as they did with Oracle I expect to see quite a few projects fall into disrepair.
I guess they can start a new company and keep working on the same products. The community would have to change to their new repo's but other than that RedHat could get a new start, with a different name.
2 replies →
Also Atomic/CoreOS - this will probably be cut now, perhaps even before it is complete.
http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2018/06/welcome-to-fedora-c...
I doubt it. When you read the IBM and Core OS acquisition press releases side by side you get a lot of the same "hybrid cloud" language.
Update: Near as I can tell the acquisition completed in March/April.
We'll see. Often talk like that is just buzzword soup. What matters to large companies like IBM is money from services, not owning the coolest tech stack. If it is clearly contributing lots of money or it has a champion in IBM they'll keep it.
In progress greenfield projects with no obvious monetisation are just the sort of thing that gets cut in this sort of merger, after the assurances that redhat will be run as a completely independent unit are forgotten and a new manager comes in looking to trim fat.
I use coreos and am now very concerned about its future.
2 replies →
Pivotal is probably next in line for size for independent enterprise OSS but still a fraction the size of Red Hat, at under $1b in revenue. And some proprietary bits.
Also CoreOS, recently acquired by Redhat.
IBM would rather push Spectrum Scale/GPFS over Ceph or Gluster
Spectrum Scale Support is one of the most horrific things I've encountered in my entire professional career.
- etcd
Also everything CoreOS-related.
CoreOS :(
Super pessimistic point of view. Why do you think these are all in danger? These are things that people and more importantly enterprises use. Why would IBM ruin that?
Because IBM ruins everything it touches?
It’s possible they don’t want to. But they will.
Exactly, these are products to monetize and make money from.
Sure rationally the products should be a success, that's why IBM bought them. But GloboMegaCorps have a consistent record of acquiring great products then running them into the ground by smothering them with shitty internal policies.
It seems like a fair % of SVers haven't had the pleasure of working for one of these Kafkaesque giants. They operate on dream logic and risk aversion.
2 replies →
> I don't know about any other company that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind OSS.
Doesnt Microsoft tick all those boxes? Even if they aren't exclusively an open source company, they are "absolutely behind OSS" if you go by how much open source code they have contributed.
How on earth is Microsoft "absolutely" behind OSS? Which of their main products is Open Source? Windows? Office? SQL Server? Azure? Exchange? What exactly makes Microsoft a company "absolutely behind OSS?"
Their stupid boot loader still ignores any other operating system for god's sake.
Kudos to people at Microsoft's Marketing and "developer relations" department who won the hearts of developers by allowing TypeScript and VSCode to be FOSS. Suddenly MS is "Absolutely behind OSS".
I work in the public sector in Denmark, and we’ve delt a lot with both IBM and Microsoft over the past 25 years.
Microsoft has been one of our best partners, including for the open source software we run, especially since Azure became their mission.
IBM has been one of the worst, so bad that I’d dread making any deals with them ever again.
I wouldn’t say MS is fully behind OSS though, they contribute a lot these years, but their main goal is still to sell you Azure. I think they won the hearts and minds with .Net core though, I mean VSC is the best ide and typescript is typescript, but the future of a lot of web programming lies within .Net core.
17 replies →
If you are including the boot loader, don't leave out the file systems.
Meh. They have a bad reputation due to calling open word source software cancer the new windows business model.
Also, while their engineers are certainly smart, their software seems very crusty (the down side of infinite backwards compatibility) and usually doesn't play well at all with existing open source software. Thus: Mostly useless.
Amusingly, they're damned both ways at this point, since many of the Windows 10 complaints have, in fact, been breaks in backward compatibility.
1 reply →
The early 2000s called and would like their objection back. Microsoft isn't that same company any more and haven't been for a long time. Sure, some of their technology is pretty awful but they definitely changed their tune around OSS.
2 replies →
Mostly useless projects though for people that want speed and Linux-native open source.
On the other hand it might mean the end for SystemD!
zing!
Debian and Ubuntu still use it.