Comment by bb88
7 years ago
Having been a linux user for 20 years now, I'm not worried.
Mostly because in the OS market there is enough competition that didn't exist back in the 1990's when RedHat was founded around the Linux kernel. And we continue to have valid choices in the Linux market.
And as we move forward into Kubernetes, we're looking at lightweight OS's to host a single purpose microservice. Most companies don't really need the full features that a full-service Linux OS offers anymore.
Another example of this trend is the declining use of Sendmail and it's alternatives. There are much better ways of handling email now than using Sendmail. Yes, it too was popular in the 1990's, and while people still use it, it's more likely for startups to use something like gmail for employee email, because it's just painless.
> Mostly because in the OS market there is enough competition that didn't exist back in the 1990's when RedHat was founded around the Linux kernel.
I'd disagree; the 90s had a lot more OS diversity in the for-profit sector than we see today.
Agreed. There has been a massive amount of tech consolidation happening lately. I assume as a result of all that overseas cash that got repatriated with the tax changes.
ofc you realise that one of the major contributors to the Kubernetes ecosystem is Redhat.
So IBM now control key elements of k8s setups like etcd (a CoreOS project, ergo a Redhat Project, ergo an IBM project)
At the same time, K8S team has been rapidly standardizing everything and turning it into a very modular system. etcd is pretty much a "done" project, but if it ever goes bad, it can easily be replaced.
If IBM ever takes etcd in a direction that k8s does not like, the k8s fork of etcd will be the one that's relevant going forward.