Red Hat Succeeds At Becoming $2B USD Open-Source Firm

[MartinN]

One of the few companies run by people who get Linux/open source and how to make money off it. Keep it up.

[liam]

Canonical were said to have financial problems for many years already, and operate at loss. They can't seem to figure out their focus, unlike RedHat.

RH struggled as well, until Paul Cormier fixed their sales model. He saved that company.

Congrats RH! Revenue predictions are right on track.

[SystemCrasher]

While I'm not a big fan of RH distros, I can't deny RH is a major player in the opensource world, who contributes a lot of improvements here and there to many key pieces, Linux kernel included. Whatever, RH really deserves these billions.

[azari]

Canonical seems to be repeating a lot of the same mistakes that many early "open source businesses" made; they keep trying to "own" a piece of the desktop Linux stack because they're approaching the market the way Apple, Microsoft, and Google approach it. They feel that if there isn't some hook to keep people dependent on them, that anyone could just come along and hijack their whole operation. Apple has the proprietary userland, Microsoft has proprietary everything, and Google has Google Apps which hook into their proprietary services.

What they don't understand is that the primary reason we don't want to use those platforms is precisely because of the various forms of lock-in, and so we complain about Mir and then Canonical staff says things like "why don't people complain about Google's SurfaceFlinger, but complain about Mir", as if to imply that there is some sort of double standard; the reality is there is no double standard, the hope people placed in Canonical was precisely that they would not be like Apple and those other companies, not that they would do the exact same shit.

Red Hat on the other hand, went through a lot of growing pains looking for a sustainable business model, so they "get it", and they aren't trying to control anything, they instead lead by making good technology that people want to use; they don't worry about "what happens if my competitor uses systemd and it's no longer a RHEL/Fedora exclusive?", they take the leap of faith like Indiana Jones, and understand that if they keep being a technology leader, that they will be seen as the go-to services provider for anything related to Linux.

Canonical would be so much more successful if they focused on developing stuff that people actually want, but the problem is if they did that, then other distributions would want to have a say in the design/direction of the project, and if they couldn't, they would eventually fork; Canonical's paranoia causes them to constantly reinvent the wheel, and by doing so they essentially guarantee that only they have the stuff they work on, but at a massive cost that mirrors the high development costs of proprietary software, since you don't get the benefit of crowdsourcing. It's a double-edged sword, and one that Canonical will eventually impale themselves on, if they don't learn from their mistakes.

[bkor]

Do people and companies really want and use pulseaudio, network manager and gnome3? gstreamer, wicd,and xfce are much more faster and stable. I do not like redhat influence in Debian, redhat sw is bloatware that cause extra work when installing a new system. Nasa might share the same view,
http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/...o-airlock.html

Red Hat contributes to _everything_. PulseAudio was _NOT_ started by Red Hat. Red Hat spends an awful amount of developers to linux kernel, glibc, gcc. Instead of hating Red Hat because they're so big; hate/question the rest for being and staying tiny in comparison. Further, WTF are you on about with "cause extra work": super vague statement so nobody can point out that you have shit all to say?!?

[rabcor]

pulse and gstreamer aren't really comparables, and network manager may be crap but so is wicd. And while I agree xfce is a bit nicer than gnome 3 (which is personal opinion) I think cinnamon is probably the best mainstream desktop environment at the moment, hands down (why do you think mint is so popular despite all it's massive flaws?)

[pal666]

Do people and companies really want and use pulseaudio, network manager and gnome3? gstreamer, wicd,and xfce are much more faster and stable.

yes, we want and use it. it is stable and fast and gstreamer is included in gnome3

[pal666]

Nasa might share the same view,
http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/...o-airlock.html

it's not nasa's view it's bullshit article's view. if you read article past the title, you will learn that iss never had any redhat, so they are unable to drop it into airlock. they are migrating from windows and scientific linux. and btw, from scientific linux you could derive that scientists share redhat's view

[duby229]

Canonical seems to be repeating a lot of the same mistakes that many early "open source businesses" made; they keep trying to "own" a piece of the desktop Linux stack because they're approaching the market the way Apple, Microsoft, and Google approach it. They feel that if there isn't some hook to keep people dependent on them, that anyone could just come along and hijack their whole operation. Apple has the proprietary userland, Microsoft has proprietary everything, and Google has Google Apps which hook into their proprietary services.

What they don't understand is that the primary reason we don't want to use those platforms is precisely because of the various forms of lock-in, and so we complain about Mir and then Canonical staff says things like "why don't people complain about Google's SurfaceFlinger, but complain about Mir", as if to imply that there is some sort of double standard; the reality is there is no double standard, the hope people placed in Canonical was precisely that they would not be like Apple and those other companies, not that they would do the exact same shit.

Red Hat on the other hand, went through a lot of growing pains looking for a sustainable business model, so they "get it", and they aren't trying to control anything, they instead lead by making good technology that people want to use; they don't worry about "what happens if my competitor uses systemd and it's no longer a RHEL/Fedora exclusive?", they take the leap of faith like Indiana Jones, and understand that if they keep being a technology leader, that they will be seen as the go-to services provider for anything related to Linux.

Canonical would be so much more successful if they focused on developing stuff that people actually want, but the problem is if they did that, then other distributions would want to have a say in the design/direction of the project, and if they couldn't, they would eventually fork; Canonical's paranoia causes them to constantly reinvent the wheel, and by doing so they essentially guarantee that only they have the stuff they work on, but at a massive cost that mirrors the high development costs of proprietary software, since you don't get the benefit of crowdsourcing. It's a double-edged sword, and one that Canonical will eventually impale themselves on, if they don't learn from their mistakes.

I pretty much more or less agree with you. I certainly don't agree about RH wasting their money on software that sucks ass (Gnome3). But it -is- their money to waste and in the mean time they are also contributing to and improving every other part of the stack. Desktop Linux is certainly better off with RH doing well.

EDIT: Whenever I sell a retail Linux, It's Redhat for a good reason.

[gilboa]

Do people and companies really want and use pulseaudio, network manager and gnome3?

Yes. (Even though I personally don't like GNOME3)
Somehow I can see my users using wicd instead of Network Manager to connect to their DSL / Ethernet / WIFI / Mobile phone, and/or revert to manually configuring ALSA instead of simply connecting their BT / USB device and letting PA do the nasty work.

Just for the sake of the argument, how many desktop Linux users do you manage?

- Gilboa