What makes us Red Hat
redhat.com
redhat.com
Time has shown that Red Hat really knows what they're doing, on many different levels, and they're the most successful free software business in history.
Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history?
Asking seriously, since I am not aware of any other examples. And I suppose it depends on your definitions of success, of course.
They're not even in the same ballpark. RH has 10k employees and USD 1bn in revenue with a market cap of ~15bn, these guys just seem to be a ~500 person WordPress shop.
That's too bad because I like what they've done in terms of usability of Linux outside Unity. I switched to Mint at that point until the distro got subverted way too easily. Then back to Ubuntu with shitty Unity. I can't wait for the new one without it that was just announced since the mobile thing didn't pan out.
Are you sure you meant "open source software" not free software?
The fact that you won't get official updates after a trial period (or if your subscription runs out) isn't against the principles of free software. As a user, you still have the source code and have the freedom to maintain the distribution yourself (nobody does, but the freedom is still there).
The difference is that Atlassian sells plenty of proprietary software and add ons too, while the only proprietary software that Red Hat sells comes from recent acquisitions (e.g., Ansible Tower), and it is all in the process of becoming open source.
Red Hat has a great track record for open sourcing software from companies that they acquired.
Then it is not open source. Open source has a strict definition, from the OSI.
(I'm not sure if it's still a Service Mark or not, though it was at one time.)
It is a bit tricky here. Based on the situation, the same software can be some times be open source AND free software, or open source only (ie, not free software).
Eg: Linux kernel. When it is run on your computer, usually it is open source and mostly free-software (linux-libre would be fully free). When it is run on your router, they (vendor) shall give you the source code, but may not allow you to modify it. This is violation of freedom 1 (The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish). Then it won't be a free software, but just open source. You can't even confirm whether the source code they gave corresponds to the binary run in the router.
scala, mail servers come to mind quickly
To have a business, you have to have something scarce to sell people - it could be simply your time, but that's difficult to scale. For most companies it's some kind of product, but open source products are inherently not scarce.
So to succeed, you have to have a source of scarcity in there somewhere, and that's not always easy, on top of the fact that no startup is ever easy.
what if you don't have hot shot VC buddies from princeton, and didn't go to stanford, and need to make $1m in cash to do your real business idea? all of a sudden doing paid features for an open source project or doing consulting sounds like a fantastic idea because that will get you to $1m, almost guaranteed (if you're generally capable)
hint: that's pretty much everyone.
I would heartily suggest avoiding it, as it's also not scalable even at a small size.
Look at the kind of stuff the 'micropreneur' guys do, like patio11's bingo thing. That was small (I agree with you there) but still something that once running, kept making money without a daily grind like consulting.
maybe you're not getting what i'm saying because it involves investing (aka betting) your own money into something.
Creating a product - even a small scale one - is much more of an investment (and a risk), because while you're building it, it earns nothing. The payoff is that it can make money while you're asleep.
Otherwise, there are thousands of small open source companies that do quite well for themselves. If you look at pure profit however, Redhat does abysmally compared to say Microsoft or Apple, or any traditional proprietary software company. Due to this, the valuation for a purely open source company have to be lower which prevents a lot of the VC funding frenzy for "the next unicorn company". If you want small and sustainable OSS can work. Otherwise, Redhat is the black swan in that they pulled off something thought to be impossible.
They have a lot of potential that's underutilized.
I lost a lot of faith in Mozilla years ago when the Firefox brand was starting to get really big and the Linux releases for everything Mozilla would lag behind by a few months. As a very early and avid Mozilla Phoenix/Firebird user, I lost faith in the brand as a whole. Sure they're doing wonderful things with webgl and the bleeding edge javascript stuff, but so is Google, and arguably to a greater degree.
Their potential is underutilized due to pathetic leadership, which will continue to flounder until that is resolved.
Which products? Firefox and Thunderbird are updating constantly and I don't see a difference between Linux and Windows there.
Nowadays their releases are always in sync, but that is a more recent thing. I also seem to recall Linux support was much better with Firefox 4 and after, but that was a long time ago and it is a bit fuzzy for me currently.
https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Audit...
Hundreds of millions definitely counts as big money to a pee on techie like myself!
That's the job of the linux distro, not mozilla.
Hortonworks is already public and almost fully-open source, although their market cap is under a billion ($670MM today).
Edit: I missed that the billion refers to revenue, and that RedHat is >2 billion. That's extremely impressive! These data platform companies are doing well, but I think they're still doing far under a billion in annual revenue.
Oracle is the only multi billion dollar database-centric company. Faceboom is the only successful social media (twitter is micro blogging or whatever you call it) Microsoft is the only desktop blah blah Amazon blah blah
That is a result of being early, acquire many small successful companies ex. Kvm, ceph, Ansible,... And being really truely opensource.
No one else is truely opensource, ex. Mysql used to sell exceptions and prosperity features instead of selling Enterprise support.
Was that a Freudian slip or something? :-)
I'm going to have to remember that one.
Now that's a great ad agency.
And yet the word free does not appear anywhere in TFA.
Now I can't find any mention of free software on their site's About pages.
I may still have the shards it finally splintered into one day as I was rescuing a system....
"Red Hat also commits to keeping our commercial products 100% pure open source. Even when we acquire a proprietary software company, we commit to releasing all of its code as open source."
I had no idea this was the case, pretty cool!
I spent an entire weekend setting up Ubuntu, and then wss extremely jaded when I could barely get anything to work, and even getting Flash in the browser was a huge pain in the ass. So I only use my windows side partition now, and its just easier....
Still mostly do everything on my Mac anyway
One thing that you have to remember is that what is easy and hard in Linux is different than what is easy and hard in Windows and MacOS.
Flash is one example. Since it is not Free and Open Source Software, the Linux distributions cannot redistribute it to you without risking being sued by Adobe. So if you want Flash you will need to jump some hoops.
On the other hand, if the software you want is in your distro's package repository then the installation experience blows Windows and MacOS out of the water.
RHEL's release schedule is really optimized around server and workstation time scales, not desktop time scales. Ubuntu's is much more amenable to desktop use, where you get an LTS release every 24 months. RHEL regularly goes 3-4 years now (with point release refreshes, but that's not too exciting for desktop users). The flip side is that RHEL and CentOS have a much longer support lifecycle.
I'd love if CentOS / RHEL would become Fedora LTS.
Encountering dependency hell is usually a sign that you don't know what you're doing.
Red Hat "just works" and has always enjoyed the reputation of being the most bulletproof distro if you could afford it.
A good sysadmin would know how to avoid dependency hell. For example this might include taking basic precautions such as testing changes in a chroot or development/testing environment, before rolling them out.
I'm not saying the problem didn't exist, only that it wasn't an actual problem if you knew what you were doing.
Also, RedHat didn't ship with (relatively) much software (install everything was an option). Now you've got to configure; make; make install. Now you've got two parallel installations of libraries and software.
Oh. And the RPM database would die periodically (rpm anything would hang), requiring a reinstallation.
Since moving to Debian over a decade ago, I think I had to configure; make; make install something only once (it was an old and unmaintained Java library on SF.net). Almost everything (open source) is in the Repos.
There is no distro today that provides packages for all the software you will ever want, or the specific version that you need. At some point, you will resort to installing software from outside the officially-supported sources, whether from experimental or user-maintained package repositories, or from a third party in binary or source form.
Until recently, this was an operation that wasn't guaranteed to be easy or straightforward or risk-free. In the worst case, it could even screw up your system in ways that are time-consuming to diagnose and fix.
In the example you gave, I would conclude that OpenOffice didn't package their RPM well, because it ended up driving RH6 users down the rabbit hole. At the very least, they could have unpacked all the files under /opt and provided static binaries, or included all the libs in the archive. Many packages still do that today, such as Vagrant, which installs under /opt/vagrant and includes its own Ruby interpreter there.
Nowadays there are efforts underway to make installing custom software safe and easy, projects like: flatpak, OSTree, appimage, and snap. Hopefully we can reach a point where you can install whatever version of whatever software you want without breaking anything.
Generally, nowadays you keep a system relatively up to date using apt-get update and upgrade, pacman or yum. Back then all you had was RPM (the equivalent of dpkg).
The attitude was "you want new versions? Go to upstream, download the .RPM and install".
Now, OO (don't remember if it existed back then) depends on certain versions of (say) GTK.
What do you do?
Go to gtk.org and download the rpm.
Rinse and repeat
I never install anything from source. Packages from yum repositories only.
Upgrade OpenOffice with a downloaded RPM? No. The point of RedHat is stability for enterprises. If you want the latest version of everything, RedHat is the wrong distribution.
I've always heard that said about Debian more than about Red Hat (though Red Hat certainly is pretty stable).
Red Hat has a lot more success in businesses though because you can get contractual support; which may not only be useful if you don't want to get the skills in-house but also because your own customer may contractually require it.
But this is not true in all areas, especially in some aspects that matter to companies such as training/certification and having good up-to-date documentation.
And as a volunteer-driven project, I don't think Debian can ever be as responsive to end-user problems or requirements as a commercial product can be.
But it definitely gives Red Hat a good run for its money. For example, the Debian LAMP stack has long been and still is the gold standard.
1) Identify a really interesting piece of software, like OpenFOAM, with (unbeknownst to me) lots of dependencies
2) Take a half hour walk to the local library with my shiny 4gb flash drive (89 dollars, a Christmas present to myself).
3) Download the .tar.gz of the software.
4) Walk home.
5) Unpack the .tar.gz and run ./configure. Watch it fail.
6) Walk back to the library to download the missing dependency. Walk home.
7) Goto 5.
I ended up very irritated that configure always fails on the first missing dependency, instead of comprehensively listing the missing requirements in one go. Things did get a bit easier when I learned to scour the documention for any libraries referenced, but of course reading the docs still often required a trip back home to unpack the tarball...
Thanks to everyone who did read that book and others cover to cover (or wrote them), so that my linux install just works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Network_Administrator's_...
I didn't give up Mandriva until near the end, when I jumped ship to Ubuntu.
After switching to Fedora because we're using CentOS at work, I've come to like it. DNF and yum are fine replacements for APT. A PPA analog (copr) is just a 'dnf copr enable user/project_name'. 'dnf history' shows every transaction on my system and makes it easy to undo installations.
The only things I don't like on an out-of-the-box Fedora installation are the stupid, touchscreen sized title bars in GNOME 3 and SELinux - which is fortunately easily disabled.
Need to set up device #25?
Upload and run. You're guaranteed to get the same system as device #24,23...
You can keep it in source control, etc.
If it (or guix - no systemd FTW) takes off, I can't imagine using another distro again.
Unfortunately, though, it doesn't have enough maintainers yet (a year or so ago nginx was some 4 or 5 versions behind, and they definitely don't do backports/LTS).
GuixSD seems nice, but seems to have no method for installing non-free software, which is, unfortunately, necessary for many setups.
One thing I would like to have is a Nix/Guix wrapper for Debian packages (and possibly other packages/distros), so I could take advantage of Debian's robust ecosystem, and NixOS/GuixSD's totally functional environment.
What does one do to fix the title bars?
cat << EOF > ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
/* Make window title bars more compact.
*
* From: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/276951
*/
headerbar entry,
headerbar spinbutton,
headerbar button,
headerbar separator {
margin-top: 2px; /* same as headerbar side padding for nicer proportions */
margin-bottom: 2px;
}
EOFTake a look at the zypper SAT solver (from opensuse) that powers Redhat's DNF package manager today - https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Libzypp_satsolver
The package management of today is a very different beast altogether. And we are on the cusp of the next generation - snap and flatpak.
Fixed that for you.
May be true, but they're given so much distribution independent code back, that I'm really glad they made it. It even seems that they contribute more to desktop Linux (GNOME, PulseAudio, systemd, kernel devs etc.), than Canonical does, (they seem to focus on Ubuntu-specific solutions mostly), which is pretty neat for a server vendor.
I know someone did a blog or article on the RPM format internals, but damned if i can find it with a quick search. I just get a whole bunch of Fedora and Red Hat links...
https://blog.bethselamin.de/posts/argh-pm.html
seems to be what i was thinking about earlier.
A great company, culture and a great place to work.
Page won't load for me but my first thought was this was a poor taste April fools ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631
Can't find a cached version of the actual ubuntu article though.
Edit: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_6qrnN...
No mention of mir though?
I checked the date of the post really carefully as well. That is certainly a change of direction.
Seems like good news to me, having a significant player like canonical contributing to the community instead of fragmenting without much benefit can't be bad can it?
I don't use it on the desktop anyway, but I hope that moves in this direction are rewarded by the community.
If they're ditching mobile, there's literally no real benefit to Mir.
The entire Linux eco-system exists of competing things. Nginx vs Apache, sendmail vs qmail vs postfix, ... the list goes on. There is no singular 'desktop' when it comes to Linux, and there will never be one. Thinking and hoping there will be is simply not understanding what drives the whole Linux world: options and competition.
2015/46 - visual and tactile bodysuits enable advancement in personal Virtual Realities, which begin to take the market share from TV, radio, films, and other media.
2017/48 - first universal operational machine 'Harvey' constructed by a team lead by Peter Shor at Bell labs, with funding from IBM, Lycos, RedHat and Pepsi.
That bit from the timeline was probably written around 1999-2001 or so. Kind of amazing that out of the tech companies mentioned, RedHat is the one that's still doing pretty well.
I get it though. Anyone know how Centos under Red Hat is nowadays?
My recollection is that Red Hat was actually working directly w/ CentOS on some things to streamline their build processes. Red Hat doesn't see CentOS as a threat (as it did OEL).
Quite honestly I wonder if this was a big motivator for them to take CentOS under their wing. Why go with the totally unaffiliated community distribution when you can go with Oracle for free (somehow)?
I've been using CentOS for some time now, and have never been happier as the release cadence has only gotten better since RH started supporting the project directly. There's no real reason I'd even consider Oracle Linux at this point as a result, considering neither comes with commercial support without purchasing a paid support subscription.
It was probably the best thing to happen to CentOS provided RedHat will continue letting them be an independent distribution.
I have something I'd like to ask you ...
Two years ago, at the RSA convention, I ran into a redhat employee and was chatting about (unix) and I mentioned that I was the founder of rsync.net with the expectation that he knew exactly who we were and what we did.
He had no idea and had never heard of us. I felt like I had uncovered an enormous flaw in my outreach and relations efforts if someone at redhat had no idea who we were.
But now I'm not so sure ... I have a feeling that somehow the redhat ecosystem and the people that use it are quite a bit differently focused than the HN crowd and people that are UNIX enthusiasts for the sake of UNIX.
I wonder what you think ?
I could see many people never hearing of rsync.net though, until you have the need you usually don't know about stuff. Well, unless you are on HN, but even then I gloss over a lot of stuff that currently isn't in my "need" bucket.
It's not a bad thing though. It allows them to be super-expert at whatever it is they know and leverage that knowledge to assist customers.
So someone who is deep into encryption may not necessarily know what Rsync does, he is not devops after all and might have never maintained a server, and doesn't keep local backups (shame on them though) to need to use rsync.
There are also marketing people and finance people, etc.
That's a bit presumptuous isn't it? While many people have heard of rsync I've only heard of you because of HackerNews, and not everyone reads this site. When I first saw the URL "rsync.net" I didn't think of "backups", I thought that you maintained rsync or provided some sort of support for rsync.
> But now I'm not so sure ... I have a feeling that somehow the redhat ecosystem and the people that use it are quite a bit differently focused than the HN crowd and people that are UNIX enthusiasts for the sake of UNIX.
I work for SUSE, not RedHat, but our culture is incredibly similar (and I collaborate with people from RedHat every day). The makeup of companies like us is incredibly varied, and it's not really fair to make generalisations like that.
I know quite a few people who work for RedHat and SUSE who are super obsessive about Unix and have hobbies that are massively tied to programming. But that doesn't suddenly mean that they will automatically know every startup that does cloud storage.
We have no issues running RHEL7 under VMware.
Disclaimer, I happily work for RH and today's blog has me ear-to-ear grinning.
Information specific to security backporting policies here: https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/backporting/
What features are you interested in?
Many enterprises want up to date and stable software, and since you are paying for stability, why shouldn't you get fairly recent and stable software
Most companies for example don't consider MS SQL 2016 as less stable than MS SQL 2008 or 2012, most users expect the same level of stability from the latest SQL Server than from earlier version, if not more because it's newer and more advanced, might as well be more stable
I didnt use RedHat in a while, so I dont know how bad the situation is , I hope it is not too bad
SQL Server 2016 may be better than SQL Server 2008, but enterprises aren't deploying it until it has baked a few months, and maybe sp1/sp2/some major rollup ships for all the bugs the suckers find at rollout
We've hit more than one kernel regression in staging.
With things like Software Collections and IUS you get to run the latest stuff on a rock-solid base. I don't want to upgrade my kernel to get a newer Python or NodeJS release!
Frankly, having a lot of new companies adopting a mantra of "move fast, break things" makes me want to 'upgrade' less and less. I need stuff working at Monday at 1PM for the weekly test offering not some oops.
1) deep freeze or virtual machines are your friend.
I work for a company that sells software which runs on top of Red Hat/CentOS servers. As a result, sometimes we have to tell our clients that the issue is on the server level and that they need RH to take a look at it, assuming they're paying for Red Hat support.
FWIW, I've never heard any of them complain about Red Hat. I've had plenty of them complain to me that I'm sending them to RH instead of fixing their server for them (because that's what software engineers should do, right?), but they've never once complained to me about RH once they reached out.
I support both Ubuntu LTS and RHEL in production (multiple releases each) and RHEL has been rock-solid for years while there's constant trouble with Ubuntu.
Documentation is great.
Love Redhat's OSS work.
But I've read that text, and have been utterly converted to RH. RH is the ultimate good, go with them, and accept their demands.
Are people regularly using ZFS-on-linux with redhat ? Or is there an officially sanctioned CoW choice from redhat ?
Or is that not on the radar at all right now ?
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Came in 4.9 and 4.8 (the commit provides the building block). And I also think Dave Chinner (works at RH) put a lot of effort into it? (but I'm not 100% sure)
The xfstests testing suite is basically the standard for filesystem testing, even for non-XFS filesystems.
Btrfs is not mature enough. ZFS-on-linux is not supported and I've never seen a customer using it.
Feeling some pressure in the revenue stream from Oracle perhaps?
Back in the day, after I'd farted around with Slackware, Yggdrasil, Mandrake etc I'd come back to RH but that was a long time ago and now is now.
Should I bother to read the blurb ... had a go ... had another go ... ... got bored ... didn't finish - soz.
I believe that RH are an important component of the (GNU)Linux ecosystem but I am not exactly fired up by this effort. I am fired up by software in general and Libre software in particular.
OK ... another go at the marketing thing ... oh, apparently RH are the leading force in open source software.
Piss off.
Open source software looks after itself.
Feel free to include say the kernel devs amongst your "life blood" Feel free to read LWN's articles that describe how stuff is done
There is no doubt that RH has contributed to open source software in a significant way but they are not on my radar these days.
Cheers Jon
PulseAudio became default in Fedora 8 (August 2007 [1]), and the feature page lists Lennart as the owner, [2] so the time checks out.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-Augus...
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio
Please build officially Red Hat backed Fedora Tables. This will be a win to win situation for both sides.
So, what makes the Debian package system superior? Having built multiple specs in the past, but not any debs, I'm curious. Given that you can often convert debs to RPMs and vice-versa, and can use the different package managers on either type of repository, it's not obvious where one has any specific benefit.
It's also undeniably true that there was a time when APT + dpkg blew Red Hat's "equivalent" tools out of the water, but that's not the case anymore.
One thing I like in particular about dnf/rpm is that I can install packages by using functions, so eg. telling yum to install perl(Net::DNS) will work and installs the perl-Net-DNS package. I'm not sure if apt can do this.
It took me days to grok how to make a proper debian package nearly a decade ago when I first did it - writing my first .spec file took an hour or so and now I can hammer most of them out in 15 minutes or less.
From the top of my head in the last few years I have (and you have also probably) used the following to get software: rpm/yum, deb/apt, pacman, ports, sysvr4(Solaris), ips, homebrew, pkgin, npm, gem, pip, hex, cpan and hmmm probably a few others.
They all do pretty much the same thing, one might have prettier progress bars or a better cli but we're just talking compressed tars with some metadata files.
Competition is good and all that, but how much innovation do we need to drive in package managers? We have lots of tools all doing the same thing with negligible advantages over their competitors and I don't see it as a positive.
Either use separate commands for different actions, or distinguish actions with arguments, but don't do both. E.g. apt-get install, apt list, apt-file update.
The software tools and packaging formats exist only to implement that. It's Policy and the comprehensiveness of the Debian archive (60k+ packages last time I checked, a year or so back), which make it bliss. You simply rarely have to go outside it, and you can configure a system as lean or rich, or anywhere in between, as you like.
What Policy states is that the package maintainer (not the user) must or must not do, including incorporating specified, requiring manpages (though that's not a release-critical bug), so that documentation is standardised. The fact that /usr/share/doc/ has every single package installed listed in it, and they don't include the installed version number in the directory names, as RH still does, means that you can use that directory to recover or rebuild from various packaging failures. (Why would you want to do that you ask? Same reason you'd want to have a doctor or hospital nearby if you had a broken leg -- it's not so much what you'd planned on, but it's damned convenient when you find yourself in that situation.)
Joey Hess and Martin Krafft (see the latter's The Debian System) both expanded on more elements of Debian packaging vs. other systems, particularly Red Hat / RPM.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/debian-system/oclc/640083534&r...
Why wouldn't you want the version numbers? That seems like something you would want when trying to rebuild a package database. Also, what do you do if you have two versions of something installed ?
2. You can reference content under /usr/share/doc/ without having to specify a goddamned version number that a) changes arbitrarily and b) is inconsistently specified every fucking time.
Version numbers are metadata, not directory name elements.
Changelogs, also required, give you the info if you desperately neeed it.
(Note: satire. I use and love both Ubuntu and Arch.)