Hacker News Reader

>Personally I think we’ll see Red Hat getting acquired in the next 5 years,

It would be interesting to see what would happen with linux after that, as they are one of the biggest (if not the biggest) donors to Linux, and while you'll still find Enterprise Linux for the Server (whether it's them or some successor), they are also responsible for things like Linux on the Desktop and FOSS in general, so projects which don't directly make money like Cygwin, gtk, gnome, gcc, and PulseAudio may be in danger.

Meh. Linux itself doesn’t need Red Hat anymore. Upstream got good enough that you just don’t need to stay on proprietary backports for years and years just to keep your service reliable and secure. These days most of Red Hat’s value add on Linux is to keep deprecated features alive for their large slow-moving customers. Sure they also contribute cool bleeding edge work, but nothing that couldn’t be picked up in a heartbeat by a team at Oracle, Google, Alibaba, or a hundred other systems companies.

As for those satellite projects you mention, in my experience the dependency on Red Hat is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their employees tend to close ranks and crowd out other contributors in the projects they sponsor. If RH disappeared tomorrow, for many of those projects the result would be more diverse contributors, with a healthier mix of ideas and priorities. It might help shock the Linux community out of the cultural rut it’s been stuck in.

Systemd is probably worth mentioning here.

I won't be missing it much.

> Meh. Linux itself doesn’t need Red Hat anymore.

It seems you're ignoring the vast amount of work Red Hat contributes as free software. See e.g. the amount of work put into the kernel: https://lwn.net/Articles/742672/. They've been increasing the amount of contributors while they've been expanding. Currently it's a pretty big company, so quite a huge amount of contributions. Further, any company they buy they tend to make the software free software.

You're being dismissive without any substance IMO.

I’m not dismissing the volume of quality of their contributions. I just don’t think they are so critically needed that Linux and its satellite projects couldn’t quickly recover if they stopped contributing (which was the GP’s question).

I'd agree with you that RH is creating a closed ecosystem and many of the ideas in RH land are not in the best tradition of open source software and not good for a healthy community.

But... Slow moving can be another way to say 'proven' and who is out there deciding what should be deprecated if it isn't the big companies like RH? Is that the cultural 'rut' you refer to? That things don't move fast enough? If that is it I disagree. Most of the 'innovation' I've seen in software is wrapping old ideas for a new generation.

I completely agree that sometimes slowing down the pace of upgrades is the responsible thing to do, especially on mission-critical systems. But Red Hat is not the most authoritative or trustworthy source of information on that topic, because 1) they don’t actually build and operate enterprise systems themselves, their customers do; 2) they have an incentive to make their slow-moving proprietary forks look more useful than they actually are, 3) they have a track record of trying to make upstream less reliable and secure than it actually is, again with the goal of making their offering seem more needed.

My comment on “cultural rut” was unrelated. I was referring to the lack of diversity in the open-source community, and the difficulty in moving past the myths and closed-club mentality of 1960s US academia. Open-source is still primarily the playground of privileged, insecure, passive-agressive white males cargo-culting the behavior of their predecessors, but it could be so much more.

Sounds good to me. I've love to see Gnome and Gtk die off or at least become much less popular. There's much better technologies out there which are getting passed over because of RH's dominance here.

Of those satellite projects, the only ones about which I'd be worried are GTK and GNOME. GCC is already supported by the FSF (and if the FSF can't do it, then I guess that's one more reason to start migrating toward LLVM/clang), Cygwin isn't as big a deal anymore (MSYS2 can pick up the torch, and Windows Subsystem for Linux helps, too), and PulseAudio - while certainly better than it was a few years ago - is not the end-all-be-all of sound systems (sndio, for example, is way more pleasant IMO, and is now available for non-OpenBSD systems - Linux included).

GCC is not supported by the FSF. Contributors are mostly ARM, IBM, Red Hat and SUSE.

Wait, what? Is it not the GNU Compiler Collection? It's part of GNU, which is a FSF project. Not sure about actual developers, but Richard Stallman himself is still on GCC's steering committee last I checked (among various other individuals, including multiple from Red Hat). The donation link on GCC's homepage also points to the FSF's general GNU donation page, which strongly implies the FSF is the one controlling the project's finances, too.

Regardless, that's even less reason to be worried about Red Hat totally collapsing, then. Plenty of other companies - large and small - to pick up the slack (and I highly suspect the various Red Hat contributors would probably continue to contribute anyway).

> Linux on the Desktop and FOSS in general, so projects which don't directly make money like Cygwin, gtk, gnome, gcc, and PulseAudio may be in danger.

People really should talk about this a lot more: Red Hat fund so much of the development of the basic components that the actual desktop environments rely on, as well as their support of GNOME: they have people working on everything from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to power management to graphics (Noveau driver, Wayland, Pipewire etc.) and audio. No other company seems to have the desire or the resources to fund these essentials at the level that Red Hat has done for many years.

> In practice both companies have struggled to diversify into broader “enterprise solutions”

I don't call growing to a thousand people from the low few hundred that I knew "struggling".

RedHat is well over ten thousand employees. If the Linux distribution really was the center they would only have a few hundred both, which they had when the Linux distribution was not just at the center, it WAS the center of the business. So clearly this is no longer the case.

That makes no sense. They had a few hundred employees because their Linux business was small. Now their Linux business is huge, so they can afford to hire more people. Some of those people are sustaining and growing the core Linux business, and others are working to develop new businesses like storage, openstack, middleware, configuration management, containers etc. None of those new businesses are anywhere near self-sufficiency. They are all funded primarily by the core Linux business.

If you look at their 2017Q4 results, it’s very telling: out of $772M of revenue, the combination of Openshift, Openstack, Ansible, Java middleware, IDEs and every other product in the “application development and emerging technologies” group added up to $173M. That’s 22.4% of their revenue coming from their entire “next-generation” portfolio combined. Everything else is basically RHEL.

Hopefully this gives you a better picture of how they pay for their 10,000+ employees.

> That makes no sense.

To me your reply is what makes no sense. I worked for one of those Linux companies. A few hundred people is all it takes to have a Linux distribution business. More people than that is what makes no sense. So if they now have sooo many more people it means that most of them do things not related to the Linux distribution business itself.

Yes, the Linux still is at the core, but I don't count people supporting computing center operations as doing work for the Linux distribution - that is an entirely new layer well above it.

Your accounting seems to be based on the idea that just because it's all centered around the Linux distribution it means you can call it all "Linux distribution business". I vehemently disagree, as I said, I consider that well above the level of merely selling Linux distributions. I saw how that business looked like from the inside, and what they do now does not remotely look like they do the same thing. Well, of course they still do, what I mean is the share of the overall activity of the company.

The amount of people needed to build and maintain the Linux distribution has not changed significantly. They don't need more package maintainers or significantly more kernel hackers. The people they hired don't work on the Linux distribution but on things made on top of it, whether that's other software products or services.

Who would acquire Red Hat?

Oracle? I shudder to think of what would happen to all of Red Hat's IP under Oracle's control ....

Death. That's what would happen.