> no other public standalone companies
Well, SUSE isn't public, but they're mostly "standalone". And there are plenty of other companies based around a single open source platform.
Sure, they aren't $1B+ companies, but they don't need to be.
Well, SUSE isn't public, but they're mostly "standalone". And there are plenty of other companies based around a single open source platform.
Sure, they aren't $1B+ companies, but they don't need to be.
IBM just made it's biggest acquisition ever on an open source company... It seems strange to use that as evidence that open source is not an effective tool--in certain circumstances--for building your business.
What about Cloudera? What about Automattic? What about MongoDB? What about MariaDB?
The podcast has 9 episodes, and we have about 20 more in the queue for 2018-2019.
Tune in... Some of the gurus of open source software share some valuable insights.
It's more about sustaining the business. Redhat's most recently reported quarterly earnings growth was negative. Did they sell now because IBM approached them with an absurdly high price? Or did Redhat executives need to shop around for a buyer, because they felt they were near a local maxima and things were starting to go downhill?
edit: that said, this is a subject I care about and will be adding your podcast shortly. Hopefully you figure out podcast sustainability as well =)
Red Hat would probably have reached a local maximum sooner or later, so it's probably a mix of the two, but I don't think it's correct to say that growth was negative.
Just going by yahoo finance data:
Quarterly Earnings Growth (yoy) -10.50%
None of this is evidence suggesting there will be another standalone open source vendor. The model seems to be converging towards taking open source technologies, buying a bunch of servers and sysadmins, and renting them out to customers on an ad-hoc basis. In which case, I won't call it winner-take-all but there's obvious economies of scale to be had. If we look at the recent Redis and MongoDB relicensing debacles, it seems like a direct acknowledgement that the cloud service model is eating their lunch.
IBM obviously thinks it's worth it, but I'll be honest and say that no matter how bullish I am on Red Hat's business model, I'm sceptical that they can grow it significantly larger without some help. Clearly the focus is on cloud computing and you're up against Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Without at least a strategic partner with someone like IBM (or, ick, ick, ick, Oracle) it's going to be pretty hard to go toe to toe with those guys. In that context, making a "partnership" (agreeing to be bought out) and making a massively big payday for the principal stock holders is pretty win-win for Red Hat.
Having said that, I seriously wonder if IBM is at all interested in maintaining Red Hat's business model...
Now-a-days everything we work on is FOSS, and for almost all of our history the major products we've had also were FOSS. You could even call up SUSE in the old days and ask for a CD with all of the source code for SLES without being a customer. These days you can download all the SLES sources from OBS (it's what openSUSE Leap is based on), and SLES has a Factory-first policy that requires all new changes to first be sent into openSUSE. All of our products (to my knowledge) are FOSS licensed and we provide the source code for all of them as source RPMs -- even if they aren't copyleft -- and on GitHub in most cases.
I would very much argue that Red Hat and SUSE can easily trade blows on which is the "more open" company in this regard. For instance, SLES sources are far easier to get access to and work with than RHEL sources in my experience (and our kernel sources are actually separate patches rather than a single patch blob). But that really doesn't matter at the end of the day -- we both work diligently on free software and contribute upstream consistently. Canonical I'm not as sure about, but from my experience collaborating with them they also do an absolutely immense amount of upstream work. In the past, they were quite sheltered and didn't contribute back, but this changed significantly many years ago.
[I work at SUSE, and all of my work is upstream and free software work. I've never touched nor seen a single piece of proprietary code in my 3 years of working here.]