And Then There Was One: Red Hat | Hacker News Reader

And Then There Was One: Red Hat

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39 pointsGarbage28 comments

...Novell and Sun were both once-mighty commercial open source-focused companies...

Rewrites history. Novell and Sun were both long past their brightest days when they embraced open source. In fact they embraced open source in desperate efforts to remain relevant in a world that had passed them by.

Right! Novell was already hemorrhaging cash before they bought SUSE, and Linux was replacing Solaris before Sun gave away the family jewels. Neither one of those companies were known for their open-source contributions before Red Hat started eating their lunch.

In fact, I don't see that Sun was any more of an open-source company than, say, Google (another public company that contributes to free software but makes its money elsewhere).

And don't forget Mozilla, which might not be a public company (it's a non-profit foundation with a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary) but is entirely open-source-focused and pays hundreds of people to work on free software.

The big difference, I see, between Red Hat and Sun and Novell is Red Hat is younger as a company and has less emotional baggage. They have to compete which makes them less complacent than Sun or Novell.

I see the future of open source as a service and support industry. It's working for Red Hat also companies like Wordpress.

Sun was a hardware company. When hardware became a commodity their unique architectures could not find buyers, and there was not enough margin in x86 to sustain the company.

Novell sold proprietary LAN software, and their market evaporated when Windows starting having networking built-in, while at the same time Linux made open networking standards available at no cost (for the software, at least).

Exactly. Of the three, Red Hat was the only one that was formed around open source, and the only one whose open source business model wasn't born in the desperation of a previous, successful closed source business model collapsing.

Sun and Novell were in the process of a pivot whereby they would have set their business model around open source. They just didn't do it well enough.

Has anyone successfully made that particular pivot?

IBM, to some degree. They launched Global Services long before it was fashionable. Louis Gerstner explains in Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? that there was tremendous doubt in the 1990's that consulting was the way to go, but he realized early on that the world "didn't need another hard drive maker" and decided that IBM could provide value best by acting as the integrator of smaller companies' components.

Indeed. The guys I knew at Sun who saw the light when Intel performance started killing SPARC has to fight against their own colleagues. Half of them ended up working at Red Hat.

It's terrible when your favorite toy is also the anchor weighing you down to the sea floor.

That's true. If Sun decided to do Linux x86 at a price point similar to Red Hat in say, 2003 I think they'd be alive now.

From the linked El Reg article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/07/mcnealy_sun_and_open...

> Sun should, McNealy told us, have sold and supported Solaris on its own x86 hardware. Instead, Sun took the fatal decision of outsourcing that role: it placed its trust in OEMs such as Dell to sell and support Sun's Unix on their Intel boxes. Problem was, these were the very same OEMs who, it emerged during the US Department of Justice's (DoJ) antitrust prosecution of Microsoft, had had their arms twisted into offering only Windows with Internet Explorer on PCs or risk losing access to Windows on their machines.

People don't like using Solaris. Regardless of the recent kernel innovations, the userspace - packaging, compiler toolchain, command line UI and GUI, support for modern keyboard layouts in vi - most people prefer GNU to Sun, and Sun never addressed this. Sol 10 had some great stuff in kernelspace, but a shitty userland on x86 wouldn't have solved Sun's problems.

Sounds good, but it was probably impossible for them. Once you have a heavy-weight sales and support infrastructure, it is extremely hard to strip it back down to compete in a low end market.

The classic that walks through the relevant organizational dynamics is The Innovator's Solution. (This is the follow-up to the better known The Innovator's Dilemma, and it focuses on what happens within companies facing that particular dilemma.) I highly recommend it.

The other view of this is that it's the point at which OSS hit the mainstream and was adopted as part of the business model of major for profit corporations as part of their offerings.

Realistically the world wasn't going to divide neatly into OSS and closed software, but merge as companies picked the best model for each sector, product and market.

I'd hardly count Novell and Sun as 'every US open source company'...

The article only considers public companies. Are they missing some?

Quite the opposite. Considering Sun and Novell to be "open source companies" obscures the fact that both of them had the bulk of their successes with their closed source products, and only came to a business model related to open source reluctantly. Red Hat is an outlier in that regard, and I suspect it is the main reason that they are still around.

Wait... what about Ubuntu? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)

You mean Canonical? Well, the article was about public US companies. Canonical is neither, it's private, and it's registered in the UK.

> [..] registered in the UK.

Actually, it's registered in the Isle of Man, which is a self-governing island that is not technically part of the UK.

My mistake, I didn't know that. I looked for the information on where they are registered on their legal page http://www.canonical.com/legal, and it simply states 'United Kingdom'. Anyway, the point stands - they're not a US company.

It's not about distributions, it's about companies. Canonical is not a for-profit, publicly traded company so it doesn't really fit this comparison between sun, redhat and novel.

Canonical are a for-profit company IIRC, however they are not publically traded and not "cash flow positive" ;)

Not sure why you were downvoted, it's called "Canonical Ltd." and besides, you can't trade stock in a not-for-profit company; parent was way off the mark.

I think emarcotte was wrong about "for-profit," but right about "not . . . publicly traded."

You're right; I mentally transposed 'not a', which gives the sentence a different spin.

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