Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but have been a fan decades longer than I've worked there.
The issue is that OSS is the only way to compete with the cloud. Quay would die without 3rd party contributions vs Amazon, Google, Microsoft.
As a devops, I rely heavily on Hashi and Ansible and Chef and so many other tools. However, their enterprise offerings are both too expensive and also too big for what I need. I can't get my employer to just donate money, so what can I simply and easily buy to fund the effort while still getting some value?
Grafana, for example, with paid plugins has made this easier: the moment you need a bit more, you pay for it. We need to extend this model out somewhat, get these vendors to offer more premium functionality - generally in the form of charging for integrations with other closed source software. That if you stay open the whole way yourself you can probably do the whole thing for free; conversely, if you have money for Datadog or whatever other service, then you probably have money to attach Grafana to Datadog too.
The real money is with the organizations that feel the need (for many good and bad reasons) to pay millions of dollars for support, consulting, and the like. They don't care about the people that are looking to save a few grand on licenses.
It's possible that the existence of CentOS is partially keeping RHEL viable. Maybe Fedora would be enough to do that, but overall CentOS probably contributes to RHELs demand, rather than detracting.
(Disclaimer: Red Hatter since almost 15 years. I never doubted for a second that we would open source what we buy. Ansible, 3Scale, CoreOS, we have a long history of sticking to our principles)
I hope for all of us that doesn’t happen anytime soon, but IBM acquired Redhat, not the other way around... plenty of sun folks learned that the hard way.
Arguably a lot of OS progress that we are seeing today, especially in the enterprise, is a direct result of IBM’s decades old investments in tools like Eclipse, which was probably the first enterprise grade open source development software, but more importantly, by promoting OS in the enterprise in the late 90s and early 2000s at a time when MS FUD about Linux was at an all time high.
P.S. I also agree with other people posting here. Red Hat is chock full of people who are absolutely looney about Open Source. It's at the heart of everything we do.
AWX isn't a trivial or unimportant product. For deployments of scale it's very important. It would also have been very easy to hoard the code and not release it, so the fact that RH did is impressive to me.
Having not tried to use open source AWX I'll take your word for the state of it. That saddens me greatly, and RH should do better. RH normally works pretty hard to avoid exactly that, but nobody is perfect (not making an excuse, just acknowledging failure).
Have you tried to contribute to AWX and had a bad experience?
Regarding RedHat (or IBM) truly committing to open-source, I'll believe when OpenShift 4.x is open-sourced.
Red Hat is very committed to putting the necessary infrastructure and organization in place around projects before they open source to make sure that the code isn't just available but can actually use community contributions. I don't have any inside info on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if OpenShift 4 is just waiting for that, or possibly to be in a stable enough state that the community can contribute.
Of course it's possible also that RH is keeping it closed for other reasons as well such as avoiding tipping their hand to competitors until their end goal is realized or something like that. I guess the point is I don't know, but given Red Hat's history of open sourcing even valuable acquisitions, I have faith that they will with OpenShift 4 as well.
OpenShift went from open-source to closed-source. The infrastructure and organization was already in place.
> or possibly to be in a stable enough state that the community can contribute.
I would say that it's stable enough for all RedHat customers who pay for it.
> I guess the point is I don't know, but given Red Hat's history of open sourcing even valuable acquisitions, I have faith that they will with OpenShift 4 as well.
I have no doubts that old RedHat would do it, but IBM might have a different approach.
But everything it's being built with is entirely FOSS. Making OKD happen is a high priority and is being worked on.
From my understanding, most of it's been blocked on Fedora CoreOS being at a state that it can be used for OKD and just putting resources onto setting up the automation for building everything for OKD.
Remember that Openshift 4.x fundamentally changed how Openshift does updates and that affects OKD a lot. Claytons email touches on this quite a bit.
Disclosure: I work at Red Hat, on projects related to Openshift.
That's great to hear. My mistake then, last time I've opened http://github.com/openshift/origin, I saw OpenShift 3.11 even though latest release was 4.2 at the time. From that, and given the fact that all other RedHat products are upstream first, I've made a conclusion that OpenShift 4 is no longer open-source.
> From my understanding, most of it's been blocked on Fedora CoreOS being at a state that it can be used for OKD and just putting resources onto setting up the automation for building everything for OKD.
What's the difference between OKD and OpenShift? Why does OKD use Fedora CoreOS, while OpenShift doesn't? Is it not the same code?
> Remember that Openshift 4.x fundamentally changed how Openshift does updates and that affects OKD a lot. Claytons email touches on this quite a bit.
Don't know Clayton or seen his email. I'm confused why would OKD use a different code than OpenShift. I though that the only difference between OKD and OpenShift would be the subscription.
Readme updates and lots of this stuff need to be done - we left the readme at 3.11 because that was a coherent install (vs the more work in progress of fedora coreos).
Every bit of source code was there (and developed in the open), but it wasn’t all “pulled together”
I'm looking forward to OKD4 and I will be checking out Fedora CoreOS soon.
OKD 4 uses Fedora CoreOS for the same reason that OKD 3.11 used CentOS instead of RHEL. For better or worse, they're built and maintained by different systems and/or people, and we simply can't just make OKD use a RHEL derivative due to how support and subscriptions work.
Functionally, they should be nearly identical, but in practice, they're two different pieces of software and they're maintained and built in different systems, much like how Fedora, and CentOS are managed separately from RHEL. The differences mostly come to where packages come from and what systems built them.
The code for OCP/OKD is the same, the major difference is how it's built and released and the OS (RHEL CoreOS vs Fedora CoreOS), and potentially the upgrade graphs supported via over the air updates.
As to who Clayton is: he is basically one of the the main architects for Openshift since basically the beginning (I forget if it goes back to prior to v3).
Lets be honest, nothing redhat gives out is actually free.
And now users are in a much better place, because they have multiple choices of container registry, which will hopefully drive innovation.