houseofzeus

Amazon do pay people to contribute to the kernel, and they have their own Linux distribution which when you poke it looks an awful lot like RHEL/CentOS but different due to some things Amazon add/change, so I'm not sure that's the greatest example. Red Hat probably aren't thrilled about that situation, but in the same breath are a larger company and not under the same pressure to simply survive at this point.

Exactly, they can both be right. In Elastic's case though being right still doesn't mean they exist in 5 years. This doesn't reflect that what they did here was wrong but that by the time this started unfolding they were already in a bad position.

It is not obvious that this action is actually in the best interest of open source. It's obvious that it's in the best interest of Elastic, but there is nothing intrinsically special about them that means they are the best stewards for the code until the end of time itself versus Amazon or anyone else for that matter.

The ability to fork in open source is a feature not a bug and ultimately the community of users and developers of these projects will decide what works best for them. In this case it isn't even a fork, it's new plugins that the community can consume under a FOSS license.

The challenge here is that there is an implied expectation that if you started or are the primary sponsor of the project, you should be the primary recipient of revenue resulting from same. Often this expectation is paired with a belief that the project and the product are the same thing (lack of competitive differentiation).

The first is not a given at all, and the second is what leads to it being a foregone conclusion with the question being not if but when someone will eat your lunch whether its Amazon or users choosing to DIY.

Yeah, they dropped the ball on this one. Now they have a growing number of countries grounding it themselves which to me seems like a significantly worse look than if Boeing had proactively done it themselves (also keeps it in the news cycle longer as each new country adds itself to the list).

I agree. Even if it turns out to be a different cause, who wants to be the airline that gives it the benefit of the doubt in the meantime? The optics at this point if it happens again while this one is still being investigated are awful. The Chinese decision here seems pretty rational.

A lot of the OpenStack engineering processes, and tools supporting them, were actually really strong for an open source project from the ground up. The problem was that a lot of it was engineering for engineering's sake without a care in the world for usability or what someone would actually use the end result for.

Devstack is a great example of this, because it became a critical building block for continuous integration but also meant testing was more focused on whether you could run it on a developer laptop than ever get an actual cluster working.

Docker are actually an example of a pattern, one that also impacts MongoDB and many other companies. That pattern is that they intentionally branded the product and the project with the same name (in this case Docker) to help with slipstreaming on the community mindshare they were building.

The flip side of that which eventually comes home to roost though is that it means the two are easily confused . If I'm a customer and I can download X or buy X from you, and the two are virtually identical, you better have a damn good story as to what your value proposition over and above the project is.

Red Hat actually arguably only just got themselves out of this. Originally there was just Red Hat Linux, regardless of whether you paid them a cent. The split into Fedora (Core) - the free distribution - and RHEL - the enterprise distribution with paid support subscriptions - is a not insignificant part of why the company still exists today. This transition was not without controversy, and arguably created the space into which Canonical and Ubuntu emerged, but it was a necessary step to disambiguate the project and the thing people actually pay for with its own value prop and messaging around it.

It's somewhat surprising that so many of these companies proclaim they want to be the next Red Hat, but ignore the prior art for how that came to be.

The big difference between Red Hat and a lot of these other companies is that if you look at a lot of their products, including the cash cow (RHEL), there is not a 1:1 mapping between the product and a single open source project.

Rather they create enterprise distributions that are made up of a number of open source projects that are (ideally) integrated into a solution. This combined with the right investment in support and training provides a product that is more compelling than "we provide a signed version of $UPSTREAM_PROJECT". I would say OEL is successful for the amount Oracle appear to invest in it (not much).

Timing helps a lot too though, in that they had a lot of success before the advent of the public cloud so are in a better position to weather the storm while they figure out a new model.

I don't think it's accurate to say it's mostly Red Hat, they are a sponsor and sometimes contributor but most of the work still seems to come out of the Intel and Hyper.sh folks who co-founded the project out of Clear Containers and runV.

Not a direct comparison of these projects specifically but here is the write-up that was presented in the context of the Kubernetes SIG Node discussions about this topic:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QQ5u1RBDLXWvC8K3pscTtTRT...

Right, the mentality of a lot of people is I'd feel bad putting this in the trash so I'll put in the donation bin and then all thinking about where it actually ends up is for someone else to deal with.

Where do you think the recyclers in the article are getting their raw materials from?

Your counterpoint to the authors claim that nobody wants your used clothes anymore seems to be that a handful do, which is great but is a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of new product being churned out, consumed, and ultimately dumped - albeit in some cases via a donation bin or even a cycle of reuse - via the fast fashion chains.

The global problem is not the stuff that is in a good enough condition for resale. It's the stuff that isn't and still ends up in the donation bins.

The reason the column on the right (Shares Held) doesn't line up with how many he sold is that he executed his options to purchase a bunch of shares and then immediately sold them, which made up the bulk of the ones he sold in this transaction.

Yeah, but he paid off the car and now they want their immobilizer back and to charge him for them to remove it.

SUSE folks on twitter have also been highlighting that they are still hiring, even in the wake of the addition of the HPE OpenStack team (or what was left of it).

Given all of the inter-dependencies between OpenStack services and lower level Linux constructs and software (OVS, Ceph, QEMU, etc.) those who were already used to distributing and managing these already turned out to be the ones who were best able to make the combination work.

That said at least some folks who were working on OpenStack and related technologies at Canonical are among those now looking for new gigs:

https://twitter.com/zulcss/status/852542117566189568

Thus while cloud remains on their priority list it is not immediately clear how big a part OpenStack will play in that going forward for Canonical versus solutions that run on the reigning public clouds.

A large part of it is that those who can make money out of OpenStack are doing so, and those who aren't are doing the math and moving on to the next thing.

Take a look at the sponsors for KubeCon and Dockercon and consider that many of these same companies were those originally trying to catch the OpenStack wave, and then ponder how many of them will be extracting themselves from those projects in 5 years (or at least lowering their investment, which as we see here is generally perceived as extraction).

Prominent folks in the Kubernetes community will tell you that it's different but the recent conferences sure have a similar vibe to OpenStack summits circa ~2013 when the marketing really started to overtake what the technology could deliver.

The screenshot that particular quote comes from appears to be from a Best Buy review section not a Lenovo hosted site, so it's unclear whether the Lenovo Product Expert is even a Lenovo employee or just the Best Buy droid assigned to answering Qs for Lenovo products.