Reminder that RedHat makes A LOT of money already. The results of the 2019 fiscal year show that RedHat spends twice as much money on ads and sales people than on developers.
Red Hat reports fourth quarter and fiscal year 2019 results
Our subscriptions mostly pay for the salesmen and the ads. They sell ads first, IT second. So I'm not gonna cry for RedHat. The image of the poor developers working in a cave, struggling to make money is only in our mind. They had a perfectly functional model but decided to sabotage some of it to try to squeeze even more money.
Operating expense, in thousands (2019,2018):
Sales and marketing 1,378,278 1,195,286
Research and development 668,542 578,330
General and administrative 304,766 239,316
Total operating expense 2,351,586 2,012,932
Let's stop talking about Fedora/redhat, we are literally doing their job for them, for free.
"If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums."
The core of their business is made by the open source community. If they need our help for something, it's from saving them from drowning into money.
We need to jump ship from redhat just like we did from reddit. This is also the perfect opportunity to think about technical solutions on how to use the fediverse to finance the developers of the open source community.
The old saying "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" is an old saying that meant something at some point; whether it still does is another matter. Read the link above to get the full picture. (As someone that used to do support work for HP, a lot of the sales-centric, don't-spend-money-on-the-tech-folks mindset resonated with me.)
People (myself included) aren't happy with Red Hat's proclamation. As an individual, I can't do much other than to watch how this plays out and give my team and management the heads-up, and monitor.