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.
You'll hear it in every company: Sales produces revenue. Everything else is a cost center. If a business could have only Sales and nothing else, they would.
Assuming RedHat is the same as my company, Sales and Marketing includes Sales Engineer and Client Implementation. And based on their Jobs page, that is the case. https://www.redhat.com/en/jobs/departments.
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.
I'd still rather see RedHat as one of the biggest kernel/linux contributors make that extra money than fucking Oracle, Amazon etc.
I'd rather step out of this dilemma and finance directly the people who write the code. If you look at the numbers and including the administrative staff, development is now roughly only 25% of the expense.
They sell ads? Source?
Their expense is 66% about pushing the product and 33% about making it. (not counting administrative stuff). I say let's throw our money at people who spend their time writing the code instead.
RedHat is probably the biggest Linux contributor across the whole ecosystem (for the kernel alone, only companies like Intel, Google or Huawei are sometimes bigger) and the average Linux Desktop user/hobbyist isn't even their target demographic, so what money to possibly not throw at them are you even talking about? Are you currently paying money for a RedHat subscription?
Also spending money on marketing/ads isn't the same as selling ads.
The problem is, although you may donate lots, historically, open source devs simply can't live off of donations. Big corporate money from Red Hat allows engineers to actually work on open source stuff for a living.
For all that people might hate them for what they do, they provide steady income for a lot of projects.
So, it's super weird to see the FOSS Crowd simping for a company that's taken what was once FLOSS (Free, as in Liberty), made it FOSS (already a problem), and is now hiding it behind pay-for-play in the repos.
Why is nobody talking about Oracle in all this? Oracle and Red Hat create competing products: RHEL and OEL. OEL is bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL. It's not hard to see why RH isn't a fan of paying their devs good money to develop a competing product, for free. Sure it sucks that Rocky and Alma get caught up in this as well but I feel like this is 100% a shot against Oracle.
My question is.. has the reason RHEL and centos been as popular as it has been simply because of a 10 yr enterprise support term this entire time or something else?
I get Ubuntu Server only lasts for 5yr - unless you go spend for the extended support.. but was 5yr LTS from ubuntu server really that make it or break it for people setting up solutions for companies? I feel like the upgrade path is also pretty painless on a 4-5yr cycle as well most of the time. I get it would be even nicer to set something and forget it for a decade - but reality is the 10yr term could be anywhere along the line, not like a new release was happening every year or 2 I doubt. I mean LTS does have that sorta overlap every couple of years so I guess maybe so did centos and RHEL, but still.
Tools are often built of specific and older versions still as well and with containerization being what it is now.. I feel like Redhats big advantage of 10yr support periods is kind of diminished from what it was in the 90's or early 2000's.
They aren't. None of this affects their submissions back upstream to things like the Linux kernel, GNOME, Systemd, or any other software they include within RHEL/CentOS Stream