Why There Will Never Be Another RedHat: The Economics of Open Source (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Why There Will Never Be Another RedHat: The Economics of Open Source (2014)

techcrunch.com

14 pointspabs39 comments

> The consequence of the model is minimal product differentiation resulting in limited pricing power and corresponding lack of revenue... it’s nearly impossible to properly invest in product development, support, or sales the way that companies like Microsoft or Oracle or Amazon can.

Building sustainable models for Open Source is definitely a challenge we still need to be working on solving but I don't think people like this are the ones we should be looking to for help on how to do that.

Open Source, almost by definition, is a rejection of the idea that we should be building moats around our software to extract the highest possible value from it. Instead, Open Source allows us to think about sharing the raw value of software freely.

If you're so consumed by greed that you only consider a successful businesses to be one that measures revenue in billions then perhaps trying to build a business around opens source is not for you.

Was redhat really that great? I used it back in the late 90s, but later in 2010 at yahoo (they used redhat) it was a friggin' nightmare with dependency hell.

I never had that issue with Ubuntu or Debian. I recently moved over to Arch and still don't have issues like that.

Maybe it has gotten better in 10 years but I think IBM is grasping at straws spending money trying to stay relevant.

RedHat employees do a large amount of upstream work on core open source projects like the Linux kernel, the open source world would not be where it is if RedHat did not exist. So even if the world doesn't need RHEL, it needs RedHat, or some other way to get equivalent investment in open source.

This is why the last conclusion in the article is ridiculous "maybe even Red Hat should think about becoming the next Amazon", they would be sawing the branch they're sitting on.

They are great because they are the first to prove that it is possible to build a unicorn on purely open source software.

Red Hat is in the position where enterprises believe that it's better and more secure.

That means that it's valuable.

Dependency management is hard and RedHats solution was pretty poor. Debian/Ubuntu got apt which meant it was really easy to install packages. It took a long time for RedHat to get something similar.

The flip side was that it’s much easier to build rpms.

yum comes from Yellow Dog Linux, circa 1999. apt comes from Debian, around 1997. The Redhat solution follows the Debian solution by about 2-3 years.

Ubuntu didn't even exist until 2004. So please, cut down on the hyperbole.

Yum wasn’t in RedHat in 1999. Back then there were a ton of distributions. Most of those that were descendant from RedHat came with their own set of tools and yum was only one of many (like zypp and apt-rpm). And of course the reason there were so many is that the developer of rpm, RedHat, had nothing on offer. Debian had apt so their descendent distributions didn’t develop alternatives.

RedHat Enterprise/Fedora adopted yum around 2003, as far as I can tell and RedHat the original free distribution never did. Certainly not in 1999.

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