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Comment by whatevaa | Hacker News Reader

RedHat sold to IBM and neutered it's free CentOS variant recently, so not so sure it's a good example.

CentOS is no longer a drop in replacement for RHEL, but both are still entirely open source other than trademarked logos and the like AFAIK.

More importantly, Red Hat was very profitable even when CentOS was a drop in replacement.

I think the only reason Red Hat’s model works for them is that Linux distributions are obviously massive sprawling complex things, and maintaining LTS distros which you then sell support for is an incredibly complex and valuable thing that no intermediary can plausibly claim they can do. Even if the underlying code happens to be FOSS.

Matrix servers (and web servers and mail servers etc) are not as complex - and if anything you want incentives to make them less complex, not more. And the better job you do of making them easy to admin and support (ie the more scalable and stable they are), the less reason there is to pay the upstream for support but some system integrator instead.

> Linux distributions are obviously massive sprawling complex things

Just my perspective but I think this was also perhaps a product of the time when Red Hat really started growing, back when linux was a little more rough around the edges. These days it seems linux has enough polish that some (many?) corporations are happy to just use off the shelf ubuntu and call it a day and hope nothing breaks too badly.

I think another thing that has changed is that big business is less suspicious of open source and are less likely to feel that all the software they use has to be licensed from someone.

I think it has dawned on people that it is impossible to avoid using open source.

This is definitely true. It’s also completely normalised to build a large commercial service on open source and not even contemplate if or how the upstream project is funded, or consider funding the upstream a serious cost.

[0] has many more details but CentOS was never a drop in replacement and the new CentOS model is a big improvement for anyone wanting drop in replacements. I agree with everything else you said though, they were independent of IBM for nearly 3 decades and always were and still remain among the most active linux contributors (just see any of LWN's development statistics articles).

0: https://medium.com/@gordon.messmer/in-favor-of-centos-stream...

They still don't sell a proprietary version of their software.

CentOS started as a fork, and new forks exist now.

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