Brian Stevens to Step Down as CTO of Red Hat | Hacker News Reader

Brian Stevens to Step Down as CTO of Red Hat

redhat.com

60 pointsguardian5x15 comments

Gotta love that comment posted on the ZDNet article [1] that appeared eariler:

  According to inside source, he was replaced by
  systemd-ctod. He tried to prevent the implementation,
  it was a good fight, but it was one he could not win.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/red-hat-chief-technology-officer-resign...

HA!

On a serious note, however, I've always hoped for more leadership from Red Hat. On the one hand, I'm sure they're doing perfectly fine on the enterprise consulting side, however they're slowly missing opportunities in on-premise cloud computing. Momentum has moved on to libcontainer/Docker, and now Kubernetes for orchestration. They've had to shift to that container format for their PaaS product OpenShift, which seems to be built with anything but Ceylon. Then there's the Fedora 21/CoreOS-envy/systemd-or-nothing crew of people who code/write specs faster than they think...

Uuugh. With their resources, I expect so much better. They're throwing away their leadership position in Linux for nothing. I'm sure some, if not all, of this had a role to play in the departure of their CTO.

Because their client base is enterprise, their goal is naturally features in that area rather than technical leadership for the community as a whole.

The point I'm trying to make is that this behavior on Red Hat's part is totally reckless. They're not entering any new markets, they're sitting on their laurels. Of course, I think at a high-level they feel that they can cure any shortcomings with acquisitions, but if any of the Docker/CoreOS or whatnot players are sufficiently motivated, have the competitive mindset, and proper funding, Red Hat is totally ripe for the taking, they just have to be really smart about it.

I have ideas as to how to proceed, but I'm not going to speculate out in the open. But it's pretty clear to me containerization is a disruption (just not exactly in its present form).

They're certainly doing containers, just a bit slower than the startup crowd. But let's face it: trying to mine open source infrastructure for monetization potential in an era of increasingly smaller/un-enterprise organizations, cloud apps and mobile devices with multiple identities/organizational affiliations is a fool's game for the most part.

Their clients are the exceptions: slow-moving organizations with specific engineering and security requirements like stockmarkets and militaries. Perhaps bringing the benefits of emerging tools like containers to these sorts of clients is what they do best, and there is an argument that the wider open source world has become a parallel one.

Where do you get that most organizations are smaller and/or "un-enterprise"? I recall recently reading a study that suggested that (1) there were fewer startups of any sort now than there were ten years ago (this includes "normal" small businesses), (2) a higher percentage of startups fail than they did ten years ago, (3) a higher percentage of employees work for large companies than they did ten years ago. If your premise is incorrect, that would suggest that Red Hat is absolutely right to be focusing on its enterprise customer base.

#userdel -r bstevens

At redhat, it would likely be more like:

# ipa user-del bstevens

If only. Still on RHDS.

Serious dogfooding of your own software I see! I still <3 IPA.

Wonder why?

For more context on the OP link: http://www.zdnet.com/red-hat-chief-technology-officer-resign....

That's not really any more context, there's nothing but speculation there.

Yeah SJVN is full of fluff. Hardly pens a word worth reading.

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