Ariadne Conill 🐰Jul 2, 2023

redhat has benefitted from centos and the other clones immensely by the fact that an entire generation of SREs trained on their distro. entire businesses (like my old one) were built around partnering with redhat and providing support and consulting for RHEL and the clones.

the redhat partner network was bootstrapped on the back of the clones. you lab with the clones and then start working with the real thing.

and yes, sometimes users who wanted support went with consultancies like mine and not upgrading to RHEL, it’s true. but that does not matter because when consultancies like mine were working on large contracts with large commitments we would suggest that RHEL be used instead of clones so that there was a point of accountability.

and really, that is and remains the only reason to buy a commercial Linux system: the contracted accountability in the form of the SLA. if a deployment does not require an SLA, then withholding the product just creates a situation where they will use a different one.

that results in a brain drain: the users who would have stayed in your ecosystem (via a clone), will now go learn a different ecosystem. and this causes you to lose your partner network as consultants retire.

Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Jul 2, 2023

you will be able to watch this shift by observing the evolution of middleware.

for example, lets talk about, say, cPanel. yes, really: cPanel is still around, and people still use it.

or lets talk about SolusVM. yes, really: that exists too, and for better or worse, it is the backbone of the traditional VPS industry.

today, these are built and deployed on RHEL or, more commonly, the clones.

tomorrow? they will be refactored and deployed on alternatives.

if i were to make a bet, i could see OpenSUSE capturing that entire segment of the RHEL/clone userbase within 2 years. later, those products will likely move more heavily in the direction of containerization, but OpenSUSE gives them a landing pad for the short term.

and when that happens? there goes the bulk of the SREs who got their first taste of SRE work by managing a hosting provider. that remains a *huge* segment of the redhat trained SRE footprint.

Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Jul 2, 2023

mike's post on LinkedIn, where he says that redhat defines "freeloaders" as people who only buy a minimum amount of RHEL licenses while using the clones heavily is spin.

RH have always hated the existence of the clones. they have used various legal chicanery, arguably in violation of the GPL, to attempt to force customers into moving all of their machines to RHEL, and away from clones.

Show threadAriadne Conill 🐰Jul 2, 2023

i think the difference is that, previously, before IBM, leadership understood the need for the clones to exist (despite hating their existence), and that ultimately the clones did drive tangible value (and sales as I outlined above) for RH.

now IBM wishes to manage RH licensing as if it were software for a mainframe. this mentality will kill whatever is left in the product.

Show threadArcticulate
@ariadne This is the best analysis I’ve heard so far about this subject. Note: I have not read interviews and not done enough research on the topic to just nod without hesitation, I think it makes 100 % sense given everything else I’ve learned about Red Hat’s business model over an extremely long time (Been a user on and off since I first installed Red Hat Desktop Linux 5.2 back in the late ’90s, plus several years RHEL at work).
Jul 2, 2023 at 10:10amWeb