[freedomben]

Love this. After Red Hat acquired Ansible I thought for sure they would cave on their open source principles, but they didn't. They really believe in open source, and we are all the better as a world for it.

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but have been a fan decades longer than I've worked there.

[burtonator]

They believe in making money.

The issue is that OSS is the only way to compete with the cloud. Quay would die without 3rd party contributions vs Amazon, Google, Microsoft.

[jwildeboer]

We happily make money without sacrificing our Open Source/Free Software principles. Does that bother you?

(Disclaimer: Red Hatter since almost 15 years. I never doubted for a second that we would open source what we buy. Ansible, 3Scale, CoreOS, we have a long history of sticking to our principles)

[tw04]

I hate to break it to you, you are no longer a red hatter, you are an ibm’er and at the mercy of their board of directors. You’ll remain open source right up until the moment they decide that’s not the best way to utilize their recent acquisition.

I hope for all of us that doesn’t happen anytime soon, but IBM acquired Redhat, not the other way around... plenty of sun folks learned that the hard way.

[Doubleslash]

I bet the same has been said about VMware, GitHub and LinkedIn. They are all still doing pretty well today, last I checked. And they weren't acquisitions that required the acquiring company to get investors in to close the deal.

[oblio]

The long history of corporate acquisitions disagrees with you. Those are outliers, not the norm.

[sachinag]

I'm new to IBM (last four months), but it's clear that everyone knows not to mess with what makes Red Hat special.

[RickJWagner]

Red Hatter here. I'm very glad to hear this! Thanks for saying it.

P.S. I also agree with other people posting here. Red Hat is chock full of people who are absolutely looney about Open Source. It's at the heart of everything we do.

[wademealing]

I think that IBM know if they get their hands dirty in Red Hat, they wont have much ROI from their investment.

[outside1234]

I think you are a little too confident in IBM's management.

[thawaway1837]

Is there any reason to believe IBM hasn’t been a good open source citizen?

Arguably a lot of OS progress that we are seeing today, especially in the enterprise, is a direct result of IBM’s decades old investments in tools like Eclipse, which was probably the first enterprise grade open source development software, but more importantly, by promoting OS in the enterprise in the late 90s and early 2000s at a time when MS FUD about Linux was at an all time high.

[gsmith2]

Ansible was never Red Hat's to open source, the only open sourcing in that space is AWX, and it lacks release tags, working migrations or any meaningful community self-support that doesn't result in "you need to talk to us if you're doing this" on GitHub. It's a GPL'd code dump actively hostile to having a meaningful community develop around it

[freedomben]

> the only open sourcing in that space is AWX

AWX isn't a trivial or unimportant product. For deployments of scale it's very important. It would also have been very easy to hoard the code and not release it, so the fact that RH did is impressive to me.

Having not tried to use open source AWX I'll take your word for the state of it. That saddens me greatly, and RH should do better. RH normally works pretty hard to avoid exactly that, but nobody is perfect (not making an excuse, just acknowledging failure).

Have you tried to contribute to AWX and had a bad experience?

[geerlingguy]

Not going to argue about any of your other points, but there are release tags at least; though they don't have any bearing on the releases downstream in Tower :(

[bryanlarsen]

I never doubted Red Hat, but I do doubt IBM. Glad to see that RedHat's principles are still alive.

[freedomben]

Yes, any for-profit company has to believe in making money. However I think they could make a lot more by being stingy with their code. Ansible for example had a lot of paying customers that no longer had to shell out after it went open source. I (and many people/companies I know) would likely pay for RHEL if CentOS weren't a thing. There's plenty of opportunities for a cash grab if that were Red Hat's thing.

[core-questions]

What they need to do is to come up with a monetization model that makes more sense.

As a devops, I rely heavily on Hashi and Ansible and Chef and so many other tools. However, their enterprise offerings are both too expensive and also too big for what I need. I can't get my employer to just donate money, so what can I simply and easily buy to fund the effort while still getting some value?

Grafana, for example, with paid plugins has made this easier: the moment you need a bit more, you pay for it. We need to extend this model out somewhat, get these vendors to offer more premium functionality - generally in the form of charging for integrations with other closed source software. That if you stay open the whole way yourself you can probably do the whole thing for free; conversely, if you have money for Datadog or whatever other service, then you probably have money to attach Grafana to Datadog too.

[jwildeboer]

We happily make billions in revenue and just got bought by IBM for $34B. Why should we aim for more through betraying what binds us?

[organsnyder]

If CentOS didn't exist, that customer segment would jump to OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. Same story for Ansible, etc.

The real money is with the organizations that feel the need (for many good and bad reasons) to pay millions of dollars for support, consulting, and the like. They don't care about the people that are looking to save a few grand on licenses.

[freedomben]

You know what, after thinking this through I agree with you. Reversing position publicly is always risky, but you're right I'd probably just move to Ubuntu and if I need support I'd pay Canonical. I have lots of familiarity with Cent/RHEL which is why I'd prefer that, but I could gain that with Debian/et al without too much effort.

It's possible that the existence of CentOS is partially keeping RHEL viable. Maybe Fedora would be enough to do that, but overall CentOS probably contributes to RHELs demand, rather than detracting.

[blaser-waffle]

I've used CentOS in every gig I've been at until my current one (we use full-on RHEL here). Even if they're not paying for support it means that the industry is still thinking Red Hat; a long play.

[throwaway9147]

A competing product (Harbor) is already open-source and part of CNCF. Quay wouldn't have had any future if it was to stay proprietary.

Regarding RedHat (or IBM) truly committing to open-source, I'll believe when OpenShift 4.x is open-sourced.

[ecnahc515]

Openshift 4.x is open-source. I'm guessing what your speaking towards is the fact that there is no prebuilt distribution of it that doesn't require a subscription, ie: OKD, which is something being worked on. Clayon started off the conversation on this back in June: https://lists.openshift.redhat.com/openshift-archives/users/...

But everything it's being built with is entirely FOSS. Making OKD happen is a high priority and is being worked on.

From my understanding, most of it's been blocked on Fedora CoreOS being at a state that it can be used for OKD and just putting resources onto setting up the automation for building everything for OKD.

Remember that Openshift 4.x fundamentally changed how Openshift does updates and that affects OKD a lot. Claytons email touches on this quite a bit.

Disclosure: I work at Red Hat, on projects related to Openshift.

[throwaway9147]

> Openshift 4.x is open-source.

That's great to hear. My mistake then, last time I've opened http://github.com/openshift/origin, I saw OpenShift 3.11 even though latest release was 4.2 at the time. From that, and given the fact that all other RedHat products are upstream first, I've made a conclusion that OpenShift 4 is no longer open-source.

> From my understanding, most of it's been blocked on Fedora CoreOS being at a state that it can be used for OKD and just putting resources onto setting up the automation for building everything for OKD.

What's the difference between OKD and OpenShift? Why does OKD use Fedora CoreOS, while OpenShift doesn't? Is it not the same code?

> Remember that Openshift 4.x fundamentally changed how Openshift does updates and that affects OKD a lot. Claytons email touches on this quite a bit.

Don't know Clayton or seen his email. I'm confused why would OKD use a different code than OpenShift. I though that the only difference between OKD and OpenShift would be the subscription.

[smarterclayton]

We needed fedora coreos. OpenShift used RHEL CoreOS. It took longer for fedora coreos because we also wanted fedora coreos to be a sufficient replacement for ContainerLinux. That integration started passing CI with openshift today.

Readme updates and lots of this stuff need to be done - we left the readme at 3.11 because that was a coherent install (vs the more work in progress of fedora coreos).

Every bit of source code was there (and developed in the open), but it wasn’t all “pulled together”

[throwaway9147]

Thank you for clarification and for all your hard work.

I'm looking forward to OKD4 and I will be checking out Fedora CoreOS soon.

[ibotty]

Is there already some documentation on how to play with it?

[smarterclayton]

Coming very soon - hopefully ready for KubeCon

[ecnahc515]

Clayton already answered some of this, but I also have some other ways of saying the same thing.

OKD 4 uses Fedora CoreOS for the same reason that OKD 3.11 used CentOS instead of RHEL. For better or worse, they're built and maintained by different systems and/or people, and we simply can't just make OKD use a RHEL derivative due to how support and subscriptions work.

Functionally, they should be nearly identical, but in practice, they're two different pieces of software and they're maintained and built in different systems, much like how Fedora, and CentOS are managed separately from RHEL. The differences mostly come to where packages come from and what systems built them.

The code for OCP/OKD is the same, the major difference is how it's built and released and the OS (RHEL CoreOS vs Fedora CoreOS), and potentially the upgrade graphs supported via over the air updates.

As to who Clayton is: he is basically one of the the main architects for Openshift since basically the beginning (I forget if it goes back to prior to v3).

[slenk]

Its OSS, but it is definitely not free software.

Lets be honest, nothing redhat gives out is actually free.

[freedomben]

I think I'm a lot more benefit-of-the-doubt than you, but I agree completely with what you said.

Red Hat is very committed to putting the necessary infrastructure and organization in place around projects before they open source to make sure that the code isn't just available but can actually use community contributions. I don't have any inside info on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if OpenShift 4 is just waiting for that, or possibly to be in a stable enough state that the community can contribute.

Of course it's possible also that RH is keeping it closed for other reasons as well such as avoiding tipping their hand to competitors until their end goal is realized or something like that. I guess the point is I don't know, but given Red Hat's history of open sourcing even valuable acquisitions, I have faith that they will with OpenShift 4 as well.

[throwaway9147]

> Red Hat is very committed to putting the necessary infrastructure and organization in place around projects before they open source to make sure that the code isn't just available but can actually use community contributions.

OpenShift went from open-source to closed-source. The infrastructure and organization was already in place.

> or possibly to be in a stable enough state that the community can contribute.

I would say that it's stable enough for all RedHat customers who pay for it.

> I guess the point is I don't know, but given Red Hat's history of open sourcing even valuable acquisitions, I have faith that they will with OpenShift 4 as well.

I have no doubts that old RedHat would do it, but IBM might have a different approach.

[throwaway9147]

ignore my above comment, I've jumped to premature conclusions.

[joshberkus]

True, but it's been a goal to open source Quay from before Red Hat acquired CoreOS. The Quay team has always wanted to go community OSS, and it's been Red Hat's policy since acquisition to help them. There were just a whole bunch of prerequisites to iron out first.

And now users are in a much better place, because they have multiple choices of container registry, which will hopefully drive innovation.

[throwaway9148]

Another great project my org is in the process of migrating to is Kraken. We’re migrating to that from after a bad experience with Harbor.

[throwaway9147]

I don't have any experience with Harbor so can't comment on its architecture, my argument was purely about there being an existing, highly popular, open source solution backed by CNCF. Can you share more details about what's so bad about Harbor architecture?

[thebouv]

Curious what your experience was. Been using harbor for a couple months and have no issues. BUT we're not using it in a very heavy environment.

[soulofmischief]

Yeah, and Ansible has only gotten better since then. Seems IBM hasn't nuked the company culture yet, either. I've been considering applying to Red Hat, they inspire me a lot with the scale they've managed to achieve. Linux would suck without them... All of my servers and physical machines are Centos/Fedora and once a few pain points are addressed I'm looking forward to switching to Silverblue.