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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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)