[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.