[gwynforthewyn]

I fell in love with this article at this sentence:

> Still. Many in the open source community have interpreted Red Hat’s decision for what it really was: A dick move.

I've had a short essay in draft for a while about the difficulty of a small business trying to make money using The Red Hat Model (https://opencoreventures.com/blog/2023-04-red-hat-model-only...). Red Hat seem like an outlier who're doing well with that model, but smaller places like Sidero or Bitfield had to find other ways to monetise their open source efforts, and sometimes that had pushback from the community.

Red Hat, though, were acquired by IBM, and IBM made it harder for an otherwise thriving ecosystem to exist. Not impossible, but harder. IBM makes money hand over fist (billions according to https://www.ibm.com/annualreport/). Was there really a reason to make Red Hat harder to redistribute? The interviews I've read come down to "our Red Hat team works hard and we don't want to give that away to low effort projects", though if you've got an interview with a different perspective I'd love to read it.

[TheRealPomax]

IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019, at which point their revenue had been stuck at "why isn't our revenue going back up?" for eight years straight, in the hopes that controlling Red Hat would let them squeeze dollars out of it by making it a premium offering to multinationals and governments. Looking at their revenue since, there's a small trend upward, so was there a reason? Unfortunately, yes. Did it work out? Way harder to say but IBM themselves would probably say yes to that one, too.

[ahoka]

The Red Hat model is basically “Embrace, extend, and extinguish”.

[rurban]

The Red Hat model is rather to be the professional distro, made by professionals.

Ubuntu and Debian are for hobbiests and lawyers, and you should never run a public server on debian/Ubuntu if you care about security.

[_factor]

I’m pretty sure the Red Hat model is to profit off the community efforts while creating convoluted complications in the name of security so they can send their high paid consultants to your business and get paid even more.

Was it professional when they let SSH vulnerabilities exist in RHEL7 forcing perfectly useable machines to upgrade to 8 for remediation?

Don’t get me wrong, they’re the new “nobody got fired for” company (technically still the same). That doesn’t imply Debian and Ubuntu are less secure except in name. Go to Google cloud and see what CIS hardened images exist.

Your perspective is an oversimplification if not completely wrong.

[kstrauser]

This is the most bizarre thing I've read in ages, and so incredibly wrong and unrepresentative of the current state of reality that I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it.