On 14/01/14 23:59, John Lauro wrote:
Your first assumption, although largely correct as a generality it is not
entirely accurate, and at a minimum is not the sole purpose. That is why
companies have mission statements. They rarely highlight the purpose of
making money, although that is often the main purpose even if not
specified. What is Red Hat's mission? It is listed as:
To be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners
creating better technology the open source way.
Making things exceedingly difficult would go against the stated mission.
In my opinion it would also go against making money as it would kill the
eco system of vendors that support RedHat Enterprise Linux for their
applications.
There are so many distributions out there, the biggest way for them to not
make money is to become insignificant. Having free alternatives like
Centos keeps high market share of the EL product and ensures compatibility
and a healthy eco system. If there was not open clones of EL, then ubuntu
or something else would take over and the main supported platform of
enterprise applications, and then the large enterprises that pay for RedHat
support contracts would move completely off.
Having people use Centos or Scientific linux might not directly help the
bottom line, but for RedHat it's a lot better than having people use ubuntu
or suse. Oracle not being free could pose a bigger threat, but either
RedHat remains on top as they are the main source for good support, or they
do not and Oracle will have to pick up the slack for driving RedHat out of
business. and what's left of RedHat would have to start using Oracle as
TUV... I don't see too many switching to Oracle besides those that are
already Oracle shops.
+1
Nice summary. (despite ignoring that Oracle's spin of CentOS most likely is
more open than what's indicated here)
--
kind regards,
David Sommerseth
----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick J. LoPresti" <lopre...@gmail.com>
To: scientific-linux-users@fnal.gov
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 12:45:01 PM
Subject: RedHat CentOS acquisition: stating the obvious
RedHat is a company. Companies exist for the sole purpose of making
money. Every action by any company -- literally every single action,
ever -- is motivated by that goal.
The question you should be asking is: How does Red Hat believe this
move is going to make them money?
Those were statements of fact. What follows is merely my opinion.
Right now, anybody can easily get for free the same thing Red Hat
sells, and their #1 competitor is taking their products, augmenting
them, and reselling them. If you think Red Hat perceives this as
being
in their financial interest, I think you are out of your mind.
SRPMs will go away and be replaced by an ever-moving git tree. Red
Hat
will make it as hard as legally possible to rebuild their commercial
releases. The primary target of this move is Oracle, but Scientific
Linux will be collateral damage.
I consider all of this pretty obvious, but perhaps I am wrong. I hope
I am.
- Pat
