[Beowulf] HPE to acquire Cray

[Douglas Eadline]

> On Mon, 20 May 2019 18:42:31 -0400, you wrote:
>
>>I am curious, do you have some evidence for the demise of CentOS
>>other than IBM bought RH?
>
> The important thing to remember about CentOS (and presumably why Red
> Hat brought it on board) is that it is not really a RHEL competitor,
> rather it is a RHEL marketing tool.
>
> Red Hat, for RHEL, needs to worry about Ubuntu who (as far as I know)
> make no difference between the LTS release publicly available to all
> and the version they offer paid support for.
>
> Red Hat needs a similiar arrangement, and CentOS does that for them.
> They need the "free" version of the OS that start ups and companies
> can use legally while building a project / business and then when and
> if they decide they want paid support then RHEL is the obvious choice.
>
> If there is no CentOS then that market defaults to Ubuntu, and if you
> are running Ubuntu and you now need the insurance that paid support
> offers you are unlikely to suddenly change your infrastructure to
> RHEL.
>
> My observation / opinion is that IBM isn't the real threat to Red Hat,
> rather Red Hat is the biggest threat to Red Hat.
>
> Like any organization that has been around for a while various
> "kingdoms" have been established within Red Hat, and those combined
> with inertia mean Red Hat hasn't been making the changes or tough
> decisions that I suspect the market is moving towards.

Well said. IMO, selling opensource software/support is about mind-share.
If you get enough people trying your "thing" the ones that
need support may come to you rather than trying to find them.
And, of course you still try to find them.

(Admittedly this strategy works best for widely used software, not
niche products.)

And as many of you know, in big companies support is about
both getting things fixed and about CYA when things go wrong.

--
Doug

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-- 
Doug