Red Hat is in the pink: Cracks $3bn revenue run rate as subs take off Red Hat’s posted a strong end to its 2018 financial, crossed the US$3bn-a-year-run-rate barrier and reported growth in its key products. The company reported Q4 2018 revenue of US$772 million, up 23 per cent year on year. There was a net loss of $12.6m, but also a one-off $123m charge related to the USA’s new tax laws so the …
And on top of that actively contribute to Open Sauce projects, Sponsor the free Fedora distro, and even sponsors CentOS which is a freely distributed rebuild of their main product!
They're actually pretty decent. I mean sure there's a few things one or two odd people don't like that they done like systemd.
But overall pretty good. They also managed to get a few hardware vendors to support them.
"Im just surprised that the corporate lawyers and MBAs have not managed to get their foot into the door and 'MBA' the org."
They have to a large extent. But the idea of open licensing has always been so baked into the Red Hat marketing USP that even the MBAs have had to learn to live with it (they may not understand software but they understand a marketing USP). Some stuff - last I looked it was all about a scheduled updates service - does get closed off, but too much of that soon gets the fur flying. Imagine a Ford or General Motors MBA trying to make the company force three-wheelers on its customers because they are cheaper to make.
The Red Hat guys I work with care about MY business model and how the OSS can be best employed to move me forward. Very different from, say, IBM which is a one trick pony with a broken back selling 'business transformation!' constantly. Good to see them healthy. I'm not not sure I've wrapped my head around systemd yet.
SystemD seems like a great idea if you're Red Hat...and sell lots of cloud and container stuff with a lot of identical or nearly opsys running.
If you're me, with some 20 odd machines all customized differently for different tasks, with a mix of X86 and arm variants, it's an unmitigated disaster that has new broken things with every new release.
Right now, system monitoring and VNC software that ran flawlessly at startup on my ARM machines cannot now be autostarted at boot anymore once I updated to Debian Stretch, as some little sorcerer's apprentice demon now starts infinite instances of both till a system locks up - no matter what init system I think I started them with - as systemD now simply looks at those files and takes over, and does the wrong thing. And when it thinks it failed, even if it didn't, it tries again.
At least they kinda fixed the issues with mounting shares at boot time, another major breakage in the WTF category.
So Red Hat's judgement in letting LP do this after previously setting linux audio back half a decade and then walking away to let someone else fix it, is to say the least, quite questionable.
Creeping dependency on the new things that did work more or less forced the other distros to add this horrible disaster. And does RH care? Nope, not one whit - people like us are not their customers and never will be. That's the downside of someone finally making money - and being dependent on it - from "open" source...undue influence to support *their* business model, and hang mine.
Whilst I am no fan of systemd, and now have to live with it in RHEL7 at work, you can hardly blame Red Hat for Debian adopting it.
If you are rolling your own builds, there's info in removing systemd from Stretch here http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_systemd_from_a_Debian_Stretch_installation
Thanks for that, I'll check it out...hopefully it'll work on arm, anyway. I can't prove it's this latest systemD, but it's the main thing that's changed at init and it's been the last 10 issues (at least).
I've wrassled the x86 issues to the ground at this point, the issue seems to be some kinda obscure timeout I can't find in the always-changing documentation, such as that is. HIts the arm stuff as it's slower?
That's actually a linux-wide issue - search for dox on you-name-it, and it's not that you won't find hundreds of answers - you will, but they'll go back two decades and help you with things that no longer exist. Sorting out which one solves your current problem is the interesting part.
You could hope the search engines would learn to notice dates a little better...not RH's fault, but still a pain.
Nor is SystemD in Debian their fault. But RH swing such a big bat - and so do the people who make apps that might find use of some new features enticing - that the rest of the world really doesn't have much choice. Sure, you can strip out systemD, and the opsys will still work, but then there's all the actual application code we need to run to do anything useful...zillions of paper-cut decisions by many providers add up. (Remember the fight over this at Debian was hardly civil...they gave up in the end, as there was basically nothing to be done).
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