[Novalug] If I were Redhat

William Sutton william@trilug.org
Mon Jan 30 13:31:18 EST 2017



William Sutton

On Mon, 30 Jan 2017, Walt Smith via Novalug wrote:

>
> for example (wiki):
> Canonical as positioning itself as demand for services
> related to free software rose.[13] This strategy has been
> compared to Red Hat's business strategies in the 1990s

Do you remember what Red Hat tried in the 1990's?  I remember some of it. 
In particular, I remember that they tried selling a user Linux (even found 
a copy of Red Hat 9 at Office Depot) and everyone insisted on downloading 
it for free.  There isn't much money to be made in such a proposition, and 
it is even harder to provide the sort of engineering services Red Hat 
does.  Canonical can try the same path in the 2010's, but I doubt they 
will make any better headway.  Even with selling Ubuntu through Dell isn't 
likely to help.

>
> Let's remember that Microsoft has purchased many
> businesses  and while on the surface the companies
> disappear, we often don't know how Microsoft
> incorporates the technologies.  A slightly more  transparent
> situation is google.     I think Android still has much
> potential - and it's worth a look at the history, and
> the upcoming attempts at competition in other
> related  variations, including IoT.
>

Red Hat has purchased lots of businesses over the years as well.  One of 
the ones they bought in the 2000's was called Akopia.  They had an open 
source ecommerce engine.  I have I have no idea what if anything they've 
done with it since.  Matter of fact, there's a long list of companies that 
Red Hat has bought at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat#Mergers_and_acquisitions

and most of them I've never heard of.

--

It's easy to sit in an arm chair and suggest what someone else should do. 
It's another thing to be the corporate officers in charge of that company 
who (theoretically) have a pretty good idea what their company's 
capabilities are and what their needs are, and make decisions accordingly.

--

Also, I will observe that Peter has a pretty good idea what his company is 
doing.  To argue with him on his turf seems to be a poorly reasoned 
decision.

W.



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