back to article Open-source Linux doesn't pay, said no one ever at Red Hat

Red Hat's sales jumped 14 per cent, year-on-year, in the quarter that ended May 31, thanks to contracts with government and cloud providers. The GNU/Linux distro maker recorded US$481m in sales in its first quarter of its fiscal 2016 year, and a net income of US$48m, up 26 per cent on the year-ago period. The 44 cents per …

  1. jonnycando
    Thumb Up

    Even if it doesn't pay.

    It puts windows to shame.

    1. asdf

      Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

      Are you kidding its becoming Windows. Still Red Hat should give Poettering all kinds of stock options. Even Microsoft wasn't able to cash in on others work as well. It does take some serious weaselling to get so much open source code locked in to the one platform you make money on that is supposed to be nearly POSIX.

      1. asdf

        Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

        Gnome for example is two years tops away from being unportable. kdbus is the next step where finally Red Hat can largely ignore the GPL on the Linux kernel.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

          Hmpf. Some is trying to recreate AmigaDOS. ZeroCopy indeed.

        2. bazza Silver badge

          Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

          Gnome for example is two years tops away from being unportable.

          Well, no loss there then. They are seriously screwing up Gnome, and Nautilus is now useless as a file manager. Amongst other things, apparently they've decided that no one should ever need to know the time stamp of a file more than 24hrs in the past. They're rapidly coding their way towards irrelevance, whilst everyone else (esp Cinnamon) just gets better and better.

          I have a thesis that's possibly worth exploring. Inside Redhat there are a bunch of programmers working on Gnome, and they've run out of ideas. If they stop doing stuff they'll get fired. So they make it up, say that everyone else is an idiot when the latest release is derided and hope that their boss never realises that he's been had.

          1. ozmark

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            Erm, just use Nemo, problem solved.

            1. P. Lee

              Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

              I can see where this is going.

              I don't think RH make their money from the desktop though.

              I'd hazard a guess that it is mostly support for systems running apache and oracle for companies where such systems handle a lot of revenue.

              The year of the Linux Desktop is not here yet. We need to wait for Snow Leopard users' systems to die and be forced to look at the abomination of Yosemite and Windows 10. They will choose the one true KDE Way ;)

              We also need a time-machine equivalent to be shipped as standard in a visible way, not be some add-on.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            @ Bazza

            Take a look at KDE Plasma 5, it's shaping up to be very nice indeed. It's an excellent evolution from KDE 4 and has just about the best file manager in Dolphin.

            1. S4qFBxkFFg

              Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

              Does KDE still have the little yellow turd (I know, I know, but that was the first impression and it stuck) in the upper right corner of the desktop that can't be removed?

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

                "Does KDE still have the little yellow turd "

                I take you mean the "cashew" although turd is a good one but now I come to look at it - stomach! Not unless you want it to appear there. I think it was there by default but that was a long time ago for me.

              2. asdf

                Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

                >"Does KDE still have the little yellow turd

                More reason to use Lumina instead of KDE. More assurance for the future though admittedly they are different beasts and Lumina does greatly benefit from all the kitchen sink apps as part of KDE.

            2. asdf

              Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

              > best file manager in Dolphin.

              Actually in the KDE ecosystem K3B and Konsole are the really killer apps for me. Dolphin's a bit heavy for a file manager. I guess Konsole is too but I still like it.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

                > Dolphin's a bit heavy for a file manager

                I guess it depends on your use case. For me, being able to access my web servers and remote computers (via sftp), phone (KDE Connect), ownCloud servers (WEBDAV), etc., all transparently and from a unified interface is quite an advantage, since all the previously mentioned actions are part and parcel of my daily workflow.

                Horses for courses, etc.

          3. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            You are correct. There are a bunch of people (designers) working on Gnome, who have run out of ideas and say that everyone else is an idiot when they're questioned.

          4. asdf

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            >They're rapidly coding their way towards irrelevance, whilst everyone else (esp Cinnamon) just gets better and better.

            Its good Cinnamon has moved more and more away from Gnome but it may well get caught up in the systemd dependency hell as well. Clem is a great dev/guy but has accepted the RH take over too readily IMHO.

        3. Baggypants

          Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

          You're suggesting the company that bought a .NET virtualisation management application and rewrote the whole thing in Java and then open sourced it doesn't have some sort of commitment to the GPL?

          1. alisonken1

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            Last I checked, only parts of .NET are open source. Need to re-check to see, so I believe that no, they are not (yet) fully committed to open source.

        4. John Crisp

          Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

          "...Red Hat can largely ignore the GPL on the Linux kernel..."

          With systemd they can largely ignore Linus and the Linux kernel......

        5. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

          Yawn... You know if you took time to learn systemd, you'd find it isn't too bad.

          If you can't deal with change, technology really isn't where you should spend your time.

          1. hplasm
            Gimp

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            "...If you can't deal with change...waahhh"

            SystemD is like paying in Euro and getting your change in Peso.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            > Yawn... You know if you took time to learn systemd, you'd find it isn't too bad.

            Of course it isn't too bad. It's even worse.

            > If you can't deal with change

            The problem with change is that it can go in one of two ways: better or ...

          3. asdf

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            >You know if you took time to learn systemd

            Systemd is not hard and I do have to use it at work along with Windows and luckily other much better OSs. Why because I am paid to do so and accept it as part of the job. Doesn't mean I have to put up with it on my own time which I don't. Both UNIX and Open Source is so much more than Linux regardless of what Red Hat thinks or tries to do. The fork will live.

          4. tom dial Silver badge

            Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

            As I see it, the good of systemd is that I can reboot in a small number of seconds, and the bad is that I seem to have to do it at least ten times as often, for something like a wash, except that I need to learn a new way to do things that were quite straightforward with the sysv bucket of mostly fairly simple shell scripts.

            1. Chemist

              Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

              "As I see it, the good of systemd is that I can reboot in a small number of seconds, and the bad is that I seem to have to do it at least ten times as often, for something like a wash"

              Using OpenSUSE I reboot hardly ever and only switch off when I'm traveling. Updates arrive regularly and systemd seems to restart any daemons that have been updated.

      2. keithpeter Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

        "Are you kidding its becoming Windows. Still Red Hat should give Poettering all kinds of stock options. Even Microsoft wasn't able to cash in on others work as well."

        All the code is GPL licenced I believe. So the system can evolve into something a bit saner over time. Some of the *bsd people are hoping to build their own launchd so having a *thing* that lives between the kernel and the applications seems to be a popular development.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @keithpeter - Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

          Don't forget they are the only contributors so once they got the (Linux) world domination, they replace it with a non-GPL, comercial version and let the community version slowly die of natural death.

          You didn't see this, did you ?

    2. kryptylomese

      Re: Even if it doesn't pay.

      Linux is installed on more computers than any other operating system, so yes, yes it really does put Windows to shame!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Having read the RH Entterprise Agreement quite recently, it struck me that I don't see how on earth it remains compatible with the GPL.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The Agreement is just for the subscription service. The software is still distributed under its license - Linux under GPL2, httpd under Apache License, etc.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If redhat is gpl then why can't I download or obtain it for free? or am I missing something here. Fedora is not redhat btw imo

    1. Justicesays

      You can download all the source, which is what the GPL says you need to be able to do.

      Building that source into a working OS and removing all the "RedHat"(TM) references is harder.

      Which is why CentOS exists.

      Look it up.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        If Red Hat are so bad, wouldn't they keep the source for the non-GPL stuff (eg APL/BSD/MIT/etc) hidden?

        AFAIK *all* of their RHEL source code is publicly available, not just the GPL'd stuff.

    2. wikkity

      RE: If redhat is gpl then why can't I download or obtain it for free?

      Free != Free as in beer.

      There is nothing preventing people from selling GPL software as long as you abide by the GPL and make the code available to those you distribute to. Over the years I've bought quite a number of linux distos and it was quite common before fast internet connections were widely available to be able to buy copies of various GPL'd software.

    3. Blake St. Claire

      here you go

      https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-enterprise-linux/evaluation

      I suppose next you'll whinge about having to sign up for a free account to get the free eval license to use the free software. amirite?

    4. Marcelo Rodrigues

      "If redhat is gpl then why can't I download or obtain it for free? or am I missing something here."

      You can download (and redistribute it!) for free - after You buy it. GPL does not mean "free as in beer". RedHat has every right to sell its Distro to You.

      Under the GPL they have to give you the source code too, an You are free (as in freedom) to pass forward both the source and the binaries.

      Intellectual property, trademark and so on, are not part of this.

      By the same token, RedHat has no obligation whatsoever to keep publishing corrections to its Distro (barring maintenance contracts). They charge You for the privilege of downloading the upgrades - and these upgrades are under the GPL too.

  4. Outcast

    Don't write off Nautlilus

    Just Yet !!

    Bit late to the party but here's a face off of the search engines I did.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUN58XiKYoc&feature=youtu.be

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