Re: If Linux Is About Choice, Why Then ...
On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 10:48 AM, somebody wrote, off list:
(I'm not sure why you sent it off-list, but I want to respond on-list.
> On 04/10/2017 08:08 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
>
>> What we needed was probably for a group like Canonical to have funded
>> development of several alternative services management systems earlier
>> on. What we need now is for Redhat to back off just a little more than
>> they already have.
>
> [something about redhat earning a billion dollars in a year.]
Last year, their net wasn't even a half-billion. I don't remember if
it's going up or down, and I don't remember them actually netting a
billion. Grossing, yes. They grossed well over 2 billion last fiscal
year, if I haven't already forgotten what I just read.
But I haven't been paying attention, really.
It's (relatively) easy to saturate a market. It's much harder to turn
saturation into a stable business model. It's often much easier to
develop a stable business if you avoid saturation. One of the problems
of the current economy is that almost everyone seems to be focused on
saturation instead of stability.
Anyway, the argument of money has to be applied carefully, and
generally should not supplant the technological discussion. Unless you
want to make your killing and exit the market.
> If you know of a way for RedHat to earn more than a billion in a year, I'm
> sure they would be all ears.
I'm not sure Redhat really wants another saturation point more than
stability, and systemd, actually, was more about stability. They
needed to keep selling things to managers who wanted to believe they
could control their infrastructure.
Systemd definitely gives more apparent evidence of control.
> Until then, I'm betting they will keep on doing
> what they do quite successfully.
Success is relative, and keeping on doing exactly what you are doing
now is not a good way to maintain success. you have to adapt to
changing times to even keep your focus steady.
> It could be they aren't quite so dumb and
> that for Debian to survive they ought to be following RedHat's lead. :) Ric
Well, if "Debian" as a company that needs to succeed (Is it?) wants to
follow Redhat's lead into a now saturated area, that's generally not
good business. Someone would need to analyze how much and what kind of
saturation has occurred, so that the theoretical company could focus
on areas that aren't saturated.
On the other hand, following Redhat's example (not lead) would mean
making their (our?) own init and service management solution, and
making it better than Redhat's.
But I'm not sure what you were trying to get at. If the systemd cabal
learns how to move important functions that have been absorbed into
pid 1 back out, systemd will become a properly usable tool. (It's only
usable now in comparison to what had not been uniformly available
before.) They haven't yet done that, even though I think they have had
time to.
Future success requires fixing things that don't currently work, even
if they aren't yet causing enough problems to impinge on the present
bottom line. Problems ignored hit the bottom line eventually.
(Unless you bail first, and no one wants that, I hope.)
--
Joel Rees
I'm imagining I'm a novelist:
http://joel-rees-economics.blogspot.com/2017/01/soc500-00-00-toc.html
More of my delusions:
http://reiisi.blogspot.jp/p/novels-i-am-writing.html
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