Paul Cormier says it clearly. Red Hat isn’t an open source company. They are an enterprise software company with an open source development model. That’s the thing anybody who thinks there will “never be another Red Hat” doesn’t get. arstechnica.com/information-te…
Folks who try to replicate it make a number of mistakes. 1: they don’t go fully open. 2: they make the project and their product identical, and free (as in beer) 3: they treat forks with hostility rather than welcome as collaborators on their upstream.
4: they build products for the wrong persona - the builders rather than the consumers. 5: they make it zero friction to move between the enterprise product and the open source project. The product is the differentiation.
The more I look, the more I believe nobody has ever actually tried building a business on Red Hats model. They all fucked it up in one of the above ways, and then abandoned it. It’s not obvious why it’s been working.
One amazing thing about their model: they are so open that they are always the de facto upstream. That means all the “free” bits are defined in relationship to their enterprise upstream, not the reverse.
Again, not a model anyone has tried. Canonical fucked it up by declaring Ubuntu as always free forever. Maybe SuSE? Certainly I can’t think of anyone not a Linux distro.
It’s the largest open source outcome in history, with a business model nobody has even tried to replicate, essentially because people always take a shallow perspective on it, and declare themselves expert equivalencies
