Our subscriptions mostly pay for the salesmen and the ads. They sell ads first, IT second. So I’m not gonna cry for RedHat. The image of the poor developers working in a cave, struggling to make money is only in our mind. They had a perfectly functional model but decided to sabotage some of it to try to squeeze even more money.
Operating expense, in thousands (2019,2018):
Sales and marketing 1,378,278 1,195,286
Research and development 668,542 578,330
General and administrative 304,766 239,316
Total operating expense 2,351,586 2,012,932
Let’s stop talking about Fedora/redhat, we are literally doing their job for them, for free.
Oh, btw, their gross profit is mentioned here.
Gross profit (thousands) 2,863,818 2,488,664
Net income (thousands) 433,988 261,851
That’s why I had such bad support experience, because they chose to hire sales people instead of engineers. You have a better chance of being hired by redhat if you are a salesman. It’s as Steve Jobs said, when the sales people take the power in the company.
“If you were a ‘product person’ at IBM or Xerox: so you make a better copier or better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market-share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums.”
The core of their business is made by the open source community. If they need our help for something, it’s from saving them from drowning into money.
We need to jump ship from redhat just like we did from reddit. This is also the perfect opportunity to think about technical solutions on how to use the fediverse to finance the developers of the open source community.
Just a reminder of a couple of things here. And to say that I’d forgotten myself.
Red Hat was acquired by IBM.
IBM has had increasingly questionable business practices over the years (ref: The Decline And Fall Of IBM.
The old saying “Nobody got fired for buying IBM” is an old saying that meant something at some point; whether it still does is another matter. Read the link above to get the full picture. (As someone that used to do support work for HP, a lot of the sales-centric, don’t-spend-money-on-the-tech-folks mindset resonated with me.)
People (myself included) aren’t happy with Red Hat’s proclamation. As an individual, I can’t do much other than to watch how this plays out and give my team and management the heads-up, and monitor.
Jeff Geerling weighed in on this yesterday and had a quick additional thought just a few mins ago.