Red Hat 30th anniversary

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-30th-anniversary-celebrating-red-hat-day-north-carolina

by rwmj • 3 years ago

215 173 3 years ago

teddyh2• 3 years ago

Red Hat was 26 years old in 2019, and then they were acquired by IBM.

But that’s only if you count the starting year as 1993; Red Hat the actual company seems to have been started in 1995, from what I read. In that case, they would have been 28 years old today.

nemetroid• 3 years ago

According to the article,

Red Hat was incorporated on March 26, 1993, by its founders Bob Young and Marc Ewing

tokai• 3 years ago

Red Hats themselves says 95 other places.[0] Young and Ewing was working together from 93', but Red Hat Software, Inc. is from 95.

[0] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/brand/standards/history

teddyh2• 3 years ago

I guess that depends on your definitions. ACC Corporation was created in 1993, but it was a simple CD-selling company and had nothing to do with Red Hat except distributing their CDs, like many other CDs they sold.

brozaman4• 3 years ago

Red Hat was 26 years old in 2019, and then they were acquired by IBM.

As a former Red Hat employee this was painful to read. IBM is doing a Sun Microsystems to it, Red Hat used to be such a great company.

jterrys• 3 years ago

That's disappointing to hear. What are some noticeable changes since the acquisition?

pxc8• 3 years ago

Oracle basically murdered a ton of Sun open-source projects overnight.

Is IBM really doing that to Red Hat, or just suffocating it slowly the way that happens in many acquisitions?

veidr• 3 years ago

I clicked through to this thread because I want to know more about this.

I'm a user (of both RHEL and Fedora, although I use RHEL via the free developer license so I am not actually a customer).

I used to be a Sun user in the same way, but when Oracle bought Sun it was really, really obvious that using Sun's stuff was something we should immediately prepare to stop doing.

It's a little less obvious with IBM buying Red Hat, though -- especially to a random user like me.

For one, IBM isn't nestled between Halliburton, Enron, and Juul on the despicability spectrum.

For two, it looks a lot like Apple buying NeXT, at least from the outside. As in old company with a lot of not-looking-so-hot-anymore tech buys the younger upstart with better tech, and the better tech seems to win.

So what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad? E.g. firing the team responsible for developing X, and just milking the dead husk for short-term enterprise deals, or... ??

blcknight• 3 years ago

Still is. I’ve been at RH a long time.

IBM hasn’t touched us and they are not doing what Oracle did to Sun. Not yet anyway, but Jim made a bunch of promises to us when we were acquired and they’ve kept them all.

ilyt5• 3 years ago

Yup, it already started. They bought Ceph and one of first things they did is discontinuing packaging for non-rhel distros

_chu12• 3 years ago

It is not nearly as bad. Oracle assassinated OpenSolaris on first sight while IBM literally pays people to develop Fedora.

samueloph• 3 years ago

But that’s only if you count the starting year as 1993; Red Hat the actual company seems to have been started in 1995, from what I read. In that case, they would have been 28 years old today.

The distro was not created before 1994 either, so looks like they're counting the moment the founders got together as the creation date (before the distro, before the company) ?!

nspattak• 3 years ago

I still have my first linux cd somewhere.

They came together with the `SAMS RedHat Linux 7.0 Unleased` book I bought as I did not want to go through the same pain I went with my 33600 pstn downloading slackware 7's cd#1 in 14 days.

Cheers RedHat :)

zhte415• 3 years ago

I remember coming down an escalator around 23 years ago in an Amazon or Amazon-like bookstore seeing someone pick up a Redhat box in its distinctive colouring from behind the cashier desk and thinking "They're onto something."

iso1631• 3 years ago

My first was from a Redhat 5.2 book, some time in the first half of 1999. Alas at the time my SIS6326 wasn't supported in X, at least by default so there was little I could do. In those days internet access wasn't ubiquitous like today -- you could get online, you'd have to use minicom to dial your modem, then background it, then run pppd to get IP up and working, then use lynx to access the internet.

Or dual-boot back to windows, use a browser, find something else to try, then back to linux to try that.

Wasn't really until 6.0 that I started using linux properly, and wasn't until Debian Potato in August 2000 that it became my primary OS.

eddieroger• 3 years ago

Ugh now I feel old, because my first Linux was a Red Hat on floppies that came tied to a RH 4.X book or something. It was so cool to install on an old Gateway 2000 I had come across, and have my own computer. Hard to believe that for as lost as I was in that shell on day one, I now spend so much time in one, sometimes from a computer that fits in my pocket.

hn_throwaway_69• 3 years ago

I only have a modicum of respect for this company after they butchered CentOS.

arjvik3• 3 years ago

IBM's acquisition caused this, don't blame only RedHat

midoridensha5• 3 years ago

Ah yes, IBM: the software company that still thinks Rational ClearCase is a great version control system.

kasabali2• 3 years ago

They bought CentOS in 2014 which was long before IBM.

Spivak2• 3 years ago

Which honestly is going to bite them. The on-ramp from CentOS when small and RHEL once you’re big enough to need support is gone. It’s Ubuntu/Debian all the way down now.

onphonenow• 3 years ago

This… it was a natural flow.

I’ve switched to Ubuntu too but my muscle memory is Redhat so still sometimes annoying- never got into Debian though

einpoklum7• 3 years ago

What would you say are the main contributions of RedHat to the FOSS world, from its inception until this time (or 2019 if we want to split hairs)?

As a devotee Debian (now Devuan), I've never been fond of RedHat/RHEL/CentOS as distributions and they always felt clunky to me somehow. But I am vaguely aware that RedHat has been involved in kernel development and the development of various apps etc. What would you say are the most prominent and "redeeming" of those?

boomboomsubban• 3 years ago

Cue start of a systemd debate.

Less sarcastically, systemd is a major part of most distros. It has it's haters, but it's one of the most impressive additions to FOSS from Red Hat.

2b3a51• 3 years ago

Contributions to kernel by employees?

einpoklum7• 3 years ago

Impressive in its insidiousness, I would say. I still can't believe Debian bought into that (of course, while claiming it's only an option).

INTPenis• 3 years ago

curl -sL 'https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS' | grep -ci redhat

The fact that their employees can work on a large part of the Linux ecosystem during work hours makes a huge difference too. I often come across people from redhat experimenting, like implementing screen sharing in wayland.

I've heard that they've been known to buy up stuff like Ansible for example, and then release source code. In ansible's case it was AWX, but I wish I had some better examples to mention. Maybe someone else can fill me in on some company red hat has purchased only to release their product source code to the public.

fransje26• 3 years ago

curl -sL 'https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS' | grep -i "@redhat" | grep -v "L:" | sort -u | wc -l

worthless-trash• 3 years ago

Not all of redhats contributions are from @redhat.com domain, its not uncommon for people to commit from their personal addresses.

I can think of a companies that redhat has bought ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat ), but the ones that i think got opensourced are:

- Sistina GFS - Netscape directory server - Permabit (Dedupe I think)

There are likely more but these are the ones that I've messed with and they opened source.

einpoklum7• 3 years ago

150 out of 3873. Certainly noteworthy. Some other commercial companies:

     curl -sL 'https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS' | egrep -o '<.*@.*>' | sed 's/<.*@//; s/>$//;' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

     23 ti.com
     24 foss.st.com
     27 vmware.com
     28 huawei.com
     36 bootlin.com
     36 mediatek.com
     41 chromium.org <- Google, right? --einpoklum
     43 analog.com
     47 suse.com
     48 amd.com
     48 samsung.com
     49 arm.com
     49 marvell.com
     49 microchip.com
     49 nvidia.com
     54 google.com
     61 nxp.com
     76 broadcom.com
     84 linux.ibm.com
     87 linux.intel.com
    140 redhat.com
    157 linaro.org
    158 intel.com

Barrin92• 3 years ago

they're one of the largest contributors to the kernel, Gnome is largely funded and developed by Red Hat I think, they sponsor Fedora. They probably employ a significant chunk of people who work on the linux ecosystem.

einpoklum7• 3 years ago

So, the kernel is very much to their credit, GNOME - somewhat of a wash, in the sense that some people like it and some hate it... as for Fedora - I count that as one of "their" distributions, which like I said, I'm not a fan of.

But point taken about many people working on the ecosystem.

dagw2• 3 years ago

What would you say are the main contributions of RedHat to the FOSS world

For me, I would say their biggest contribution is their early work with getting Linux into the hands of 'normal' people. RedHat was the first to really get their CDs into bookstores, into computer books and into the hands of students and hobbyists. They sponsored and supported the writing of many of the books that first taught people Linux. At the same time they managed to appear as a 'serious' company and calm and convince managers that Linux on both company servers and work stations was a safe bet. I would also say they really pioneered the whole "FOSS as a business model" concept which many companies and projects later adopted.

mongol3• 3 years ago

They have set a lot of standards. If Red Hat did something it often has become embraced. Basically, they have acted as a leader and I think they have done a good job as that.

einpoklum7• 3 years ago

Can you name some of the prominent examples?

frant-hartm• 3 years ago

They are 2nd largest contributor to OpenJDK (Oracle is 1st obviously). They maintain the older releases - 8 and 11. It's mainly thanks to them that freely available maintenance releases of JDK 8 an 11 still exist.

sverhagen2• 3 years ago

That's truly admirable, but on a little tangent here: how sad is it if you still have to be on Java 8. Sure, there's probably a small few good reasons for an exceeding small amount of users, but all those enterprises that won't go with the times just because their compliance team won't certify an upgrade, I feel for those folks.

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

For better or worse: $$$$. Lots of $$$$.

yrro• 3 years ago

See the sibling comment from Thev00d00 for a decent answer.

account424• 3 years ago

Just one person amongs many, but employing Dave Airlie (airlied) has been a great boon for the Linux graphics stack. Among many other things, arlied started the radv driver (together with Bas Nieuwenhuizen) which has been become a significant part of Linux gaming on AMD hardware.

dralley3• 3 years ago

There was a long stretch of time for which the only full-time developer working on Python (cPython) upstream was a Red Hat employee. The other core devs were either working in their free time or with their employers sponsoring only a few hours a week.

https://discuss.python.org/t/official-list-of-core-developer...

I believe Microsoft has been sponsoring a lot of work for the past year or so, so I doubt that is still the case.

Red Hat has been probably the biggest contributor to GCC for a very long time and contributes to LLVM/clang as well.

Beyond the kernel - glibc has a lot of RH maintenance work, Grub2, wayland, Xorg, Gnome, Gtk, pipewire, systemd. etc.

Thev00d002• 3 years ago

Leader: "What have Red Hat ever done for us?"

Enthusiast #1: "Well, they developed and continue to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux, one of the most popular enterprise Linux distributions."

Leader: "Oh, well obviously we need that. That's true."

Enthusiast #2: "And don't forget about the Fedora Project! It's a community-driven distribution that helps test out new technologies before they make their way into RHEL."

Leader: "Oh, right, the Fedora Project. Yes, yes, we should be grateful for that."

Enthusiast #3: "Plus, they've made significant contributions to the development of the Linux kernel, especially when it comes to virtualization, security, and performance."

Leader: "Ah, yes, the kernel. You're absolutely right, that's a big one."

Enthusiast #4: "And what about all the open-source software projects they've developed and supported, like the GNOME, JBoss and Ansible?"

Leader: "Well, obviously we couldn't get by without those."

Enthusiast #5: "And let's not forget about their collaboration with other companies and organizations to advance open-source initiatives, like OpenStack and Kubernetes."

Leader: "Yes, yes, very impressive. But apart from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Fedora Project, contributions to the Linux kernel, open-source software projects, and collaboration with other organizations, what have Red Hat ever done for us?"

hulitu• 3 years ago

advocated for the use of open standards and interoperability

systemd, pulseaudio, freedesktop have bought much pain in the way of open standards and interoperability.

pxc8• 3 years ago

For people trying to run desktop BSD, I think systemd has caused some real pain. For most Linux users and sysadmins, systemd has been helpful in the way it has standardized service management.

The freedesktop standards just seem to be offensive to BSD people as a matter of taste, though.

At its worst, PulseAudio was basically fine but pushed on some users by their distros before it was mature. And even then, Red Hat has also driven the development of its replacement, PipeWire, which has been widely recognized as kickass pretty much from the get-go.

nailer3• 3 years ago

So many people quietly making .service files for their software who don’t even know what systemd is. Thanks Red Hat.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4018154/how-do-i-run-a-n...

jmclnx2• 3 years ago

systemd, pulseaudio, freedesktop have bought much pain in the way of open standards and interoperability.

You were down voted, so I will be glad to join you in the swamps :)

I fully agree with that statement, with freedesktop being by far the worst of the bunch. Seems these so-called "Open Groups" are doing all they can to eliminate the BSDs and probably some rather unique Linux Distros along the way.

And yes, I stand by this and I doubt my opinion will ever change. So let the down-votes begin :)

midoridensha5• 3 years ago

I can do just fine without GNOME. In fact, I think the Linux ecosystem would have been much better off if it had never been developed, or maybe left to die after the Qt license issues were sorted out.

As for the popularity of RHEL, how much of that is because the US government is probably their biggest customer, and basically mandates its use for any application needing Linux? That's not a grassroots type of popularity.

anthk• 3 years ago

I always tought an enhanced GNUStep+WindowMaker with a modernized setup a la OSX would create a much better environment than Gnome.

Today we would be using GNUStep using 1/10 of the resources of any DE and Cocoa Emacs would shine on GNU much more than the GTK3 version.

nailer3• 3 years ago

AWS Linux and the internal Facebook system were also based on Red Hat.

toyg3• 3 years ago

The popularity of RH was (and is) driven by its commercial stability. They were the first to support slow-changing releases over timespans that businesses found realistic. In the enterprise, you can't rebuild a server every other year - you must be able to guarantee stability over 5 years at least. This stability gave major developers (like Oracle) a fixed target they could realistically aim to support with closed-source binaries. This way, they became "the" commercial Linux distribution of choice.

They've since missed a few boats, but still they've been careful to play only in the areas where real money can be made - and they've quietly steered platform evolution over the long term, effectively calling all the shots (or at least all the shots that matter) in the Linux world for a long time now.

EntrePrescott4• 3 years ago

if it had never been developed

In all fairness: Gnome was absolutely great at its beginnings… until the clique around Havoc Pennington took over and decided they know better than the users what's good for them and ruined Gnome… thus earning them the affectionate title "interface nazis" dished out by Linus Torvalds.

https://www.cio.com/article/220271/11-technologies-that-tick...

after the Qt license issues were sorted out

Much as I'd agree that GTK has proven to not be the way (either), I don't see the "Qt license issues" as being "sorted out" at all.

It did look like it for a short while after Nokia bought Trolltech and made Qt available under LGPLv2.1, but that didn't last long: Shortly after, Microsoft managed to place their mole Stephen Elop onto the CEO seat of Nokia, and Elop methodically ruined Nokia in preparation for a Microsoft takeover and threw out Qt (which represented cross-platform, a concept Microsoft always saw as as a threat to their business model), replacing it with the ill-fated Windows Phone platform. Under Digia, and even more so once splitted out as QTCOM, The licensing focus of Qt has shifted from "make it more open so as to gain wide traction" (the strategy under Nokia) to "try to force devs into commercial licensing schemes and monetize to the max you can milk out of it", and it has been a sore downhill slide into a shitty situation.

The "Qt license issues" we have today aren't the same as way back then in the QPL days of early KDE-vs-Gnome forum wars, but they are at least as bad imho. A lot of developers who used to develop mainly with Qt (me included) have since jumped ship because of that and prefer to avoid Qt too now, though the sad reality is that while there are better alternatives depending on the project, there isn't really a good free cross-platform allround alternative for Qt either. I think there is really a big window of opportunity and gap to be filled by a new modern cross-platform UI toolkit.

sverhagen2• 3 years ago

I felt I was reading toward some sort of punchline, but it didn't come, or I didn't get it. Like how the leader acknowledges all the goodness, but still doesn't want to pay for it, perhaps. Though maybe that's not really a Red Hat problem?

eloisant• 3 years ago

That's a reference to the Monty Python's "what have the romans ever done for us?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

Thev00d002• 3 years ago

You're right, I think I made a mistake by adding the last block, edited it to end on the leader, which I think makes it funnier.

Scubabear68• 3 years ago

I LOL’d a bit at JBoss, only because how radically history changed from App Servers ruling the world to practically disappearing over night into the maw of Spring boot (and it’s ancestors).

toyg3• 3 years ago

We hated appservers so much, we reinvented their whole "managed deployment" thing at the OS level (with containers/docker).

stuff4ben• 3 years ago

Openshift is the new Websphere/JBoss.

znpy2• 3 years ago

Red Hat basically made linux on the server a reality.

It provided a solid and serious corporate backing to that idea, providing not only software implementation and bug fixes, but also (and maybe more importantly) guidance, training, consulting.

Basically bridging the tech world with the corporate world.

All this in a time where the computing industry was divided among Microsoft and proprietary unix vendors.

Anybody not acknowledging these points would be dishonest at best.

ghaff4• 3 years ago

IBM's big endorsement in early 2000 made a big difference as well.

But whether or not you you accept the premise that an open source "unix" was inevitable, a lot of companies in the late 90s were at least hedging on a world where Windows basically conquered all. (Sun being the notable exception among the systems companies.)

einpoklum7• 3 years ago

One could argue it has offered GNU/Linux distributions which, in order to manage, require their guidance, training and consulting.

So, yeah, basically bridging the tech world with the corporate world, but in both directions :-(

quickthrower24• 3 years ago

systemd?

dralley3• 3 years ago

pipewire

EntrePrescott4• 3 years ago

given the strongly diverging views and controversial nature of forum discussions whenever the subject "systemd" comes up, I feel like I have to ask, for the sake of clarity: was the mention of systemd meant positively (in favor of Red Hat) or negatively/sarcastically?

op00to8• 3 years ago

Leader: "Great. We've embraced RHEL, and decided to toss out VMware for RHV, just like you've been asking."

Enthusiast #6: "Uhhh ..... about that."

Leader: "Oh, not good huh? Well, certainly Red Hat Storage is a great take-out for our expensive proprietary storage units!"

Enthusiast #7: not present because the whole BU was moved to IBM

markandrewj• 3 years ago

I have been experiencing this personally, although it's more accurate to say the RHV/oVirt team was moved on to OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt).

CraigJPerry• 3 years ago

Still to this day, THE BEST exam i ever sat was the Redhat Certified Engineer. I guess like many folks here i’ve sat a ton of exams over the years but none compares to that one. I can’t really think of another case where i loved an exam.

It might have all changed by now, I did my RHCE exam on RHEL5.5 so we’re talking many moons ago before switching careers to development.

eminent101• 3 years ago

I guess like many folks here i’ve sat a ton of exams over the years

At the risk of sounding like a caveman I have to admit that I haven't sat a single exam in my professional life. Am I losing out on something? What benefits have these exams brought to you that could not have been happened without them? Seriously considering if I should start signing up for them. And if I want to sign up for them, where do I start?

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

For your personal development, it offers a structured way to learn a new skill; doing it on your own works, but has the risk of skipping large swathes of it or getting bored with it. Working towards certification is a goal you can work towards, as an alternative to undirected or situational learning.

And for an employer it's a nice tick when assessing candidates, it might just tip the scales in your favors vs someone else. However, I recognize that we're very much in a "seller's market", in that it often feels like education or certifications don't matter when it comes to finding a job, to the point where some years ago, people that just had a crash course / boot camp (as opposed to a formal education, bachelor's or master's degree) could land a six-figure job at a FAANG or startup company.

dagw2• 3 years ago

There was a time (early 2000s) where certifications where all the rage and by far the easiest way for otherwise 'mediocre' employees to stand out from the crowd to get hired and/or a raise. A couple of places I worked had formalized systems tying raises to passing certifications. Several people I know got hired for their job in tech purely on the back of passing their Microsoft developer certification.

chr15p4• 3 years ago

To me there are a few benefits of doing exams (at least the Red Hat ones that are not cheap, but well respected):

1) it looks good on the resume, which can help you get past the initial sift by people who dont understand what your experience actually means.

2) They give you the chance to fill in the gaps in what you think you know. My experience of doing my RHCE after 10 years of professional sysadmining was of the 14 chapters in the book I knew maybe 10 already and had never touched the other 4 because they never came up in my job, and the prospect of a looming exam gave me a deadline and the motivation to actually sit down and learn them, which then paid off later in other jobs that did use them.

3) to test whether you are as good as you think you are :)

If those don't speak to you then they're probably not super important to do, luckily we mostly work in an industry where experience trumps exams.

jasoneckert• 3 years ago

I was one of the first people to write RHEL back when I think they were still figuring out how they should do the exam.

There was a written portion followed by a practical portion in a lab where you had to configure services/features, followed by a break where they would mess small things up that you had to troubleshoot and fix.

I had a feeling they were going to break things, so I made sure I installed tripwire on each machine so I knew exactly what files they touched. I was done that portion in under 15 minutes. When I came out, the proctor said "Did you give up?" to which I replied "Nope - got 'em all I believe."

I think they removed tripwire from the available binaries after that :-)

jyscao• 3 years ago

Red Hat deprecated that exam a couple years ago, and the content it tested for (provisioning servers of various kinds and security) simply got scrapped completely.

I attempted that exam right before it was to disappear permanently, on RHEL 7.4, but did not pass unfortunately.

martyvis• 3 years ago

I think I bought my first Intel based PC (a 486DX66 with 4MB RAM) in March 1993 - I was just shy of 30 myself. A core goal, which I achieved, was to dual-boot MS-DOS6 and Linux. While I started with SLS and Ydraggisil, I did end up giving Redhat a run. It's great to see it make it commercially.

petr25102018• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwaaFwTluLU

zubairq• 3 years ago

I have very fond memories of the two years I spent at Red Hat. I even organised an interview with Bob Young in 2019: https://youtu.be/Z75GvP-nYtA

froh• 3 years ago

sweet they are a year younger than SUSE

https://www.suse.com/de-de/30years/

kar1181• 3 years ago

They still host images for the versions of linux I cut my teeth on in the 90s. For that as much as anything I'm really greatful!

Redhat 4.2 Biltmore represent!

_chu12• 3 years ago

Unrelated but does anyone know if Fedora/Red Hat is or if they will start funding KDE as they do GNOME?

Red Hat 30th anniversary

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