Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore

> A lot of you seem to have in your head the unstated syllogism that because (a) “there is nothing that [Red Hat] ships with their software that cannot be duplicated by anybody else with a little effort” (drag), and (b) this is obviously not true of closed source Oracle 11g or Microsoft Windows or VMware or iOS or SAP ERP or Google’s search algorithms, (c) therefore RHEL belongs in some fundamentally different (“non-proprietary”) category than all that other stuff. But this syllogism is busted. It’s the equivalent of saying (a) Cheetah is naked, (b) Tarzan is wearing a bulletproof vest, (c) therefore Tarzan is immortal. No. Cheetah might be more vulnerable than Tarzan if a hunter is shooting at them (though maybe not if they are trying to escape an enraged elephant), but both belong to the same metaphysical category of mortal creatures. And Red Hat is proprietary. The barriers that protect it from competition are lower than those shielding Oracle, Microsoft, et al., but they are real nonetheless and carefully cultivated by Red Hat.

The 'barriers of competition' have nothing to do with the code. Because there is no barriers to competition that exist there. There is no copyright restrictions, special features, optimizations, that Redhat implements that cannot be trivially recreated by anybody else that cares to. And people have replicated it many times.

Your stuck with the notion that the reason people pay for the software is because Redhat ES product is somehow special or proprietary to Redhat. It's not. The fact that it's different from what Novel or Debian does not mean that it's nothing that anybody can use freely.

What Redhat provides is services, industry partnerships, certifications, and support options. That is how they make their money.

> The fact that all the Linux vendors have to work harder to make less money than closed source software vendors is due only to the historical accident of how their business model got started. It doesn’t make their motives intrinsically nobler or their conduct more pure or their intentions less proprietary.

The only fact that makes it 'nobler' is that they are not relying on the Government to enforce their business model. That is they actually provide value to customers that is beyond just the actual binaries they ship. Yes that is more difficult then depending on the government to protect you and force your customer to pay you money if they need your software for something, but it's still a valid business model. It's pure capitalism and is sustainable without government IP laws. That's the only reason it's better.