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