[Beowulf] HPE to acquire Cray

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Mon, 20 May 2019 18:42:31 -0400, you wrote:

>I am curious, do you have some evidence for the demise of CentOS
>other than IBM bought RH?

The important thing to remember about CentOS (and presumably why Red
Hat brought it on board) is that it is not really a RHEL competitor,
rather it is a RHEL marketing tool.

Red Hat, for RHEL, needs to worry about Ubuntu who (as far as I know)
make no difference between the LTS release publicly available to all
and the version they offer paid support for.

Red Hat needs a similiar arrangement, and CentOS does that for them.
They need the "free" version of the OS that start ups and companies
can use legally while building a project / business and then when and
if they decide they want paid support then RHEL is the obvious choice.

If there is no CentOS then that market defaults to Ubuntu, and if you
are running Ubuntu and you now need the insurance that paid support
offers you are unlikely to suddenly change your infrastructure to
RHEL.

My observation / opinion is that IBM isn't the real threat to Red Hat,
rather Red Hat is the biggest threat to Red Hat.

Like any organization that has been around for a while various
"kingdoms" have been established within Red Hat, and those combined
with inertia mean Red Hat hasn't been making the changes or tough
decisions that I suspect the market is moving towards.