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.
I'd rather step out of this dilemma and finance directly the people who write the code. If you look at the numbers and including the administrative staff, development is now roughly only 25% of the expense.
Their expense is 66% about pushing the product and 33% about making it. (not counting administrative stuff). I say let's throw our money at people who spend their time writing the code instead.
RedHat is probably the biggest Linux contributor across the whole ecosystem (for the kernel alone, only companies like Intel, Google or Huawei are sometimes bigger) and the average Linux Desktop user/hobbyist isn't even their target demographic, so what money to possibly not throw at them are you even talking about? Are you currently paying money for a RedHat subscription?
Also spending money on marketing/ads isn't the same as selling ads.
Also, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to take away from the whole 66/33 thing. Are SUSE or Canonical handling it notably differently? If they've concluded spending lots on PR will get them lots of costumers, making a shitton of money with 1/3 going to devs still might lead to more contributions than making a little ton of money with most going to devs.
Well these contributions are now behind a paywall. The salary of the ~~sales people~~ devs are now safe.
I told you, if you are fine that for each $4 only one goes to the devs then we have a fundamental disagreement. You are absolutely free to agree or disagree. All I do is to show the numbers and suggest that we spend our money elsewhere.
Maybe the real "freeloaders" of this story are not the ones that were presented to us? Can we see it through this point of view?
They factually are not. Any fixes to RHEL go also go to CentOS Stream. and their contributions to the Kernel, GNOME, etc are freely available to anyone as well.
It's literally the opposite: buying ads.
They contribute more to the advertisement and sales industry than to the kernel. The point is the efficiency of the money spent on them for the open source ecosystem. If you think that on $4 given to redhat only $1 should go to the devs then we have a fundamental disagreement.
I did pay money for their subscription, I already had to deal with them. I won't do it anymore, I prefer to give my money to the people doing the hard work. But you've already said before that the "reactions are overblown" and they decision makes sense. So your opinion was already made anyway.
Hence my question about SUSE and Canonical. I have exactly zero context for being able to determine that these expenses are excessive. They very well might, but "this number is bigger than the other one" without any industry context whatsoever just doesn't strike me as a meaningful argument.
That being said, if one's primary goal is to support open source development, the best way to spend one's money is obviously to donate to software projects directly. If one needs server support AND wants to spend money in a way that does most for development, the question still stands whether any direct competitors do any better.
Edit: seems like the post from Celestial kinda settles the matter anyways
https://kbin.social/m/linux/t/107420/Reminder-that-RedHat-makes-A-LOT-of-money-already-The#entry-comment-432567
You may prefer to give directly, but donations don't typically pay the bills of an open source developer.
I think what he meant was that means they're buying ads, not selling them.
The problem is, although you may donate lots, historically, open source devs simply can't live off of donations. Big corporate money from Red Hat allows engineers to actually work on open source stuff for a living.
For all that people might hate them for what they do, they provide steady income for a lot of projects.