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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Le 18/12/2020 à 20:03, Mike McGrath a
écrit :<br>
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cite="mid:CAH8B=Op7CfF1MeX65oE0iK7y43J6Z59v-Y9iisXwwV_PxcDFKg@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at
11:12 AM Mark Mielke <<a
href="mailto:mark.mielke@gmail.com" moz-do-not-send="true">mark.mielke@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid
rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at
9:58 AM Mike McGrath <<a
href="mailto:mmcgrath@redhat.com" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">mmcgrath@redhat.com</a>> wrote:<br>
>> I wanted to pay Red Hat for the services we
received. I could justify<br>
>> this. However, we were looking at a $2M USD RHEL
expense for the next<br>
>> year, and $4M USD for the year after that. I could
not justify this,<br>
>> when so many alternatives existed that provide what
was substantially<br>
>> the same content and service.<br>
<br>
I just explained how Red Hat's subscription model and
pricing forced<br>
me to review if we could justify a Red Hat cost increase
from $0.5M<br>
USD annually to $4M USD annually for essentially no increase
in<br>
service levels, and I found it was not. We could fund a
small army<br>
with $4M USD annually, and build our own distribution. This
is at<br>
least 20 people worth of salaries.<br>
<br>
Mike McGrath's answer below was not "I see your point, I
will look<br>
into this and fix this" as it should have been. Instead, his
point was<br>
"I think you are ignorant and not aware of our value."<br>
<br>
This level of arrogance ("having or revealing an exaggerated
sense of<br>
one's own importance or abilities") meant I was forced to
reduce our<br>
contribution to Red Hat from a value we were willing to pay
of $0.5M,<br>
down to <$0.1M, and with this new CentOS choice, it will
likely drop<br>
to $0, by investing in alternatives.<br>
<br>
I want it to be perfectly clear that Red Hat management is
making Red<br>
Hat a difficult proposition for us to sell, even for
proponents and<br>
admirers of Red Hat, and these choices have direct
consequences on the<br>
Red Hat bottom line. Most other vendors we work with provide
large<br>
discounts to support cases such as ours, so that it is a
win/win. Red<br>
Hat provided no such option, and effectively priced itself
out of the<br>
market. 2 years later when they saw that we were not
bluffing, they<br>
offered a discount that only kicks in above $1M, and would
still be<br>
about 20% discount. These terms are unacceptable.<br>
<br>
Do you think I wanted to use my technical skills to rip out
Red Hat<br>
binaries from everywhere in our company in a short time
period? I<br>
didn't. But, I had no choice. After a year of discussions,
Red Hat<br>
gave me no choice.<br>
<br>
Let's dissect Mike McGrath's answer in a little more detail:<br>
<br>
> I have to assume you actually downloaded and installed
RHEL. To do so you would have used our CDN and a fairly
extensive (and audited and secured) supply chain.<br>
<br>
Any large deployment cannot use Red Hat servers to deploy
RHEL, but<br>
requires in-house CDN. Also, any large deployment requires<br>
customization, which then involves overlaying RHEL packages
with<br>
non-RHEL packages including packages from external sources
such as<br>
EPEL, and in-house packages. The CDN cost is therefore
*ours*, not<br>
*yours*.<br>
<br>
> Over 1,000 people work on the actual RHEL bits *after*
the community has already worked on it and many more support
those efforts. We push all our code upstream before we
release it so presumably, you got some value out of RHEL or
you would have just used upstream.<br>
<br>
We have a team of in-house people providing front-end
support for our<br>
users. Red Hat did not eliminate the need for this team. If
we<br>
quadrupled our installs as was projected, the brunt of this
cost would<br>
have been borne by our in-house team, not by Red Hat. The
Red Hat<br>
subscription model is broken. The Red Hat proposition
becomes<br>
problematic with scale.<br>
<br>
Red Hat may have 1,000 people working on hardening RHEL, but
the<br>
global community has millions of people, and the global
community<br>
includes people such as myself who contribute back. Red
Hat's<br>
contribution here is significant, but it is not infinite. I
have<br>
contributed to several fixes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
and Red Hat<br>
deploys components that I have worked on. It's great that
you<br>
contribute back - just as it is great that all companies who
work on<br>
F/OSS portions of Linux contribute back. Red Hat is one of
many<br>
companies who contribute back, and this means that the Red
Hat value<br>
proposition is not infinite. If Red Hat prices itself out of
the<br>
market, how will Red Hat support these 1,000 people? How is
choosing<br>
to force me to reduce our RHEL deployment from $0.5M USD
annually to<br>
$0.1M USD annually, because of unacceptable subscription
terms, in the<br>
greater interest of Red Hat?<br>
<br>
> We also have an extensive KBase and are working for
more "in your face" ways to let you know something is up
with your servers via services like insights so you can fix
them before there's an impact to the services you run.<br>
<br>
This paywall service is sometimes useful, but most of the
time<br>
problematic. Our users don't have access to it. I usually
avoid using<br>
it wherever possible, and recommend it be avoided. This
information<br>
should be publicly accessible.<br>
<br>
> We have subject matter experts and sometimes project
leads those critical upstream projects. If you've got a
strange problem, or need a feature implemented, we've got
the people who can solve it. The best in the industry (at
least for those who need the best, not everyone does).<br>
<br>
So does Oracle, or Google, or AWS, or hundreds of others. I<br>
participate on the devel mailing lists, and I pay attention
to who<br>
contributes and who provides answers. Red Hat is definitely
on this<br>
list, but Red Hat is not alone - and for the most part, this
service<br>
is a "cost of doing business", and not directly tied to a<br>
subscription. When I had an issue with Qemu and live
migrations of<br>
nested virtualization, it was Oracle that contributed the
fixes for<br>
live migration of nested virtualization. I don't want to
reduce the<br>
value of Red Hat here - I want to make it clear that Red Hat
is one of<br>
several important players.<br>
<br>
> And finally, while you are only calculating Red Hat
value via support tickets..... It sounds like you rarely
needed it so on behalf of the engineering and QE team I'd
say... you're welcome.<br>
<br>
Especially the "you're welcome" at the end is arrogance.
Actually, Red<br>
Hat has plenty of bugs after "hardening", many of which I
have had to<br>
deal with, including getting fixes made upstream. But, I
don't find<br>
Red Hat support that useful for this. Too often, I have to
figure out<br>
for myself what is wrong, and I may as well describe the
problem on<br>
<a href="http://bugzilla.redhat.com" rel="noreferrer"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">bugzilla.redhat.com</a>
myself. I don't need to open a support ticket and<br>
go through somebody else to do this.<br>
<br>
I know you don't want to hear my story. You would prefer the
story<br>
that Red Hat is awesome, that Red Hat can set whatever price
they wish<br>
and it should be considered a bargain, and anybody who
disagrees is<br>
ignorant. But, you are talking about your customers here -
including<br>
customers showing good will and willingness to negotiate.
You forced<br>
me to substantially remove Red Hat from our systems, by
refusing to<br>
negotiate acceptable terms. You did this. I didn't do this.<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Mark Mielke <<a href="mailto:mark.mielke@gmail.com"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">mark.mielke@gmail.com</a>><br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Mark, I've heard responses like this for two weeks. You
describe me as arrogant, and not listening, and I can only
assume that you think we at Red Hat are fools who don't
understand the enterprise. You've used a lot of fairly
charged language in your response and you and many others
have the "I'm going to show Red Hat" attitude. The problem
is, and I think too few people realize this:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Red Hat isn't aiming for total global domination</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So when you say I forced you to go somewhere else. You
have to understand that in the open-source world, and in Red
Hat's business plan, we know alternatives exist. That's the
whole point of it. If you don't like the level of service
you're getting. Go somewhere else. But don't pretend that
the RHEL bits don't matter and that minimizing RHEL's
contributions on a CentOS-devel mailing list will teach us
something. You posted that your relationship with Red Hat
boils down to cost per ticket - you did that, not me. I
think if we've learned anything in the last two weeks it's
that the bits seem to matter very much to people. They
matter so much that people are feverishly trying to recreate
RHEL instead of going to one of those many alternatives that
already exist.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Just know that I mean it when I say, for those of you
that are moving on. We wish you luck, we understand, and
we'll see you around.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div> -Mike</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>It's sad to say, but CentOS-devel mailing list was more
intersting without some Red Hat proud boys.</p>
<p>Jean-Marc<br>
</p>
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