[CentOS-devel] Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About…

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 2:04 PM Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:12 AM Mark Mielke <mark.mielke at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I just explained how Red Hat's subscription model and pricing forced
>> me to review if we could justify a Red Hat cost increase from $0.5M
>> USD annually to $4M USD annually for essentially no increase in
>> service levels, and I found it was not. We could fund a small army
>> with $4M USD annually, and build our own distribution. This is at
>> least 20 people worth of salaries.

Even in your response below, this shows a high level of tone deafness.
You are hearing what you want to hear. For example:

> 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:
> Red Hat isn't aiming for total global domination

I never claimed you were trying for total global domination. I claimed
your subscription model is fundamentally broke, and does not scale. I
claimed that you made it difficult for me to justify RHEL for our
company going forwards. You are not listening.

> 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.

You didn't hear my argument at all. You focused on one point about
ticket cost, and ignored everything else. It's no wonder you don't get
it. Read my above statement I quoted, and tell me how my *one*
argument is about ticket costs. My point is that I had a choice -
choose RHEL for our projected future use, and see our subscription
costs go from $0.5M to $4M for essentially no increase in service
levels, or choose something else.

> 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.

I don't think you do understand. And that is the true tragedy here.


-- 
Mark Mielke <mark.mielke at gmail.com>