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

Le 18/12/2020 à 20:03, Mike McGrath a écrit :
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 11:12 AM Mark Mielke <mark.mielke at gmail.com 
> <mailto:mark.mielke at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 9:58 AM Mike McGrath <mmcgrath at redhat.com
>     <mailto:mmcgrath at redhat.com>> wrote:
>     >> I wanted to pay Red Hat for the services we received. I could
>     justify
>     >> this. However, we were looking at a $2M USD RHEL expense for
>     the next
>     >> year, and $4M USD for the year after that. I could not justify
>     this,
>     >> when so many alternatives existed that provide what was
>     substantially
>     >> the same content and service.
>
>     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.
>
>     Mike McGrath's answer below was not "I see your point, I will look
>     into this and fix this" as it should have been. Instead, his point was
>     "I think you are ignorant and not aware of our value."
>
>     This level of arrogance ("having or revealing an exaggerated sense of
>     one's own importance or abilities") meant I was forced to reduce our
>     contribution to Red Hat from a value we were willing to pay of $0.5M,
>     down to <$0.1M, and with this new CentOS choice, it will likely drop
>     to $0, by investing in alternatives.
>
>     I want it to be perfectly clear that Red Hat management is making Red
>     Hat a difficult proposition for us to sell, even for proponents and
>     admirers of Red Hat, and these choices have direct consequences on the
>     Red Hat bottom line. Most other vendors we work with provide large
>     discounts to support cases such as ours, so that it is a win/win. Red
>     Hat provided no such option, and effectively priced itself out of the
>     market. 2 years later when they saw that we were not bluffing, they
>     offered a discount that only kicks in above $1M, and would still be
>     about 20% discount. These terms are unacceptable.
>
>     Do you think I wanted to use my technical skills to rip out Red Hat
>     binaries from everywhere in our company in a short time period? I
>     didn't. But, I had no choice. After a year of discussions, Red Hat
>     gave me no choice.
>
>     Let's dissect Mike McGrath's answer in a little more detail:
>
>     > 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.
>
>     Any large deployment cannot use Red Hat servers to deploy RHEL, but
>     requires in-house CDN. Also, any large deployment requires
>     customization, which then involves overlaying RHEL packages with
>     non-RHEL packages including packages from external sources such as
>     EPEL, and in-house packages. The CDN cost is therefore *ours*, not
>     *yours*.
>
>     > 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.
>
>     We have a team of in-house people providing front-end support for our
>     users. Red Hat did not eliminate the need for this team. If we
>     quadrupled our installs as was projected, the brunt of this cost would
>     have been borne by our in-house team, not by Red Hat. The Red Hat
>     subscription model is broken. The Red Hat proposition becomes
>     problematic with scale.
>
>     Red Hat may have 1,000 people working on hardening RHEL, but the
>     global community has millions of people, and the global community
>     includes people such as myself who contribute back. Red Hat's
>     contribution here is significant, but it is not infinite. I have
>     contributed to several fixes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat
>     deploys components that I have worked on. It's great that you
>     contribute back - just as it is great that all companies who work on
>     F/OSS portions of Linux contribute back. Red Hat is one of many
>     companies who contribute back, and this means that the Red Hat value
>     proposition is not infinite. If Red Hat prices itself out of the
>     market, how will Red Hat support these 1,000 people? How is choosing
>     to force me to reduce our RHEL deployment from $0.5M USD annually to
>     $0.1M USD annually, because of unacceptable subscription terms, in the
>     greater interest of Red Hat?
>
>     > 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.
>
>     This paywall service is sometimes useful, but most of the time
>     problematic. Our users don't have access to it. I usually avoid using
>     it wherever possible, and recommend it be avoided. This information
>     should be publicly accessible.
>
>     > 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).
>
>     So does Oracle, or Google, or AWS, or hundreds of others. I
>     participate on the devel mailing lists, and I pay attention to who
>     contributes and who provides answers. Red Hat is definitely on this
>     list, but Red Hat is not alone - and for the most part, this service
>     is a "cost of doing business", and not directly tied to a
>     subscription. When I had an issue with Qemu and live migrations of
>     nested virtualization, it was Oracle that contributed the fixes for
>     live migration of nested virtualization. I don't want to reduce the
>     value of Red Hat here - I want to make it clear that Red Hat is one of
>     several important players.
>
>     > 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.
>
>     Especially the "you're welcome" at the end is arrogance. Actually, Red
>     Hat has plenty of bugs after "hardening", many of which I have had to
>     deal with, including getting fixes made upstream. But, I don't find
>     Red Hat support that useful for this. Too often, I have to figure out
>     for myself what is wrong, and I may as well describe the problem on
>     bugzilla.redhat.com <http://bugzilla.redhat.com> myself. I don't
>     need to open a support ticket and
>     go through somebody else to do this.
>
>     I know you don't want to hear my story. You would prefer the story
>     that Red Hat is awesome, that Red Hat can set whatever price they wish
>     and it should be considered a bargain, and anybody who disagrees is
>     ignorant. But, you are talking about your customers here - including
>     customers showing good will and willingness to negotiate. You forced
>     me to substantially remove Red Hat from our systems, by refusing to
>     negotiate acceptable terms. You did this. I didn't do this.
>
>     -- 
>     Mark Mielke <mark.mielke at gmail.com <mailto:mark.mielke at gmail.com>>
>
>
> 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
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>               -Mike


It's sad to say, but CentOS-devel mailing list was more intersting 
without some Red Hat proud boys.

Jean-Marc


	
	
	

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