Dear Red Hat...  ## Metadata - Author: [[Changelog Master Feed]] - Full Title: Dear Red Hat... - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ed0b1f5b-150f-4008-bd85-eb5f75c4778a ## Document Notes ## Highlights - How to Pay Developers for Drupal Infrastructure • - The speaker disagrees with the perspective of the writer and gravitates towards the weird, obscure, and hacker-related things. • - The speaker mentions that a reason for the decision to start paying developers was the need to attract and retain talent. • - The speaker expresses sympathy for those who were laid off, especially in the open source communities, but questions the company's decision given their profits. • - The speaker suggests that for-profit companies should consider cutting profits to support developers, while giving an example of how not-for-profit organizations handle similar situations. • - The speaker doubts that Red Hat's decision will positively impact their long-term relationships and trust with customers, highlighting the potential loss of leads. • - The speaker discusses the importance of hobbyists and hackers, like themselves, in innovation and customer attraction. • - The speaker criticizes Red Hat's decision, stating that it provides no value and is detrimental to the company. • - The speaker comments on the negative responses to Red Hat's decision and mentions that they personally try to avoid engaging in such discussions due to its impact on their work. • - The speaker expresses their intention to address the issue in a video they have been working on for six months. Transcript: Speaker 3 Yeah, I read that too. And I was like, okay, I know who's writing this because they're just don't have the same perspective as I have. It's like, I always gravitate towards the weird, towards the obscure, towards the hacker and the free and the cool and the, you know, like that's the cool stuff. Speaker 2 The officers that we had to pay our people. And that was the other thing was like this hobbyist, you know, hackers only thing and then we have to pay people. That was our reasoning essentially. Those are the two kind of main things. We have to pay developers. So we must do this. Well, you know, really? Yeah, you do. But that's not the only way. Speaker 1 I feel very sorry for the people who are laid off, which disproportionately seemed to affect the open source communities. For example, opensource.com being basically cut off the field, Fedora community manager being cut out. You know, but I feel for, you know, it is tough to go through layoffs, but that's after a quarter where they said that OpenShift just made a billion dollars. Yeah. And profits are down, but there's still profits. And you're saying, Oh my gosh, oh, please don't hate us because we got to pay our developers. It's like, well, then maybe cut your profits a little bit, but if they can't because, you know, it's a for profit corporation and they have to please their investors and the board and All that. But it's like, you can't use that line. If they were a not for profit, sure. You know, we want to pair developers in it, you know, in the Drupal community, we have had that conversation because the Drupal Association, which is a not for profit, has had hard decisions When it, when times get tougher. How do we keep these developers who are working on the Drupal infrastructure employed and pay them? And so we all band together and the community contributes and we get that, but you don't get that when you're a for profit company advertising billions of dollars of profits in your new Market segments that are leaching off the Kubernetes ecosystem. Very you can contribute back, but you didn't build all of Kubernetes yourselves. Yeah. Speaker 2 No sympathy. What do you think about the future of open enterprise Linux as a standard? It has been real. This change may change things. So obviously, so they're going to fork it. They've got an investment oracle put down there, smack down their little slap in the face. What do you think is going to happen with the open enterprise Linux standard going forward? Speaker 1 Well, they say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes and I was not deeply involved back when the whole SEO thing happened, but that was kind of what happened back then when Red Hat Linux became Red Hat enterprise Linux and then eventually out of that came Fedora and there was this movement to try to get like this community based distribution that all these Companies work together with. What was it? No, Val and I forget all the companies involved in it, but basically that the same kind of thing happened and we're back there again. I can't predict whether Red Hat is this is like a downhill slope for Red Hat or if this is a steady state for Red Hat, I don't think it's going to increase Red Hat's revenues for the next year Or two. I think maybe for a quarter or two, they might have locked in some more contracts just from the people who read all the press and say like, oh my gosh, I'm building this stuff on Alma or Rocky, I got to stop that and move back to Red Hat because I need the support, but I don't think they're building that long term relationship and the long term trust. Like I said, I brought companies into Red Hat in my consulting work because I had learned on centos and I said, you need the support and I'm not going to be there for you, so here use Red Hat And they could afford it. So they did. People like me are not going to do that. They're going to lose all of those leads, which maybe that's 10% or 12% or something. Maybe it's not a huge majority, but that's a lot of the long term relationships are built out of that and they just said, nope, gone. Like that they provide no value. What's the words? Speaker 2 I want to key on one thing too because I've been watching you on YouTube for a while, Jeff, probably at least a year, maybe two years when I got into Raspberry Pi as more and pile hole and Just home labby stuff. So probably several years. And I think as I've watched you, you're in that obvious hobbyist and hacker. You're literally tinkering and trying to break things in most cases. Will this even work? Will this pile hole nass scale? Will it actually be able to transmit data across the land at speeds, I think, or? Can you do a petabyte on a Raspberry Pi? You've done all these crazy things. And so I think in many ways, you find ways to innovate and you're in that category. And if you, I'm sure you've even helped many companies who come to you with saying, hey, Jeff, here's my product for free. You don't have to talk about it, but if you like it, do a video and I'm sure you've done it at least a couple of times. So you've profited those companies, you've helped them in some way, shape, or form. And you're a tinker. And so if you peel the tinker is like you, which I'm sure there's many like you who don't have YouTube channels and don't do all the things you do, but do them in the behind the scenes, if You cut those kind of people out from a rail standpoint and you don't bring customers to row anymore, that is bad. Right? Speaker 1 That's just bad. It provides no value, no value. No, I, it's just crazy. And the other thing that I think about too is like seeing the responses. Obviously, there's a lot of red hatters. I mean, for me, if somebody attacks my family or my organization that I like being affiliated with or Drupal, let's say, I'm going to feel offended by that. That's just human nature. So I don't take offense to their kind of lashing back out. But outside of the red hat community, I haven't ever seen someone say like, man, they did the right thing. I've seen a lot of, you know, you shouldn't be so harsh on them, but yeah, they shouldn't have done that that way. That's like as positive as I'll get. And someone mentioned this morning, I think at this point, I try not to respond to anything because it just raises my blood pressure a little bit. And right now I'm trying to work on a video that I've been working on for six months. And I just need to finish the start thing. I started working on it when I saw the, I think somebody on YouTube reported the thing and then I was like, there's no way that red hat is actually doing this. And I read the blog, it was like, oh my gosh, I have to say something. ([Time 0:50:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b957c344-4c3a-49ba-b6ba-8120eb649c22))