Day Two Cloud 095: Grappling With The Open Source Business Model

Today on Day Two Cloud we get into…well, a whole lot of things. For example, what is IT’s value in the age of cloud? How can IT figure out what’s actually providing value to the business vs. undifferentiated heavy lifting? How a company like Red Hat, which is built on open-source software, can be a multi-billion dollar company. Our guest is Stu Miniman, Director of Market Insights at Red Hat. You may recognize Stu from former life as an analyst at SiliconAngle and interviewer with The Cube. Stu works for Red Hat now and we do talk about some Red Hat products including OpenShift, but this isn’t a sponsored episode. We discuss: * Making the transition from practitioner to analyst * Whether the cloud makes IT obsolete * How to identify the high-value aspects of IT * The difference between open source and free * The business model of open source * The value of OpenShift vs. plain-vanilla Kubernetes * More Show Links: @stu – Stu Miniman on Twitter Stu Miniman on LinkedIn Red Hat Summit Transcript: [00:00:04.930] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud today we have a special guest, a friend of the show, Stu Miniman, from Red Hat. He’s the director of Market Insights there. And if you have no idea what that title means, don’t worry, we didn’t either. We made sure to ask Stu what’s going on with that. And we also covered a lot of ground in the world of what’s going on with technology and how we as infrastructure people can provide more value than what we’re doing today. What stuck out to you Ethan? [00:00:33.820] – Ethan In the context of Stu working at Red Hat. We do talk about open source software, quite a bit open being kind of part and parcel of what Red Hat is all about. And we get into some specific examples how OpenShift really works and how if I’m looking at open source and thinking free, maybe open source doesn’t mean free. And how Red Hat interprets all that, because, of course, Ned Red Hat is a multi billion with a B dollar company. [00:00:59.440] – Ned Right? Well, there’s there’s free as in beer free as in a puppy and free as in a piano. So you will see which one of those OpenShift is for you in this episode. [00:01:10.420] Stu Miniman, welcome to the show. You’ve been on Packet Pusher’s podcasts before, but this is your first time on Day Two Cloud. So why don’t you introduce yourself to the fine listeners that we have out there. [00:01:22.720] – Stu Thank you, Ned. Great to be on. Ethan. Great to be on a podcast with you again. It has been a few years since you and I have had our audio waves recorded together. And nice to see you both since obviously we’re not seeing anybody in person all too often. So hi for the audience that doesn’t know me, Ned said. My name is Stu Miniman. Currently work for Red Hat, my titles director of Market Insights. I’m part of the cloud team there. [00:01:49.360] So if you’re familiar with like OpenShift, all the kubernetes stuff, Open Stack is in the group that we do join them towards the end of twenty twenty. Before that, most people know me. I was an analyst and host of a video program called The Cube, so I’d done thousands of interviews at all the clouds and everywhere in between. So Amazon, Microsoft, Google, VMware shows. And yeah, Red Hat was was also a show that we covered. [00:02:18.520] So I personally done thousands of interviews,