Red Hat and Fedora News: Financial Report, New Partnerships, Fedora 21 Plans
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-02 10:28:28 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-02 10:28:28 UTC
Google Relationship
Red Hat has announced a new collaboration with Google that will enable Red Hat customers to move eligible Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to Google Compute Engine using Red Hat Cloud Access. Google joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider program in November 2013.
Google announced the public availability of the Google Compute Engine platform earlier this year. Compute Engine placed the company in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and represented a strong step into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service space. Now, Google becomes only the second Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider to earn designation as a Red Hat Cloud Access-enabled partner.
Finance
"While we remain cautious around the maturing Unix-to-Linux migration cycle, the strength of the fiscal Q3 bounce back suggests that the combination of core Linux and JBoss (middleware), some contribution from RHEV (virtualization) and storage, and the halo effect of Red Hat's aggressive move to become 'Red Hat of OpenStack' are sustaining mid-teens growth," Turits wrote.
Red Hat reported its full-year fiscal 2014 earnings late Thursday, showing continued momentum for the Linux server operating system business leader. As Red Hat looks for future growth, the open-source OpenStack cloud platform is front and center.
Shares of Red Hat (RHT) today closed down $3.90, or almost 7%, at $52.23, after the company yesterday afternoon reported fiscal Q4 revenue and earnings per share that topped analysts’ expectations, but forecast this quarter, and the full year’s results below consensus.
Red Hat is out with a slew of news this week. As Susan covered earlier, the company reported better-than-expected quarterly results, aided by strong subscription growth for its Linux operating system, but also forecast full-year profit following below average analyst estimates. Along with that news, the company announced the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta, which builds on the recent Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 release, and aims to automate enterprise virtualization tasks while providing integration with OpenStack.
Virtualisation
The new oVirt 3.4 release improves storage, high-availability and networking features.
The open-source oVirt virtualization project debuted its 3.4 release on March 27, providing users with new features to meet the expanding needs of workload virtualization.
Red Hat begins beta test of RHEV 3.4, an enhanced KVM virtual machine designed to continue simplifying and automating enterprise virtualization tasks while providing an on-ramp and a seamless integration with OpenStack.
People
Whitehurst is an avid advocate for open source software as a catalyst for business innovation.
"I am to technical people what a groupie is to a rock band," he laughs. "In other words, what's the point of being in a rock band if you don't have people to appreciate the music?"
As an OpenDaylight project board member and the technical director of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) at Red Hat, Chris Wright knows what it takes to launch a successful open source, collaborative project. He'll share some of what he's learned through his experience with OpenDaylight in his keynote presentation at Collaboration Summit, March 26-28 in Napa. Here he gives us a preview of the talk and shares his predictions on which industries are primed for disruption through collaborative development.
Development
If you're a system administrator, what you really want is a stable operating system with long-term support, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). If you're a system programmer, what you really want is the latest and greatest program. What to do!
The next version of Red Hat's Software Collections package includes Apache httpd and Nginx Web servers, Ruby 2.0, and NoSQL database MongoDB. They are all part of version 1.1 of Software Collections, a beta of which can now be downloaded, Red Hat said in a blog post Thursday.
One of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's big selling points has been its consistency, in the operating system itself and the software packaged with it. Red Hat goes so far as to offer application certification -- now with Docker support -- to ensure the software running on top of RHEL behaves as expected.
Red Hat is out with its latest Sofware Collections package, arriving at version 1.1, and it is embracing Apache httpd and Nginx Web servers, Ruby 2.0, and NoSQL database MongoDB, among other previously unseen offerings. As Infoworld has noted: "One of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's big selling points has been its consistency, in the operating system itself and the software packaged with it. Red Hat goes so far as to offer application certification -- now with Docker support -- to ensure the software running on top of RHEL behaves as expected. But what about developers who want to step outside the lines, so to speak, and run something a little more cutting-edge?"
Insiders have publicly bet against Red Hat's platform-as-a-service, but I say it will stand by OpenShift without regret.
Bad Behaviour
Matthew Garrett, a former Red Hat employee who has gained something of a public profile, suggested that Piston had got itself into Red Hat's bad books by competing against it for a contract - and winning.
Docker
Containers aren't quite virtual machines, but with recent advances in Linux, they can do many of the same jobs as a VM while using far less memory.
The other is an open source tool called Docker. Docker bundles applications into self-sufficient units called “containers.” These can be easily moved from server to server, and they include everything the application needs to run. Unlike a virtual machine — which recreates the entire operating system — Docker containers are can take advantage of the host server’s operating system and other software, even though the containers are separated from each other. Basically, it’s another way of improving the efficiency of your infrastructure.
“Containerization has emerged as an essential solution for sys-admins and developers, as it provides a flexible way to build, scale and deploy applications, and reduces the time and expense of cloud infrastructure,” said Al Hilwa, program director, application development software at IDC. “Docker is emerging as a standard for containerization, driving innovation among developers, sys-admins, and DevOps alike.”
Since we first wrote about Docker last August, the open source container project has advanced in numerous ways. Not only did the company behind it officially shed its original dotCloud name and put Docker at the forefront of its focus, but it also raised $15 million in funding and announced partnerships with the likes of Rackspace, OpenStack, Red Hat and Fedora.
Open source developer adds container certification for Enterprise Linux apps, aims to improve workload portability and ease maintenance burden.
Docker is nothing more than a handy container. But for a lot of use cases, it's opening up amazing new possibilities for making development and deployment work together more closely than ever. It's an open source project designed to make it easy to create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers of an application, allowing that containerized application to run just as easily on a massively scaled cloud as it does on a developer's laptop. For projects like OpenStack, it's a new way of deploying applications as an alternative to (or on top of) a virtual machine, while potentially using fewer system resources in the process.
Red Hat's application certification program is nominally about ensuring that third-party applications and app platforms run reliably on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The newest candidate for certification, though, isn't an application per se. Rather, it's an application technology that stormed the Linux world and quickly became a major part of its landscape: containerization, which allows apps to be packaged to run almost anywhere with minimal muss or fuss.
"One of the most-requested features is private repos. Say you’re working on a project that you want to share with the world but is not yet ready for prime time. Now you can push your work-in-progress to a private repo on docker.io and invite only specific collaborators to pull from and push to it. When you’re ready, you can make your private repo public, and it’ll automatically be indexed and publicly searchable."
Fedora
I saw on the Fedora Xfce mailing list today that it looks like xfdashboardand xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin are coming to the Fedora Xfce spin's ISO, if not as default choices at least as things you can add to your desktop after the fact.
Docker is a hot topic in the Linux world at the moment and I decided to try out the new trusted build process. Long story short, you put your Dockerfile along with any additional content into your GitHub repository, link your GitHub account with Docker, and then fire off a build. The Docker index labels it as “trusted” since it was build from source files in your repository.
It’s been a relatively quiet week. Snapshot support in virt-manager, automatic latest-code repos with dgroc, Fedora Plasma KDE-based product proposal, and Fedora Atomic Initiative.
We have very positive brand. When I go to a conference and talk about Fedora, obviously there are some complaints about specific things, but overall, people are happy with us. We have a very strong user and developer community — people are using Fedora in production in the real world, sometimes in amazing and crazy ways (for large-scale web hosting, as a platform for very high-stakes rapid stock trading, as the desktop for a not-small law firm, as the basis for the most popular CS course at Harvard…).
Fedora 21
The Fedora Engineering and Steering committee convened today for talking about another round of Fedora 21 features. One week after approving a bunch of features for this Fedora Linux update due out in late 2014, there's more features added to the list.
Last week there were a great number of interesting features approved for the Fedora 21 release due out in October~November. This week there isn't quite as many items that were on the FESCo agenda, but there's still some interesting work that hopes to make it into this next Fedora Linux release. The approved items at yesterday's FESCo meeting were
Profiles would cover things like TLS/SSL and DTLS versioning, ciphersuite selection and ordering, certificate and key exchange parameters including minimum key length, acceptable elliptic curve (ECDH or ECDSA for example), signature hash functions, and TLS options like safe renegotiation.
Misc.
Red Hat (RHT) has highlighted the transition from Unix platforms to open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in awarding the 2014 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year Award. The recognition goes this year to Jorge Juarez Acevedo of Banco Azteca, who oversaw the bank's migration from Sun Solaris, HP UX and AIX servers to RHEL.
Red Hat did this because it believes there are three very different ways that 70 to 80 percent people tend to use Red Hat Linux distros. Businesses that want a lot of support and device and staff certification pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Fedora is for users, often developers who use the latest and greatest Linux and open-source software and want to be ahead of the curve. CentOS is for Linux experts who can handle their own support and want a stable platform.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- It Has Cost $215,000 in Legal Costs to Sue IBM for Wrongful Termination
- IBM typically settles out of court and demands secrecy (to avoid anyone else benefiting from the very expensive outcome)
- The PIPs or 'Voluntary Termination Offers' Help IBM Fake Its Situation
- "IBM is not a tech company"
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- It's Not About How Developers Vote
- This isn't about politics, it's about users being in control of their own computers and computing
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC logs for Monday, September 14, 2026
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- Links for the day
- LG Lies to Cover Up Lies About Its Spying TVs (It Records and Transmits Conversations in Rooms)
- This is what a lot of "modern" technology is like
- Oracle's Debt Continues to Soar (Increase of 60 Billion Dollars in 15 Months, Not Counting the Secret Debt, With Off-balance-sheet Debt Having "Grown Roughly Thirtyfold in Four Years")
- Oracle debt continues to grow
- Apple's iOS and macOS Measured as Bigger Than Windows in the US, Linux-Based OSes at Almost 30%
- Expect the silent layoffs at Microsoft to continue at a rapid pace
- Oracle, Like Microsoft, Drowns in Debt and Discards Tens of Thousands of Staff (Microsoft Does the Same More Discreetly)
- The main difference between Microsoft and Oracle is that the latter is honest about what's going on
- Gemini Links 14/09/2026: First Android Phone, Leaving Sony, and Rant About Gemini-to-HTTP Proxy Providers
- Links for the day
- Links 14/09/2026: "Scam Altman Now Trying to Gain Control of Electric Grid" and Sweden Moving to the Right
- Links for the day
- Vista 11 Flunked
- Microsoft cannot start a "Vista 12" campaign as it would only make matters worse
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- Anything to distract from XBox fiasco
- IBM Flying Away to Sweatshops (So Will Red Hat)
- Even on Sunday people post about 'leaving' IBM
- RFID Ambitions Already Established by Widespread Skinnerbox Adoption
- A society that cannot maintain privacy for those who deserve it will not manage to assure dignity of citizens
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 183 Out of 200: What Actually Happened Two Months Ago (Based on People Who Attended)
- It's dangerous to assert what happened in a hearing you did not attend (there was no video stream or recording, either)
- Phil Harvey, an Editor-in-Chief in a B2B Site, Explains Why ChannelFutures (Connected to TechTarget) and Other Sites That Used to Cover Linux Deleted Many Articles
- Every old article in channelfutures is gone!
- Software Freedom Day 2026 is 5 Days From Now, Fresh Reminder to Boycott Proprietary Software
- Let this be a timely reminder of why people should avoid proprietary software
- Links 14/09/2026: Slop Hardly Used for Actual Work (Chatbots Are for Lonely People), Slop Bots (Scrapers, Plagiarism) "Are Thirsty for Power"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 14/09/2026: Trip, Hiding, and OCR
- Links for the day
- IBM PIPs Are Layoffs (RAs Come Later Even If You Satisfy the "Performance" and "Plan")
- Notice how "the media" almost never mentions silent layoffs, as if just because they're silent, there's nothing to investigate, nothing to see there
- Slop Companies Engage in Plagiarising the Web, Now They Pay People to Contaminate the Web With Their Lies
- Remember that the lawfare against us is funded by slop salaries!
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 13, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, September 13, 2026
- Microsoft is Laying Off All Year Long (It's Just Keeping Quiet About It)
- The issue here is also the media. It's complicit.
- MElon's Twitter Takeover Was Meant to Amplify People Like Himself or David Heinemeier Hansson (Slop Pyramid Schemes and Bigotry)
- Social control media is not neutral
- Microsoft Lunduke of 'Linux Sucks' (and Microsoft Corp.) Tries to Replace GNU/Linux With Toxic Discussions About Toxic Politics
- Poisoning the well people drink from
- General Assembly Covers EPO Strikes on Thursday, September 17th (2026)
- The EPO's staff representation at The Hague has asked people to join an upcoming online session about industrial actions
- Links 13/09/2026: Republican Campaign Aide Uses Nazi Photo and Convicted Felon is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 13/09/2026: Never Settling, Plain Text Digital Life, and Newsgroups
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 182 Out of 200: UK Dockets With Machine-Generated Applications to the Court (From American Slop Companies)
- Earlier this year Garrett was using machine-generated output as legal papers and submissions
- Efforts to Cancel Matt Mullenweg Have Made Us More Sympathetic Towards Mullenweg and More Sceptical of the People Who Run Automattic (Named After Mullenweg)
- Mullenweg, unlike Automattic, is not "in it for the money"
- Boosters of Omarchy Are No 'Underdogs'
- There are many Arch derivatives that do not rely on "viral" marketing in MElon's child porn-pushing social control media and are instead relying on real development, not slop
- PIPs Are a Setup: They Set Workers Up to Fail While Working Their Arse Off Before Getting Kicked (Out) in the Arse
- Malicious and exploitative
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 181 Out of 200: This is Really More Like Brett Wilson LLP v Schestowitz (Using Money From American Slop Companies, Plagiarism Pushers)
- We approach the parts where we explain that the Application to the Court with Garrett's name on it was instead complaining about fair criticism of the combative law firm (irrelevant to any injunctions) as if it was impermissible to explain what it had done - and still does - to my wife and I
- It Sometimes Feels Like Slop Companies Are Committing Online/Digital Crimes
- "GPT" out of control
- Gemini Links 13/09/2026: Why Omarchy is "Plain Disgusting" and "AI Slop" and Why "Plain Text To Do List" Rocks
- Links for the day
- Links 13/09/2026: Scam Altman Admits Issues (Financial), Rival Says Stop Slop (Plagiarism)
- Links for the day
- Windows Down to New Lows as Switzerland's Federal Government Abandons Microsoft (Where Feasible for Now)
- That's how it starts...
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 12, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, September 12, 2026