Red Hat will probably stay the biggest one, but there's a huuuuge room for applications in specific areas today that range far beyond the operating system.
In particular, I think Big Data and Open Networking are two of those areas.
Do they need to get as big as Red Hat is now? Defintely not.
Levine's (linked) comment that OSS companies can't execute on Product Management is incredibly short sighted, if done correctly, they have infinitely more data than their proprietary counterparts. But later on he seems to be saying that there can't be another people keeping it as "pure" ... well, no, Red Hat isn't really a product company. I'll get to that.
The first article itself doesn't seem to know what Red Hat really is either, saying "Red Hat has become a technology sommelier that selects the best of open source infrastructure and development software and organizes it into packages to solve enduring problems for enterprise computing.". It's more about support of base OS. Really. All the packaging stuff makes that possible, but the various products that Red Hat buys and sells are tiny in comparison.
Whether we like it or not, if you are building building-block software the expectation is now that these components be OSS. Proprietary software is generally viewed as acceptable in SaaS apps and end-user products, but is growing less acceptable in application substrates, programming languages, and the like.
Red Hat is doing well because of a lot of big (read: bank) customers needing expertise on kernel/hardware related issues, other companies will likely grow differently.
If people are asking for "another" Red Hat, what do they want? It's really a meaningless phrase in a way. I don't think they want Red Hat's various ancillary products, I think they mean something with the teeth of an operating system company.
Red Hat is great, and in many ways still is. There are many more interesting things to do instead. The comparison of thing-that-is-a-company-but-not-in-the-same-space with Red Hat is typical VC meaningless-ness question.
Maybe it's asking "can something get so big without being an OS company". I think it can, because the OS is largely a solved problem, and there is lots to be done is going to appear on top of it - but I'd also rather companies didn't try to get that big, and just concentrate on making one or two awesome things, and there being lots of awesome things.
Cloudera, Hortonworks, and Pivotal are shaping up to be possible contenders and most of the large players are pretty openly announcing that they're planning IPOs. Big Data platforms are a lot like OSes in how they'll schedule jobs and allocate resources for you across nodes. What's bothered me a lot about these stacks is how significant the overhead is and how little really technical work has gone into them like we had developing kernels from the 70s to even today. Most Big Data articles are... not exactly meant for developers while mostly engineers cared about OS design back even to the early 90s as Windows v. Macs v. OS/2 wars still were argued.
In particular, I think Big Data and Open Networking are two of those areas.
Do they need to get as big as Red Hat is now? Defintely not.
Levine's (linked) comment that OSS companies can't execute on Product Management is incredibly short sighted, if done correctly, they have infinitely more data than their proprietary counterparts. But later on he seems to be saying that there can't be another people keeping it as "pure" ... well, no, Red Hat isn't really a product company. I'll get to that.
The first article itself doesn't seem to know what Red Hat really is either, saying "Red Hat has become a technology sommelier that selects the best of open source infrastructure and development software and organizes it into packages to solve enduring problems for enterprise computing.". It's more about support of base OS. Really. All the packaging stuff makes that possible, but the various products that Red Hat buys and sells are tiny in comparison.
Whether we like it or not, if you are building building-block software the expectation is now that these components be OSS. Proprietary software is generally viewed as acceptable in SaaS apps and end-user products, but is growing less acceptable in application substrates, programming languages, and the like.
Red Hat is doing well because of a lot of big (read: bank) customers needing expertise on kernel/hardware related issues, other companies will likely grow differently.
If people are asking for "another" Red Hat, what do they want? It's really a meaningless phrase in a way. I don't think they want Red Hat's various ancillary products, I think they mean something with the teeth of an operating system company.
Red Hat is great, and in many ways still is. There are many more interesting things to do instead. The comparison of thing-that-is-a-company-but-not-in-the-same-space with Red Hat is typical VC meaningless-ness question.
Maybe it's asking "can something get so big without being an OS company". I think it can, because the OS is largely a solved problem, and there is lots to be done is going to appear on top of it - but I'd also rather companies didn't try to get that big, and just concentrate on making one or two awesome things, and there being lots of awesome things.