I was talking to a colleague about Red Hat yesterday, and it struck me that a new competitor has emerged that threatens Red Hat's business model in a fundamental way. Red Hat has two main lines of business, Linux and JBoss. Yes, they also have a cloud platform called Redshift, but I'm guessing it's not yet of the scale of the other two. Both Linux and JBoss are Open Source, so the revenues to Red Hat are through support subscriptions. Put very bluntly, Red Hat's business model is based on fear, rather like that of insurance companies. Customer organisations are generally afraid to run unsupported software in their data centres, so they will gladly pay the insurance premiums to ensure that someone stands behind the software they run. But consider this subtle change in the model of reliability that comes about when we move to a cloud-based platform like Amazon. Reliability is achieved not so much by keeping servers running and getting them back online when there's a p...