When I talk about Red Hat's involvement in RDO (http://openstack.redhat.com/) the question I often get is, "doesn't that undermine sales of RHEL OSP (Red Hat's paid OpenStack offering)?"
Well, it's complicated.
To review, RDO is a community project, sponsored by Red Hat, that packages upstream OpenStack releases for CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). While much of this work is currently done by Red Hat engineers, we're increasingly seeing people outside of Red Hat involved in the effort, because they care about having the latest OpenStack to run in their organizations, a well as some of the galaxy of orbiting projects like Ceph, Gluster, OpenDaylight, and so on.
RHEL OSP - Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform - is Red Hat's supported release of OpenStack, targeted at Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As you may know, Red Hat doesn't sell products, really, we sell support. You're paying for and someone to help you over the difficult bits of deploying OpenStack, as well as someone to call when things go wrong.
Ah, that's the question, isn't it? We put a lot of time and effort (not to mention money) into developing a free, upstream product, which anyone can take and install, or even sell, with no further benefit coming back to Red Hat.
Why would you, the customer, pay for RHEL OSP when you can get RDO for free? And, on the other side, why would our sales organization so enthusiastically support and promte the RDO effort, when they know that it is, to some extent, taking away from their sales?
Although the cynical among you have no illusion that this is purely altruistic, we genuinely believe that, as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. Even though the work that we do on OpenStack directly benefits our competitors, the work that they do also benefits us. We all get a better product, and we can compete on the things that we each do best.
What Red Hat does best is support our customers as they use this technology to advance their own businesses. And part of how we do this is by becoming experts in the technology, by participating in the upstream development, helping to steer the project in directions that benefit customers, and ensuring that the documentation, user experience, and code stability are as good as they can possibly be.
We believe - and our company history supports our belief - that a strong upstream produces a strong downstream, and vice versa. Our participation in the Linux upstream development has been the backbone of our company for twenty years. As we have diversified into different related technologies, we have maintained our dedication to work in the upstream first. All of our software engineers are producing upstream code. Our work on RDO is done in the open, and patches to our OSP product always go upstream. This is in everyone's best interest - you wouldn't want customers getting used to new features that don't end up landing in the upstream, and so aren't available in future releases.
So, in the end, it's pretty simple. We participate in the upstream, because it benefits our customers. We package RDO because it helps our customers get started quickly and easily. We package RHEL OSP because it gives us a way to support our customers who need someone to rely on for expertise and around-the-clock assistance. It all is part of an ecosystem, and each part feeds the others. It's a model that has worked for us for 20 years, and one that we're replicating across a wide range of community projects, including Ceph, Gluster, oVirt, ManageIQ, Fedora, OpenShift, and many others.
You can get started with RDO by following the Quickstart guide at http://openstack.redhat.com/Quickstart and get OpenStack running on CentOS, Fedora, or RHEL, for free. And you can ask your questions at http://ask.openstack.org or on the RDO-list mailing list (http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rdo-list), where we'll try to get your questions answered in a timely manner. Or you can talk with your Red Hat salesperson about whether RHEL OSP is right for you.