Ask Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik 666
Red Hat has made several changes in how they run their business, notably concentrating more (perhaps one might say "entirely") on enterprise-level Linux users. Some of Red Hat's moves have upset long-time users, and many people seem to have trouble understanding exactly where Fedora fits into all this. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik has offered to answer your questions and clear things up, so ask away. Please don't ask questions he's answered in recent interviews and statements, and try -- hard though this may be for some -- to ask only one question per post. We'll forward 10 or 12 of the highest-moderated questions to Szulik tomorrow, and run his answers when he gets them back to us.
Why (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux on the desktop? (Score:3, Interesting)
Question... (Score:3, Interesting)
up2date (Score:5, Interesting)
linux's enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
Timing (Score:4, Interesting)
Opportunity for small business (Score:5, Interesting)
Red Hat and Fedora (Score:5, Interesting)
What's next? (Score:5, Interesting)
Making my own RHEL variant? (Score:5, Interesting)
I (and thousands upon thousands of others) felt comfortable with RH's excellent QA and support. Now that this is only available in RHEL, how would you react to the community creating a freely-distributale RHEL variant? In other words, strip out the copyrighted bits, use the errata SRPMs to produce updates, and offer users with a robust, cheap and long-term supported distro.
This may cause problems with your core business, and I respect greatly the work RH does on GCC, GNOME, glibc, XFree86 etc., but I can see a group getting just enough dissatisfied to create such a distro.
MSa
Emphasis on the General Linux community (Score:5, Interesting)
Server without Desktop? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the (many) factors leading to Microsoft dominance was that they had, from the user's perspective, essentially the same operating system on the desktop and the server, in that they ran the same software; And recently, Microsoft has provided literally the same software on desktop and server. RedHat began with a general-purpose product, and then moved to an artificial separation between desktop and server as Microsoft now has, and has since moved to providing only the Server. Do you feel that this is a necessary product of the differences between open and closed source models, or is it simply the right position for RedHat to take, and not the rest of the Open Source Unix community?
Leaving users' market for profitability? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your exit from the desktop Linux market was an attempt to focus the company on enterprise editions, which bring in more contracts and revenues.
How big of a business was desktop Linux for you in the first place and what was your revenue structure in that market? How much do you expect to add to bottom line by concentrating on enterprise market?
Will Linux be RedHat's Only Core? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fedora, Rawhide, and Legacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Business Model for non-Enterprise Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
How have you helped Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you see... (Score:2, Interesting)
Question of Mr Szulik (Score:4, Interesting)
Two way street between Fedora and Enterprise (Score:5, Interesting)
You have mentioned that there would be a sort of quid pro quo between Fedora and your Enterprise line: in return for the community support for Fedora as a "testing ground" for Enterprise Linux, Fedora will get some engineering and management support from Red Hat. It's not that I doubt your honesty, but I'm worried that if I were to contribute to Fedora, those contributions might get sucked into an enterprise distribution I could never afford while Fedora support ends up falling by the wayside. How two-way will the street be, and are there any assurances that it will keep being two-way?
If you could go back in time. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you could go back in time with the knowledge you have to day, and live the dot-com years for a second time. What would you change in RedHat's business model ?
Will Red Hat become more proprietary? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the strengths of Red Hat has always been its emphasis on Free software. Unlike, say, SuSE, which contains significant pieces of SuSE-only infrastructure (such as YaST), Red Hat has always been more careful not to "Weld The Hood Shut". This is one reason we recommend Red Hat to customers at work.
Will we continue to see this, or will Red Hat start trying to beat the competition with proprietary add-ons?
HP, Dell etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that the most important thing to gain widespread acceptance of Linux is for the big PC manufacturers to promote and factory install it.
We used to hear that when companies such as Dell and HP were approached about this, they would be very hesitant about it, probably due to fear of what Microsoft might do in retaliation.
Is this still the case? Do you think we are ever going to see Dell offering Linux as an option on their standard desktops, for example?
Diverse Hardware Support (Score:5, Interesting)
Giving back to the community (Score:4, Interesting)
Mr. CEO Guy (Score:5, Interesting)
AND, if its NOT ready for the desktop, what will you run on YOUR desktop?
Did The Consumer Stream Make A Profit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Standardization? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it is inevitable that standardization will continue to occur -- things have gotten much better over the last few years -- but do you see Red Hat changing to fit Linux or Linux changing to fit Red Hat in the future?
Upset is a understatement (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not seeing a roadmap out of RedHat that I am comfortable with.On top of that I am spitting mad about his desktop comments a few days ago!
Package management in RH's future (Score:3, Interesting)
Since apt4rpm works very well, once installed, have you considered a greater use for apt vs. RPMs in Fedora / future versions of whatever products end up with the Red Hat label? Mandrake's URPMI does a great, similar job, too. I like the automatic dependency checking that this type of package manager brings, and Synaptic is one of the nicest package management front ends I've seen.
timothy
What about KDE? (Score:1, Interesting)
abandoning linux on the desktop (Score:3, Interesting)
My question is about application installation (Score:2, Interesting)
Novell + Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
RHAS licensing (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd like to install Linux on a 'scratch' machine for some minor development and testing, and I now have a problem.
1) I don't like to use RH9 with that on life-support.
2) I can't install RHAS because the 'license' costs more than the ancient box it'll be on, and if I put an 'unlicensed' copy on our suppport contract is invalidated.
3) If I put on some other Linux, it's not all that compatiable with the RHAS.
So what the heck am I supposed to do? Do you really think this is good for Redhat? And isn't problem #2 really skirting the edges of what's allowed under the GPL?
If I sell Foobar Linux for $1000 a copy, with a $900 rebate if you don't execise any GPL rights, I don't think that's ok with the GPL, but it seems equivalent to what's going on with the advanced server licenses.
public vs private (Score:4, Interesting)
Has being a public company altered your business decisions? Obviously, the infusion of cash allowed for greater growth, made it easy to buy other companies, and made unprofitability possible. But has meeting the streets demands adversly affected your business decisions?
General Desktop functionality (Score:2, Interesting)
Where should Redhat desktop users go next? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been purchasing and promoting RedHat Linux as a desktop alternative and it appears from recent official statements that RedHat is abandoning the desktop effort. I know the RedHat has recently annouced Fedora as a replacement to the boxed RedHat distribution which is supposed to be community based.
In my experience as an RHCE, Redhat has done very little to promote a sense of community among it's users or RHCE's. A year ago, RedHat started some online forumns to start the community building processes but, the forumns were very short lived (2 months). Based on all this, where should the users and believers in a desktop Linux solution go next and, what is Redhat doing to and build an effective user/developer community around Fedora? Also, can you comment on the response that Fedora has received so far?
Re:up2date (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, who maintains the repositories? Will they be as reliable as RHN was?
Red Hat 7.x support (Score:2, Interesting)
Education and Research Markets (Score:5, Interesting)
We have twice, over the past few years, attempted to contact Red Hat regarding site licensing or educational volume licensing for access to Red Hat Network. Both times the answer has been that -- unlike Sun, Microsoft, Apple, and our other OS suppliers -- Red Hat has no licensing programs for the education and science markets. For this reason, we have turned our Red Hat Linux users away from Red Hat Network and towards FreshRPMs APT [freshrpms.net] as a source of regular software updates.
With the discontinuation of the Red Hat Linux product line, we are now at an impasse. We do not expect FreshRPMs to conjure up security and bug-fix updates for a system that will no longer be supported upstream. My clients would prefer a more guaranteed solution than FreshRPMs. However, Red Hat still shows no signs of interest in the education and research market. Fedora is not an option, as we can't expect our science staff to accept major upgrades every 2-3 months -- they are science nerds, not Linux nerds.
Is there any chance that your plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux include site- and volume-licensing oriented at the educational and research community? For if not, my colleagues and I will have a hard row to hoe -- migrating existing Red Hat Linux users to supportable distributions such as SuSE or Mandrake.
What differentiates ES from AS or WS? (Score:3, Interesting)
What makes Enterprise ES more attractive than either WS or AS, or even Fedora? Your website only makes vague short descriptions of each of the variants, and I have yet to find any advantage that ES may hold over its two peers. Even partners like Oracle are reluctant/refusing to support ES.
One thing that would make a huge difference to us involved in purchasing Linux would be more detailed technical descriptions on your website. Even just having a package listing would I think relieve much confusion.
Bitter People... (Score:3, Interesting)
Changes to RHN (Score:1, Interesting)
Academics... (Score:5, Interesting)
As a professor at a Big-10 University, I now find myself in the curious situation that RedHat, for either server or workstation usage, is more expensive than Windows, owing to the terms that MS offers academia and the new licensing of RH products. Most Universities can _purchase_ Win2k3 Server for the price of one year of RHEL WS support.
Does academia constitute one more market segment that RH is no longer contesting?
licensing issues (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I run Redhat across a rather large ( > 4000 CPUs ) cluster, and have never bothered doing more than buying a few boxed sets due to the fact that I have never been able to get a reasonable price from your sales team. Cluster support tends to be more like dealing w/ a single machine, since the hardware is generational ( if you add 512 CPUs to the system, their hardware is going to be exactly the same if you ordered it that way ). Why should I pay a license for each machine, when I can just get a license for one that is having the same problem as the others ( for example, a bizarre problem we had w/ the eepro100 driver + PVM - and yes, I know PVM is generally used for > 1 machine, but technically I probably could have addressed the support problem w/ 1 license ). I wouldn't have a problem buying cluster support if you had a decent sliding scale ( ex. : 512 nodes @ $50/node, 1024 nodes @ $35/node, etc. ). And of course, have a caching update server for the site.
And for universities : if you want brand recognition, try offering site licenses or educational discounts. Don't count on all CS/EE students to be clued in enough to install Fedora on their laptop and then debug any problems that come up. Offer a site-wide license to all students for $50k, or a department for $10k, or something like that. That would probably give you a lot of name recognition in the future. You already offer site licenses for corporations, right?
So when will RedHat come up w/ some decent licensing schemes for those environments?
Can we decide what we want for ourselves? (Score:2, Interesting)
Will Red Hat QA contribute in any way to Fedora? (Score:3, Interesting)
To what extent is Red Hat part of the "Fedora community" for QA purpose? If Red Hat QA finds bugs in the Fedora Core from which RHEL draws, will Red Hat contribute bug reports and/or patches back to Fedora, so that the community as a whole will benefit from that work? Since Red Hat is naturally interested in maintaining some sort of differentiation to give people incentive to purchase RHEL, what criteria will govern when Red Hat would or would not contribute bug reports and/or patches to Fedora?
How can I convince customers? (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet a lot of us have this question on mind.... (Score:1, Interesting)
what distribution do you recommend? (Score:3, Interesting)
Regards
Migration (Score:5, Interesting)
So what should "something else" be? Your remark about Windows is legendary by now, but Microsoft is not an option since I depend on the gnu environment and a lot of linux-based software.
Why should I choose Fedora? Debian certainly looks like the best choice, offering much longer maintainance than the 4-6 month release cycle and 2-3 months of bug fixes the Fedora claims. And Debian is well established and has a strong user base. Even Suse and Mandrake look like better choices than Fedora's extreemly short maintainance cycle. Each of these distributions considers me (even if I download free ISOs) as their "customer", whereas Red Hat's attitude appears to be that I'm a "hobbist" or "enthusiast" if I use Fedora.
So please answer with your best "sales pitch" for Fedora. This is your chance to sell it to me and thousands of other long-time Red Hat Linux users. Or if you (and Red Hat) really don't care if I switch/migrate to Debian instead of Fedora, please be honest and just say so.
How will your choice impeed adopting of Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
Before, it looked as though Linux was poised to make a major push onto corperate desktops within the next two years. Now without any firm support, many companies I have spoken with are ruling out Linux all together and going to other *iux vendors such as *BSD, Apple, and even Sun. With the sudden EOL for RH products, how are company's to trust RH's commitment to their products and services?
No More Redhat (Score:2, Interesting)
See ya around RH, I just got my debian WS up and I am migrating my servers next. I appreciate you doing this early in my migration process, it makes the switch that much easier.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Is Red Hat pulling out of the educational market? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Mr. Szulik,
I am the IT manager of a large academic department at a California university. I have installed Red Hat linux as the distribution of choice since 1995. I trusted that Red Hat would rapidly make patches available and found Red Hat's default GUI layout to be intuitive when training others. However, I am now in a quandry. I don't want to switch distributions; I'm happy with what I have. However, as the campus negotiated pricing for RHEL, several critical questions went unanswered. Since I am limited to one question per post, I will ask the big one.Why does the only level of support available for 4-CPU systems cost between $1,500 and $2,000 per year? Operationally, there is no difference between my 1, 2, and 4 CPU boxes. I get OS patches from Red Hat and support from the Open Source Community. However, the lowest level of support for my 4-CPU box would cost about as much as the whole campus's software support contact with Sun. Why is this a good deal and how can I possibly justify it at the political layer?
Thank you.
Might you be willing to reverse your direction? (Score:4, Interesting)
RHEL Work Station Pricing (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of people here don't seem to have noticed that Red Hat still have a desktop product (RHEL WS 3 [redhat.com]) and if they did would find the pricing intimidating. Sure $179 of x86 isn't much, but it's a lot more than $0! Moreover $792 for AMD64 is out of the reach of non-corporate purchasers. (If my next home box in a year or so is an AMD64 will I be forced to use a different distro for the first time ever?)
So onto the question:
Could there be room for a level between Fedora (free, good, etc.) and the RHEL WS 3 pricing: ie. the RHEL WS 3 product, but with updates only via 3rd-party yum mirrors or some such?
Common Criteria evaluation (Score:3, Interesting)
SUSE and IBM got Linux EAL 2+ evaluated, and are currently working on receiving a higher level. However, when this evaluation will be undertaken is currently unknown.
Is RedHat currently planning to have their Enterprise Linux undergo common criteria evaluation, and if not, please explain your motivation.
Cost / EOL issues? (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe that the popularity of Red Hat with business users early on was the promise of a workstation/server that was much cheaper than Windows, combined with decent support not available for the other Linuxes and BSDs. Now, I see [redhat.com] that the 'basic edition' of Enterprise Linux Workstation is $179 and for Enterprise Server is $349. All that for a distro without even web-based support, or a printed manual? While I still believe that RH is a superior OS distro to Windows, I think the price increases and limited support are hampering adoption by businesses, and some that embraced RH earlier might be feeling a bit betrayed. Do you care to comment on this?
Re:Fedora (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the real issue is whether or not he meant "home desktop" vs. "corporate desktop". The corporate desktop is one where the admins have very tight controls over how the desktop works and there is a good deal of consistency across different boxes. The home desktop is a totally different beast. You have home users who want to do silly things like plug in USB cameras, scanners and play the latest games and media content. For those users, sadly, *RedHat* Linux isn't ready yet. There are other distros that are closer to being ready for the home desktop (SuSE Personal Edition, Lycoris and even Lindows), but they are geared towards a customer base that doesn't even realize an option exists.
Of course there's also the philosophy issues that surround the different distros. More technically inclined folk scoff at Lindows and other more "user friendly" systems because they allow the default user to be 'root'. While it's terribly insecure, it's incredibly convenient. And THAT IS a problem.
Windows XP is in the same boat. I forced all of my friends running XP to never run as administrator and had to show them how to use Runas or login as the administrator. I also forced them to use complex passwords, disable file sharing and rename the administrator account to something more cryptic. While it's a little more secure than a default Windows install, they ALL hated it and eventually howled at me to set their regular user account to being Admin accounts. I complied with the warning that if their box gets hosed or rooted, I'm just doing a clean install from the ground up and they better back up their data even more religiously. Of course... the average user can't comprehend this. That's why this is a problem for ANY OS that is internet connected.
Until a user can plug in a computer like they can an old style analog TV and just start using it for whatever they want it to do, these things are all going to be problems for the home desktop. None of this is going to change until computers can respond to natural language voice commands, anticipate a user's desires and parse the illogical and, often stupid, human thought process.
What about Advanced Server? (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, thanks for taking the time to answer these questions. I am (among other things) the SysAdmin for a small ISP. We know that Linux is our best choice for server systems. It's fast, secure, cost effictive and reliable. When making our choice for the next distribution to use on our servers will I be able to obtain a copy of RedHat Enterprise Linux to see if it has features we would like to impliment like I can with other Linux distros? I'm specifically interested in what makes RHEL "reliable, secure, high-performance" (quoted from http://www.redhat.com/solutions/migration/rhl/) and Fedora or Debian not those things.
Return on RHN Entitlements? (was Re:up2date) (Score:5, Interesting)
Gaming and Linux (Score:1, Interesting)
Fedora vs. Mandrake: a merger? (Score:3, Interesting)
Compared to Red Hat, MandrakeSoft has very small financial capabilities, very low press coverage, but is still growing and attracting a large user and contributor community. Additionally, they now have a full range of products, from the pure desktop product to the clustering solution. They generally have excellent new technologies (URPMI/RPMDrake/dynamic desktop...), excellent support policy (see http://www.mandrakesecure.net [mandrakesecure.net]) and again with very low ressources. Why? Maybe MandrakeSoft understood something about the Linux community, a way to listen to it carefully (maybe too much sometimes).
Why wouldn't Red Hat trust Mandrake and let them deal with that? Red Hat could certainly buy MandrakeSoft easily, and the "Mandrake" brandname could become the community Red Hat brandname, by merging with Fedora. The "Mandrake" brandname is already very well known and this would be better for Red Hat than trying to impose the new "Fedora" brandname (this could take years).
Mandrake has always been a kind of little brother of Red Hat. They know how to do things Red Hat don't know how to deal with or don't want to do - and now they are profitable with this model. It could turn into a great thing for Red Hat and would help to catch a new big part of Linux users, in particular newcomers, individuals and small corporates, from the Windows world. At the same time this would avoid to frustrate millions of Red Hat users that are now considering a switch to another Linux distribution.
So why wouldn't Red Hat trust Mandrake for the community side of Linux?
Enterprise on Multiple Systems (Score:4, Interesting)
Even without the current change in your business plan, we had been seeing the benefit of the longer release cycle, etc of the Enterprise product. However our understanding is that we would now have to purchase a licence for *each* server we would like to install the Enterprise product on. Adding up these costs, it quickly becomes ridiculous and a non-option for us.
This strikes me as a strange approach. Why has RedHat not offered a more palatable migration path for companies like ours using your OSS? For instance, you could limit the tech support levels and charge a nominal fee for up2date on additional machines, but still keep this under single unit pricing. If there is not a good "middle ground", the jump in costs for us is too great to consider.
Ethics in a business plan... (Score:2, Interesting)
Dear Mr Szulik,
With the recent purchase of SUSE by Novell and Red Hat's focus on the Enterprise, it is clear that Linux stands to make even more money. I think most of us believe that this increased profit for Linux-based companies will only enhance the pool of excellent software that is already available. The governing license for all (or most) of this software is the GPL, and it comes with certain inherent values. One of those values is that code can and will be swapped within a public sphere of developers, for the purposes of review and reuse. What we, the open source developer community, want to know, is how have you guaranteed the integration of these ethics into your business plan? How will Red Hat, the company, ensure that it continues to participate meaningfully to this community?
Redhat Linux as the server "sweet spot" - still? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now with the licensing fees being charged by Redhat for your only effectively supported OS, your Enterprise line, I wonder where this "sweet spot" will shift or whether it will disappear altogether. Certainly most of the academic development will not be done on the Redhat Enterprise line. It's too early to say about development done in the open source community, but I would expect that to shift off of Redhat also. We can afford the license fees for now, but if the software development shifts we will have to also.
I realize Redhat was in a difficult spot financially. However, isn't there a danger that shifting and/or destroying that "sweet spot" will have an adverse effect on the Linux community and on Redhat?
When you rose to speak at the recent Linuxworld in San Francisco, I expected you to say something to the effect that "Times are tough and this is what we had to do to stay in business. We're sorry about the possible negative impact on the community." Instead you gave this rousing: Isn't open source wonderful?, We're all in this together, etc. presentation. That seemed a bit hypocrital to me. How did you justify such a presentation given the upcomming end of life for your consumer OS line?
The future of desktop Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Losing grassroots support because no RH distro (Score:3, Interesting)
I was solely responsible for pushing and implementing the port of our company's product to Linux. I specifically chose Red Hat because of brand-name recognition, and because it was a distro I could play around with before I actually committed to porting our software to it.
Now that RH is going completely in the Advanced Server route, I no longer have the ability to play with the OS before I do my development. My company balked at the prices AS was being sold at, as well as our customers, and we are now re-evaluating our push into Linux, at least using Red Hat. The whole point was that Linux was supposed to be CHEAP. Once they start going up in price, why wouldn't I go with a more established vendor with a more mature product like Solaris X86?
And please don't say that Fedora is the same as Red Hat. It isn't. It will have a different look and feel, different marketing, and different demographics especially as time goes on. People will not pick up Fedora and say, "Oh this is really just Red Hat Advanced Server".
I know it's not something that pays, but having Red Hat's name out there as one of the premier distros with exceptional quality was one of the things that kept Red Hat's name in the spotlight.
It's the same reason why Microsoft is pushing for the education market... they want to have the kids already have experience with their products. If you stop the up-and-coming kids who are interested in computers not able to use your distro, you have already lost mindshare.
Getting rid of the publically accessible distro will relegate Red Hat to the same status and mindset of SCO (before the lawsuit crap), where it was a business version of UNIX but regular people didn't play around with it. It won't be the first thing people will think of when it comes to Linux.
Please reconsider this disasterous decision because I actually do like Red Hat a lot.
I've always wondered... (Score:4, Interesting)
question (Score:3, Interesting)
My feelings are the same as those of every Red Hat Enterprise Linux customer I've talked to. What will Red Hat do to retain the benefits that were caused by its market dominance when it has clearly indicated that it no longer wants to maintain such market dominance?
Consolidation in the industry (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently there are at least 5 really significant players in the linux industry: RH, Novell-SuSE, United Linux, Debian, and Gentoo. Gentoo fills an important niche, but will never likely play a broader role.
By terminating your retail products while simultaneously throwing your weight behind Fedora, you seem to want to create a two headed distribution - a fully free community based distribution that maps extremely closely with a fully supported commercial distribution. Essentially your trying to appeal to both the enterprise customer and the Debian user.
Do you expect that either SuSE or UL will try to align themselves closely with Debian in order to create the same synergy?
Do you expect that in a few years the landscape will have only two big players - RH+Fedora alliance and another commercial+community alliance?
Dear RedHat CEO: (Score:5, Interesting)
Sincerely,
William Dunn
Competing with the big boys (Score:2, Interesting)
Now the programmers etc won't be installing RedHat for their own use at work (it would cost them too much of their own money, and it looks like quite a few of them are pissed at RedHat). You will have to enter the buisiness through the front door. The first person you have to convince is now the suit, not the geek.
This raises some problems:
1) Is Linux established enough in the buisness that the managers will be interested on their own, without their geeks prodding them?
2) At the front door, you'll meet the guy from Microsoft and the guy from Sun and the guy from HP, all elbowing each other. Can you go toe to toe with them, without the inside support of the "fifth column" of geeks rooting for you?
3) While you are fighting the Sun guy and the Microsoft guy at the front door, the geeks inside are still installing Linux on their boxes, only now it won't be RedHat. Aren't you afraid that when the management finally says "let's do Linux" the geeks will agains answer "Done already" but will point to their Debian or Gentoo boxes? The same force which was proven to be so effective at getting Redhat and other Linuxes into business can now turn against you.
Who is of greater importance? (Score:2, Interesting)
Since it is impossible to please everyone all the time, how would you rank the following groups in terms of importance? When I say 'importance' I mean expending effort to understand the needs of and attempting satisify.
(a) Your customers
(b) Your shareholders
(c) Your employees
(d) Open source community
Thank you.
Re:SOHO Support? (Score:5, Interesting)
I feel like a peoplesoft customer, who are facing the loss of huge investments in time and money if Oracle succeeds in buying them out.
Are you abandoning the small business market? (Score:2, Interesting)
But the pricing model is unacceptable. It's right up there with Microsoft. Now while I agree that RedHat Linux 8 is a better OS than anything MS has ever produced, that's still an awful lot of money. It gets even worse, because your salespeople can't seem to quantify for me what differentiates a server from a desktop. If I can get away with using WS on everything except the ones I consider enterprise servers, it will only cost me about $40,000 - $60,000, depending on what discount rate we end up getting. If I have to consider the compute servers as servers, then pricing moves into the area of the utterly absurd.
So, we need a stable platform. We don't need much hand-holding. We don't need (or want) a continuous stream of updates that have to be applied to every system. My group has the only people who would ever call for support, and between us, we know an awful lot. Any calls we make would almost certainly represent at the very least a real hole in your documentation, and quite likely a real problem with the software. I can see us calling with 2 or 3 oddball configuration questions a year if we had something like AS support. That's about it. That's not worth what we've been told the licensing would be.
We could buy one copy of WS and one copy of AS, read through the EULAs, and (I'm 99.99% sure) legally copy everything we need to the other systems. We could just buy a copy of WS and build everything else we need from source around the web. Both of those are less than ideal options. But they still sound better to me than $40K - $60K (nevermind the upper limit). How do they sound to RedHat?
We're not alone. There are lots of companies in this boat.
We're poised for growth.
Are you even interested in our business?
Re:Why (Score:1, Interesting)
Not next but before that, RH made their NAME and ENTIRE BUSINESS with this "loOsing money" distro. RH went from loss to profit with it and will now fail just like Caldera with their drive towards expensive distros.
thought police? (Score:2, Interesting)
4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. Which gives you the right to come knocking on my door with 10 days notice, and if I've accidently messed up, to knock whenever you want to.
Further more, it commits me to keeping absolute track of installed systems, and matching that precisely (or making sure I have more licences) to installed systems. This means that my developers can't experiment with non-production machines or try things out at home on their weekends (they're a bit fanatical that way).
Personally, for me, and the organisations I run, this is a deal breaker. It means we're going to be moving (and all our current mission critical production systems are on the RHN).
Which brings me to my question: Are you going to say goodbye, or are you going to rethink this one clause? We were looking at moving to RHEL (once it had caught up), but not with clauses like that.
Redhat's future revenues (Score:1, Interesting)
Fedora: Will you go the distance? (Score:2, Interesting)
excellent QA and support? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm interested in how you have come to the conclusion that Red Hat has excellent QA and support. Have you personally dealt with Red Hat support? If so, what was the nature of the problem? An RTFM problem where you only had to be pointed to the right doc / given a procedure? A defect in the distribution?
My company has been using Advanced Server 2.1 (with several paid-up copies) and over a period of approximately 6 months have only been blown off when requesting support. For a kernel issue (fixed in 2.4.10 and higher -- but AS2.1 is pegged at 2.4.9), "it didn't scale for Red Hat to support this", and for a buggy driver "You are downrevved, upgrade" -- on a product where the point is to have a 3 year lifecycle. We have never called with RTFM issues, as we have those capabilities in-house.
I agree, Red Hat support *sounds* good from the marketing materials, but when it comes time to deliver, they scramble for excuses not to provide it.
Why not base Fedora on Debian? (Score:2, Interesting)
What does it really cost? (Score:3, Interesting)
While it's tempting to break out the incremental cost of adding one additional subscriber to the RedHat network, I am interested in knowing what the whole thing actually costs, in real dollars? Also, how big a team does it take?
Perhaps if we knew the real size and scope required to keep RedHat going, we'd feel the need to be more supportive, instead of feeling betrayed.
--Mike--
Leaving customers behind. (Score:3, Interesting)
Should a 20 year old, rapidly growing business that can project needing enterprise grade services in 2 or 3 years, and currently pays hundreds per year for RedHat services that are about to be discontinuted, and paid retail for RedHat since 5.x days, ever consider using RedHat again?
--- my editorial behind these questions
Believe it or not, these are quite serious questions to me. My first RH distro was pre 5.0 and I have always bought the box set just because it felt like the right thing to do, and paid for up2date service since it was offered a little over a year ago. I have been as loyal a customer as they could hope for, but I can't help but to feel betrayed with the "new policies". Either I will have to suck it up and pay much more for service I do not need, or change distros. It would be cheaper to just pay RedHat, but I had the same feeling everytime Microsoft releases a new OS, with a higher price. Its cheaper to just pay the much higher price, but it still leaves a very bad taste in your mouth.
When you feel that your loyalty has just been rewarded with a slap in the face, you have no choice but to consider changing loyalties. Go google it, and you will see I have always been pro-Redhat, almost fanatically...until now.
What about RHCE? (Score:2, Interesting)
White Hat Linux (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Academics... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure many sysadmins don't find themselves calling for support (even good tech support is a hassle) - what we really need is updates and stability.
What I would love:
1. Deep EDU discounts on RHEL ES and WS
2. Perhaps a site-license style agreement for these OSs if we run our own Up2Date server (thus consuming less RH resources)
3. Pay per-incident support or an affordable service-level agreement
4. A program that offers discounted or expedited support when the school funnels support requests through an on-staff RHCE (Dell offers something like this for hardware support)
Isn't that the failed Caldera business model? (Score:2, Interesting)
It was also because of the free-strategy and GNU policy for added distribution packaging software that I recommended Red Hat Linux to hunderds of system administrators and IT managers in Belgium and across Europe (as CEO of LIFE and European Manager of VA Linux Systems).
I assume this is a good move on the short term, with an instant increase of Red Hat Enterprise licensees. But all the enterprise users we spoke to, said they were looking "were everybody was going to". A lot of them are looking at Debian. We suggested them to take a look at the zero-configuration CDdistro KNOPPIX to have a sneak preview of the capabilities of Debian, on the server and the Desktop.
Also, saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop is an insult to all sysadmins who demonstrate Linux's capabilities to their management and user base.
So the question is: What is the difference in strategy and product between Red Hat Advanced Server and Caldera OpenLinux when other as capable (or even technologically better according to some) distributions are freely available?
Sub-question (just for the karma): Will Red Hat degrade further on the Caldera road and become the next SCO?
Selling shares of RHAT (Score:1, Interesting)
of stock. Is this just for tax purposes & diversification? Or are you guys thinking you
want to cash in before SuSE eats your lunch?
Linux in Schools (Score:1, Interesting)
If a big name like RedHat or Novell were to put together a "Computer Lab" solution that tied in tightly to a linux-powered enterprise and allowed you to network boot various specialized images... you know, something really focused on the 6-12 education arena... Wouldn't that increase the adoption of Linux in education, and buy future mind-share? Wouldn't it seed a whole generation who can spend the next 20-40 years building the future?
I'm not talking about targeting desktop users in school. I'm talking about targeting tomorrow's developers--the ones who will build the desktops of the future.