Red Hat CEO: Bring On the Clones

An anonymous reader writes "Best Buy and Barnes and Noble have a problem with showrooming — shoppers checking out the merchandise in their stores and then proceeding to order the goods at a discounted prices online. And Red Hat might have a similar problem with people (not just college kids and software professionals boning up on their skills at home, either) using the free-as-in-beer CentOS rather than licensing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and paying support fees. But according to CEO Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's competitive position may actually be helped by CentOS in the same way that counterfeit Windows products sold on the streets in the Far East may have helped Microsoft — by cementing their position as the technology standard, in a marketplace that also includes entrants from SuSE, Debian, Oracle, and Ubuntu, just among Linux-based entrants. Who does Whitehurst consider to be Red Hat's most direct threat? VMWare."

Redhat needs packages

[Hatta]

The only way I can get by using my IT mandated RedHat box is by installing CentOS packages on it. RedHat simply doesn't keep the packages I need up to date. If CentOS didn't exist, I wouldn't use RedHat at all, which would entail a huge fight with IT. Thanks CentOS!

Re:That's funny

[DuckDodgers]

The virtualization itself is awesome - to my knowledge nothing proprietary beats the stability and performance of KVM. The weakness is the fancy tools around managing your virtual infrastructure. But Red Hat, OpenSUSE, and others are working very hard to make the tools built around KVM, VirtualBox, Xen, etc... better so they can compete with the best VMWare has to offer head-on.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:That's funny

[DuckDodgers]

KVM and VirtualBox on Linux both run Windows VMs flawlessly. KVM was originally created by engineers at Qumranet for the specific purpose of running Windows guests in virtualization on Linux hosts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qumranet [wikipedia.org]

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC as I cannot sign in at my new employer due to firewall/browser configurations ...

I used to be the tech for MS who was sent to customer locations - and I can tell you there are varying levels of problems that customers have. I don't know your specific example, but I never had a problem fixing a problem quickly when it was something that MS wrote. The issue was actually re-producing the results so that we can figure out what the root-cause was. 95% of the time the customer was slowing us down because they wanted to be "safe". When you are talking some 16-bit accounting software that has been jerry rigged into a windows 2003 server and it keeps throwing kernel errors and blue screening, yeah those take time to fix. A majority of my calls were from customers who had some app and it would not work right, and caused issues. Getting those app support people to 1) admit they were at fault was the first problem and 2) getting them to fix the app was always the hard part.

To each their own, I always tried to provide the best service I could, and when I am there at 3 am fixing stuff while the customer has gone, they don't see all the stuff that is going on as well, they just want it fixed now.