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Redhat Reports 90% Return Subscription Rate 303
jasonbowen writes "In this article from ZDnet, Redhat claims a 90% return subscription rate for its Enterprise line. Sounds like Redhat is doing just fine providing a quality product for people that want to pay the money for it." (And for people who don't want to pay money for it, too.)
Why (Score:5, Insightful)
Or have corporations just not yet had the chance to fully investigate the red hat alternatives since the desktop line went kaput.
We have been QA'ing a new default burn for desktops for the past 6-8mnths, in the meantime, we keep purchasing what we had before.
If there is going to be a dip because of the drop of the desktop line I wouldn't expect it untill at least next quarter
Re:Why (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why (Score:4, Insightful)
this is a return subscription we're talking about here. these are people who are already using rhel. this should not be interpreted to mean "all those people who were using rh 9 gladly upgraded to a more expensive version".
Re:Why (Score:2)
Personally, I think that giving users (wether end-users or technical) the opportunity to run exactly the same software at home and at the office is the only way to go. Otherwise you double the learning curve, and cut the pace at which one proceeds along it.
To be honest, I haven't looked into the fedora project too much, so I am not sure how similar it is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation.
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
In the server space things are much more uniform. No one is really looking for RedHat to support the latest and greatest gaming libraries, sound stacks, 3D screensavers, etc. for server platforms.
Nov
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why (Score:2)
You could run AS [redhat.com] or ES [redhat.com] on the commercial server app, and WS [redhat.com] or PW [redhat.com] on desktops. That would give you the same distribution everywhere, but give you wider flexibility with the price scale.
I Miss RedHat Network (Score:5, Insightful)
apt (Score:2, Informative)
As long as RedHat still posts updated RPMs in a timely manner, you can make a cronjob to check and update packages.
Re:apt (Score:2)
I too am moving to apt, but dpkg too - I'm moving all the servers to Debian.
Re:apt (Score:2)
2) Just because debian stable is thoroughly dated for desktop-like apps, doesn't mean that All debian package systems are that bad. Just re-point your apt repository to unstable (sid) and apt-get update&&apt-get dist-upgra
Re:I Miss RedHat Network (Score:5, Informative)
You have many other options -- you can use yum, apt, synaptic to upgrade your machines. If you have all these scores of machines in a single facility you can create your own yum/apt repository and have the machines check each day via cron. If you want a centralized view of the state of your machines then maintain a database of each machines packages. Periodically check the repository against the package database and send an alert if any are out of date.
For example:
rpm -qa --query-format "%{name}\t%{version}\n"
For each machine store this information in a mySQL table. Then as new packages enter the repository, store that information inside another table. You can then select packages based on name between tables then inform the user that a package needs to be updated. Or count the packages that need to be updated. This will give you 90% of the RHN functionality. Won't be as pretty but it works.
Or you can pay RedHat for this service.
Re:I Miss RedHat Network (Score:3, Informative)
multiple RHEL installations (Score:4, Informative)
I hate to be negative, but I do not actually think that this is legal.
Look carefully at the RHEL EULA [redhat.com]. Here are some quotes, emphasis added:
Of course Redhat is not allowed to impose this EULA on third party GPL software, but the problem is that not all of RHEL is third party GPL software. A lot of it is third party free software under licenses other than the GPL. Moreover a substantial fraction of the GPL software in RHEL is actually owned by Redhat themselves.So, ironically, the only way to install RHEL on multiple machines without support is not to buy RHEL and compile your own copy.
Re:I Miss RedHat Network (Score:2)
Incidentally, I gather Debian takes broadly the same approach. The alternative is to blindly supply the latest version
Re:I Miss RedHat Network (Score:2)
That says to me you installed it wrong. I have postfix installed on a handful of machines, and there are no sendmail packages installed on any of them. There is a utility, name is something like redhat-config-smtp or redhat-config-mail or switchmail, that can switch all the important config files between sendmail and postfix. Perhaps you should look into it.
Subscription (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Subscription (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone have any experience with RedHat support? Is it worth the money?
My experience 3 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
I will probably fork out the dough for the enterprise version for my home machine simply because I think Red Hat is great at what they do, play nice as a community member and produce quite a great product as far as I can tell.
There is no louder way to vote than with your wallet. As for me, I vote for Linux and Red Hat seems like a great company to push for. Don't forget they didn't hesitate to fire back at SCO. I will gladly help fund that effort.
Re:My experience 3 years ago (Score:2)
As for support, I will get the RHN and that is sufficient for me. My time is important and I like having an easy way to install updates. I am sure other ways are easy but this one happens to be easy as well.
Re:Subscription (Score:3, Insightful)
mission critical app would be a very tough sell in our organization. Our Unix team doesn't need support
generally, but then there have been times when we've
found a bug and were quite happy to open a case with
Redhat and ask them to figure it out.
It's not really about needing support or not IMO, but rather the opportunity to pass off an issue to someone in a better position to investigate.
My experience with Redhat support has been very
positive so far. The 'on
Re:Subscription (Score:2)
Yeah and if someone had said that about Microsoft, they'd be flamed off the internet. In fact, they already have. Remember that Microsoft requires you to buy Professional Server or Datacenter Edition (I cannot recall) for machines with large amounts of memory and multiple processors. But that's not paying for peace of mind, that's being ripped off, I get it.
Re:Subscription (Score:2)
or not (Score:2)
On the Support Options page [redhat.com], you can buy the 'Basic' server addition for $349 and do not get support. You get updates, but no support.
Re:or not (Score:2)
our experience with you guys has been terrible. Starting from the "availability" of your sales personnel (before the buy) and the technical preparadness of your techsupport people after the buy, it has been unpleasant. Let me tell you what you missed: 1 to 4 million US$ a year. We were going to use RHAS for our products for the telecom market, but now we're sticking with Sun and HP/HP-UX. There's even Linux on the roadmap, and it isn't RH.
I guess you're not
Re:Subscription (Score:2)
And one time, we never found a solution, no matter what. We decided not to use RHAS for our turnkey solution.
I work for a 50.000 Software/Hardware/Telecommunications company in Europe.
Re:Subscription (Score:2)
I have just migrated from $c0 to RedHat ES 3. The initial disks were corrupt on shipment
Re:Subscription (Score:2)
Some differences:
* RedHat is not a near-monopoly that charges almost $300 for just a license on their latest desktop OS.
* RedHat does not disable your operating system if you opt out of the subscription or upgrade your machine.
* A RedHat subscription includes support. Microsoft's license fees only include software updates.
Re:Subscription (Score:2)
Can you show me evidence that Microsoft has ever disabled someone's computer for failure to upgrade?
Re:Subscription (Score:2)
Can you show me evidence that Microsoft has ever disabled someone's computer for failure to upgrade?
The parent is refering to XP product activation. If you change too much stuff in your machine, or try to move the install to a new machine Windows will lock you out until you call Microsoft to reactivate.
Re:Subscription (Score:2)
What's the difference ? (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance will all the Oracle optimization still be in Fedora?
Re:What's the difference ? (Score:2)
btw. do you have a link to any information regarding those Oracle optimizations?
Re:What's the difference ? (Score:2)
Re:What's the difference ? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:umm (Score:5, Funny)
Doublethink. (Score:5, Insightful)
No it's not a great job, the reasonably priced support option is gone, and there's nothing they offer between outlandishly expensive enterprise support and free no support. For an Operating system they mostly package, not author, they are doing a really bad job at providing affordable support options or stable releases that the ordinary user might want (like the vast majority of Linux users using RHx who were abandoned). Of course they have explicitly said they're not interested in that business, (probably abandoned to protect margins in the Enterprise business). Why anyone would pretend this is all rosy and RH are doing a great job after leaving such a gaping wound on the Linux desktop is beyond me.
Re:Doublethink. (Score:2)
Complaining does nothing to solve a problem. It only adds to it.
Re:Doublethink. (Score:2)
Re:Doublethink. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doublethink. (Score:2)
We were using RedHat 8.0 in my lab, and now we have to switch distros. Not a big deal, we've got choices. I don't like RedHat's Gnome-y desktop anyway. Users who want what RedHat no longer provides will get along fine.
Re:Doublethink. (Score:2)
Free software gives you the freedom to shop around (Score:2)
Perhaps you should recognize the support value of free software is in its ability to go around to other programmers and ask how much they will charge you to change this software. One can't do that with proprietary software because there's no source code to fix and there's no license with terms that allow changing the program to suit my needs.
You should
Re:Doublethink. (Score:2)
What a bad company, they dropped a line with no profit return and simply committed a handful of 70-110K $ developers to a free project. Damn them. Why won't they support my 8 PCs with Red Hat 6.2 that I burned (not bought). Linux is free (like speech) you want free like money go play with Minix or something.
Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the renewal rate for Microsoft? 99.999%?
Yeah, I'm not too happy with ole Redhat these days. Our enterprise RHN subscription runs out December 11, but I still can't get any info about the alleged rumored educational version of RHEL out of them. Christmas holidays would be a perfect time for migrating our servers to RHEL Academic, but I fear they are going to shaft us on this one as well.
It's almost like they don't have a well thought out business plan and are making it up as they go along. All of this should have been mapped out several months in advance, giving customers the ability to plan their own migrations. The Academic piece was just forgotten about and filled in a week or so ago, and it's still vaporware.
Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL (Score:4, Informative)
You could look at this the other way, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL. The way the RHEL license/contract reads, if you decide not to renew, you have to remove RHEL.
No, you just don't get support, updates and new releases.
Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL (Score:5, Informative)
I reread the agreement hoping to tell you that you were an idiot, but the egg may be on my face. Where it does say that the annual payment will be automatically invoiced each year unless explicitly terminated, I couldn't see anywhere where it says you have to remove software if you don't remove.
My bad. Touche.
Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL (Score:2)
Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL (Score:2)
How does that work for a product that's made up of GPLed software? Does RH include some non-GPL stuff that they use to keep a hold on people?
Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL (Score:2)
Good point (Score:3, Informative)
That means that the more accurate way to view the statistic is that Red Hat has lost 10% of its existing customers. Now, the story doesn't say what their new
Upgraditis (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect a fair few RH9 people (like me) are now evaluating their options. There are several distributions out there that the non-enterprise peeps can take a stab at before they decide to fork out for the RHEL edition.
There are a couple of advantages that RH offer - they are the de-facto standard, so if you use qualified software from a supplier, chances are it'll be qualified on RH, not debian...
They also offer support, and I've had to use it when installing on troublesome motherboards, but once something is installed, I'm reasonably ok on my own, so this isn't such a big deal for me...
The business imperatives to stay with RH are significantly less than with MS, so I would say 90% is a good figure, despite MS probably being able to claim higher than that. There is more choice on the linux OS, that's all there is to it...
Random thoughts...
Simon
Hope Gentoo Doesn't Learn This Stuff... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hope Gentoo Doesn't Learn This Stuff... (Score:2)
Or you could say: (Score:2)
That's a horrific customer loss rate.
Re:Or you could say: (Score:2)
(Well, not really. Some of them probably shifted to some version of Red Hat Enterprise, where they will be counted as new customers rather than renewals.)
The only statistic that I'm certain of is this one: "I'm gone." But it doesn't sound as good as I expected. I thought they would have a short-term increase in
Re:Or you could say: (Score:2)
Probably, you could say that 8 out of ten people do not know / or understand that it is a subscription service and thus don't pay. 1 out of ten were not prepared to migrate and unable to perform technical tasks related to
No, probably just tired people (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, even Microsoft doesn't force you to go through a lengthly (or much of any, besides activation) registration in order to use Windows Update. It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late.
Now that Red Hat is becoming more popular, I see these problems only getting worse.
Re:No, probably just tired people (Score:3, Informative)
Number of vunerabilities, perhaps. Severity of vulnerabilities, no.
Re:No, probably just tired people (Score:4, Informative)
MS: you pay dearly for the software, they throw in the Windows Updates for free.
RedHat: we give you the software, you pay yearly subscriptions if you want the easy Windows-Update-like RHN.
The fact that RedHat had demo accounts in the first place is to their credit. It's really hard to feel bad about the fact that it's a hassle to abuse the demo account concept (by signing up for an account for each machine). And also, you don't need RHN to get updates anyway - you can always download them from their errata page.
Re:No, probably just tired people (Score:3, Informative)
To answer your question, legally speaking, nobody. But then again, legally speaking, if you read your MS EULA you'll notice that they legally have no responsibility whatsoever to do anyth
Re:No, probably just tired people (Score:2)
No, they just charge you $400 for your copy of Windows first.
It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late.
Number of vulnerabilities != severity of vulnerabilities.
Show me something as damaging as the RPC holes on RH. It has to be installed by default, you cannot just turn off the service blindly
If you want RHEL but can't afford it... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it... (Score:5, Informative)
From the website:
(One immediate problem will be bandwidth. The Beauregard Parish Library is a small parish (county) library in rural Louisiana with a single lowly T-1 connection to the world. Even with BitTorrent, serving up six or seven full ISO images will get insane very fast if the word spreads very far. So PLEASE! For the love of all that is Good, Holy, Just and generally pleasing to the Great Penguin, DO NOT SUBMIT THIS PAGE TO SLASHDOT!!)
The Google mirror is here [216.239.59.104] for the curious who want to view the site without killing their bandwidth.
Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it... (Score:2)
Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it... (Score:2)
White Box Enterprise Linux is a much better solution, because they've done the preparatory work.
OTOH, I've been pretty satisfie
and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA (Score:3, Insightful)
How many customers of RH did actually pay for a subscription before the change? And from those how did not pay (but were loyal Rh customers), how many are sticking with it?
The ones who paid before the kaboom do not care in spending bick bucks. The users who supported redhat but could not afford such a pricey OS definitely will not stick with it -- as it is the case in Academia! If RH were smart, they would offer site licenses for academia and big clusters.
I am willing to be my officemate (he is a good catch) that from the RH users who did NOT pay in the first place, 90% will switch to another OS if RH does not offer something "in-between". How about also releasing this information, RH?
(As one always learns in statistics: the outcome depends on HOW you present the data, and not what it actually looks like...)
Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA (Score:2, Interesting)
How are you a "customer" if you didn't pay? How is Red Hat losing money if people that don't pay them continue not to pay them?
Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA (Score:3, Informative)
For years I've used Redhat, yet never paid a dime for the distro itself. However, I have gone out of my way to supply others with Redhat CDs, help if them when needed it and recommeded Redhat to customers looking for an alternative to Windows.
I've also spent a lot of time on the Redhat mailing list, answering questions for the most part as well as getting some answers myself.
In my mind, Redhat got to be the distro of choice not because it's rock solid (there have
Interpreting this number (Score:3, Informative)
Yet, even after shipping a distribution which hasn't worked very well, and having them give the run-around instead of support, the business still keeps the support contract. Why? Because it's a blanket requirement that the software used have support. Perhaps in case the sysadmin and engineering teams weren't able to pull together and work around Red Hat, they would be better posisitioned to "have my CEO call your CEO". Anyway, 90% retention doesn't mean Red Hat is doing a good job or that everyone is pleased. It could mean they're still not sure about switching to SuSE because they're not sure how badly Novell is going to mess it up.
What about wanting to pay for a consumer (Score:3, Insightful)
I ALWAYS paid for RH linux, because it was stable and did what I wanted, and had supported updates.
Fedora does not meet this requirement, and I don't need a corporate version.
I want to keep paying and getting RH linux.
But Redhat screwed me. Why should I do business with some that treats me that way?
Re:What about wanting to pay for a consumer (Score:2, Interesting)
Redhat has yet to answer the SOHO masses who are wailing "What about us?". These folks certainly can't afford $1000 per cpu, yet they are willing to pay something for services they perceive as valuable.
I'm a perfect example. I have 10+ servers, I don't need hand holding, I have never called Redhat support, but I certainly do appreciate security updates. Am I going to pay $1000 per machine for that? No way!! What's my option, Redhat?
*sound of crickets*
Redhat, whos
Re:If they're doing so well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like RedHat just handed them a site and told them to get on with it. RedHat employees are very actively involved with the whole thing, and are contributing tons of code.
-Erwos
Re:If they're doing so well.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why do I think that I should have just used the entire HD for XP? Hmmmm....
At least Mandrake does install, and only crashes every other time I shut it down. Boy, that sure beats my crappy, unstable, one-crash-per-month-or-two eXPerience, when it gets used 98% of the time. I know, I proba
Re:If they're doing so well.. (Score:2)
They screwed up here, big time. There are lots of distros out there to choose from. And that's exactly what people are going to do: choose from these other distros.
OTOH, I wasn't comfortable with RH's dominance in the industry to begin with, and this bit of bone-headed thinking on the
Re:If they're doing so well.. (Score:2)
Most of the more-or-less free distributions have the same problem. Fast release cycles and rapid EOL'ing. Both Mandrake and SuSE run on similar life cycles; this whole thing is not news.
You can make the same mistake with Fedora, or you can make the same mistake with pretty much any other distribution.
Re:If they're doing so well.. (Score:2)
A product with even less QA than RH9.
Redhat wants to scare business users into buying their "Enterprise" line. There is a group of users for whom Enterprise makes perfect sense, companies that want a nice stable product that doesn't upgrade every 6 months; that the group they founded it for. They soon started advertising that it was more stable (it was). From there, they morphed to advertising that the other product was "less stable" (rare you see a company dissing their own
Re:If they're doing so well.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If they're doing so well.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Hint: RedHat is a corporation. Corporations like to make money. They've tried the "Free as in $0 to entice people to pay for Linux" route for years now. They're scaling that back significantly, and putting more effort in the purchase-only version.
Do you think it was working well for them, and t
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
i think you're misreading the apple license. it doesn't mean you can install it on as many servers as you like, it only means you can connect to it with as many file-sharing clients as you like at one time. kind of like the windows server line - the basic license only allows 5 clients to connect at a time.
red hat may turn out to be a better deal since they don't limit the number of clients that can connect to your samba server.
jon
Re:I wonder (Score:2, Troll)
Actually, if you have only one network card - you can't connect more that one computer at a time. Ethernet is a serial protocall - sure it switches really fast so it seems like everybody has a perment connection.
So unless you have 6 network cards or do somtihng really odd - Any computer can only server one other computer at a time.
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
So unless you have 6 network cards or do somtihng really odd - Any computer can only server one other computer at a time.
ah, but, are you sure that will do the trick? The PCI bus will be shared among your multiple ethernet cards, and your six users will be each contending for use of a single CPU.
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
The parent is absolutely misreading the license. You are correct: you can only install it on one, but the "unlimited" means that you can allow "unlimited clients" to connect.
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
Mac OSX Server comes with an unlimited client license with each Xserve (1U rackmount G4 server). There is also a stripped down Xserve cluster node specifically for clustering that comes with a 10-client copy of OSX Server.
You can also purchase OSX Server and install it on a G4 or G5 tower, or heck, even an iMac. It's $999 for unlimited clients and $499 for 1-10 clients. The unlimited version is not limited in any way under samba or otherwise. Unlimi
Re:I wonder (Score:2)
Re:The money issue (Score:4, Informative)
Red Hat Professional Workstation is $99 [redhat.com]
Re:The money issue (Score:2)
Re:The money issue (Score:2)
Re:The money issue (Score:2)
The price isn't terrible, and currently it includes four upgrades (I believe four sets of CDs). But the license says that you can only install it on one machine, or its void. Also you can't install any software that isn't a part of the distribution that you buy, or it's void. Granted, this is a support license, so that's not terrible, and certainly compatible with the GPL. Merely unacceptable for my needs.
P.S.: I don't know that their support would be any be
Re:The money issue (Score:2)
Consider All options (Score:2)
You don't have to worry bout them changing there licensing on a whim..
Re:Debian! (Score:2, Funny)
these goddamn hippies, can`t even speak gollumish.
Re:fedora... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have to stay up allways, then you need that red phone.
Re:fedora... (Score:4, Informative)
For another, Fedora is becoming their development platform with little regard to having to support or promise stability. So while bugfixes will be applied to the distro, you can bet an equal amount of broken feature enhancements will come in to offset stability benefits. Like running Debian unstable, essentially, but likely to be more bleeding edge and off the beaten path (i.e. the X based init, the kernel with nptl support, and a host of other things that are neat, but not well tested in Fedora).
So if you want to stay redhat-ish, on your servers and workstations for other people you support, RH enterprise is cool, but for your own desktop if competent, I would say the Fedora 'releases' are neat and any breakage can be worked around by an expert.
Of course, I think SuSE has the most appropriate business/pricing model in terms of being competitive against MS. SuSE professional is reasonably priced compared against what the actual cost of an MS OS license is for a workstation, whereas Redhat is really really expensive in the Workstation context. I'm quickly becoming a SuSE fan.
Re:fedora... (Score:2)
Well, for one support.
Maybe. At $179 (WS) and $349 (ES), the 'Basic Editions' do not include support, at least according to this page [redhat.com].
Re:fedora... (Score:2)
If you actually like new, usable software (desktop) go with Fedora. It's very nice, very slick. Except for the missing pine...
Re:We are ready to pay for quality (Score:2)
Re:Too complicated (Score:2)