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Red Hat Software Businesses Linux Business

Redhat Reports 90% Return Subscription Rate 303

Posted by timothy from the self-reported-numbers dept.
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.)
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Redhat Reports 90% Return Subscription Rate More

Redhat Reports 90% Return Subscription Rate

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  • Why (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PktLoss ( 647983 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @10:56AM (#7568474) Homepage Journal
    Is this the result of corporations really beleiving in the quality of the product, and its usefullness in their corporation?

    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)

      by Libor Vanek ( 248963 ) <libor,vanek&gmail,com> on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:03AM (#7568551) Homepage
      Please - be clear on this - Red Hat CORPORATE (ENTERPRISE) desktop line is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and isn't kaput!

      • Re:Why (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @01:02PM (#7569941) Homepage Journal
        while we're being clear....

        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".

      • Thank you for the clarification, thankfully you got modded up quicker, so people should see them both.

        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)

      by ajs ( 35943 )
      I would expect that you will see Novell start to get traction in the desktop space in the next several years. But it will be a long and hard road for them. I think that RedHat got out of the desktop biz because they were starting to feel the pain of supporting hundreds of applications in such a fragmented way.

      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)

      by shaka999 ( 335100 )
      No, this is corporations wanting to be compatible with their software suppliers. I work in circuit design and most of the EDA tools support only Redhat Linux. If we want support for the EDA tools we have to run Redhat. The price for RHE is really a drop in the bucket compared to the other tools we run.

  • I Miss RedHat Network (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DeckerEgo ( 520694 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @10:56AM (#7568482) Homepage
    After months of therapy, I finally came to terms with the fact that I'm upset because RHN is gone. They locked my entitlements and prefs, and so now I can't manage the scores of machines I have deployed. I'm reasonably okay with the whole Enterprise-Fedora concept where there is one supported enterprise product and one free personal edition, but I just feel kinda worried about when my RHN subscription goes away for good and another buffer overflow exploit comes around.

    • apt (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I've moved all my redhat machines (200+) over to apt.

      As long as RedHat still posts updated RPMs in a timely manner, you can make a cronjob to check and update packages.
      • You mean the updates they won't be releasing [redhat.com] after Dec 2003 (or April 30th if you're running RH9)?

        I too am moving to apt, but dpkg too - I'm moving all the servers to Debian.

    • Re:I Miss RedHat Network (Score:5, Informative)

      by digitalhermit ( 113459 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:54AM (#7569104) Homepage
      You have scores of machines that you're managing through the free service? RHN allowed you to manage these for free (maybe the cost of a demo subscription or a single $60/year fee that you bounced from machine to machine). It put a load on their servers for both the rhn-applet, the up2date, and the package information that's stored there. There's a $20 update service now until EOL that you can buy.

      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.

  • Subscription (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hcuar ( 706760 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @10:58AM (#7568499)
    Isn't a yearly subscription the same thing Micro$oft considered for their software model, and people brought their pitchforks and torches?

    • Re:Subscription (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BenjyD ( 316700 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:11AM (#7568634)
      Ah, but you see, Red Hat will give you support and ermmm... timely updates. Unlike any other distribution, where you just get the updates. I guess the main point is that for the kind of task you use a four processor machine for, a few thousand dollars isn't much to pay for peace of mind.

      Does anyone have any experience with RedHat support? Is it worth the money?

      • My experience 3 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)

        by div_2n ( 525075 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:21AM (#7568751)
        I dunno about now but three years ago I was trying to get a sendmail (don't ask) box up and running for a client and was a complete newbie to Linux. I purchase a one time incident for like $250 and spent about 3 hours on the phone with them. They put me on the phone with their e-mail admin and he helped me get it up and running.

        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:Subscription (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dr-suess-fan ( 210327 )
        For us, releasing a production redhat server for a
        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
      • I guess the main point is that for the kind of task you use a four processor machine for, a few thousand dollars isn't much to pay for peace of mind.

        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.

      • 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.

        • I'm glad I can find a RH employee I can reply to:

          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
      • Yes, we had. Paid 1200 Euro (about 1350 US$) for one year usage of RHAS (redhat adv. server), and the support was laughable. OK, sure, the support guys knew some things, but they never told us anything we didn't already know, and most of the times we had to come up wth the solutions ourselves.

        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.
      • Does anyone have any experience with RedHat support? Is it worth the money?

        I have just migrated from $c0 to RedHat ES 3. The initial disks were corrupt on shipment :-( that left a bad taste in my mouth. However, I called Red Hat support and the guy said "What do you want me to do for you?" I said I would be satisfied (their FTP server was not working either that day) if they got me new disks RIGHT AWAY. He actually said "OK" The next day I got a package from Red Hats Distribution people containing BURNED
    • Isn't a yearly subscription the same thing Micro$oft considered for their software model, and people brought their pitchforks and torches?

      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.
      • RedHat does not disable your operating system if you opt out of the subscription or upgrade your mac

        Can you show me evidence that Microsoft has ever disabled someone's computer for failure to upgrade?

        • RedHat does not disable your operating system if you opt out of the subscription or upgrade your machine.

          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.

  • What's the difference ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alenm ( 156097 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:01AM (#7568526)
    Well, they are commited to supporting the enterprise version of Redhat, but can anyone explain me if there will be a difference between the Fedora and Enterprise line other than the support and speed of implementation?

    For instance will all the Oracle optimization still be in Fedora?

    • And what is more important, will Oracle only be supported with Enterprise versions in the future.

      btw. do you have a link to any information regarding those Oracle optimizations?
    • the way i view it(in debian terms) is that the enterprise version would be 'stable' and fedora 'unstable'. so a lot of stuff would be easier to add first into fedora and test it there, and they don't have to be responsible for anyone if fedora gets broken because of this so that they can add more stuff just for testing purposes much more faster than they could if they were actually selling it(with support).

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:02AM (#7568539)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Doublethink. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Performer Guy ( 69820 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:06AM (#7568586)
    That is a pretty blatant example of doublethink propaganda. Red Had drops support and release for RHx, and we see an article singing their praises on how great a job they're dowing throwing Fedora over the fence because they can claim some customer retention on the Enterprise front.

    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.
    • If you see a huge gap in the market, stop complaining and fill it. There is little that is more silly than someone that complains about a problem yet offers no solutions or desire to find a solution.

      Complaining does nothing to solve a problem. It only adds to it.
      • In this instance my post wasn't complaining about RH, it was complaining about the propaganda saying RH was doing a great job. Since I have complained on other occasions about RH and what they've done with this move in the past I will respond to your comment on filling the gap, Perens and his latest Debian derived effort looks like it might be a contender, or SuSe might offer an alternative (let's see how the acquisition pans out). That's the beauty of Linux, you have a choice, it still doesn't make the uni

    • Re:Doublethink. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Junta ( 36770 )
      Exactly why I think SuSE has a great window of opportunity, their 'Professional Linux' distribution is still reasonably priced for the support offered. And frankly, once one looks past previous RedHat training experience, a lot will realize that SuSE does quite a few things better.
    • Where's the "gaping wound"? Let me check... hmmm... Holy Christ, my Mandrake Update still works! Surely this black hole that RedHat has created has caused SuSE's auto-update feature to break down! What's that, SuSE users? YaST still works? Oh...

      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.
      • Except the other desktop distributions had gapping holes in configurability, or sucked in terms of hardware detection (the only ones that don't suck use redhat's detection)

    • [T]he reasonably priced support option is gone, and there's nothing they offer between outlandishly expensive enterprise support and free no support.

      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

    • 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.

      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)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:08AM (#7568608) Journal
    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.

    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)

      by teg ( 97890 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:19AM (#7568736)


      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.

    • 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.

      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?
    • Actually, though it may seem bad, it doesn't say that much about dissatisfaction. That 10% of non-renewed subscriptions represents dissatisfied customers and customers that will stick to their current release level of RHEL and don't see a support need that warrants a renewal. I would daresay at least 10% of those customers could represent those with a really strong internal IT dept that has never called Redhat for anything and therefore the chances are low that they will do it again. And the chance they

    • Good point (Score:3, Informative)

      by FreeLinux ( 555387 )
      While there is no licensing requirement to remove your old Red Hat software, as others have pointed out, you are still correct. It is likely that you will have to remove your old Red Hat software because without purchasing an upgrade and subscription you will no longer be getting updates and this is unacceptable in an enterprise production environment.

      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)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:27AM (#7568823) Journal
    This is about the *existing* RHEL users keeping the product...

    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)

    by kaltar ( 727301 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:42AM (#7568973) Homepage
    I Hope that gentoo don't start charging money for sync as redhat did with up2date. That will make me cry!
  • 1 in 10 redhat customers is so dissatisfied with their product that they are not maintaining their subscriptions.

    That's a horrific customer loss rate.
    • Do remember that this is only a statistic on their Enterprise customers. It doesn't say anything about the Red Hat Professional or Red Hat Personal edition users...Oops!, those are 100% gone.

      (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
    • 1 in 10 redhat customers is so dissatisfied with their product that they are not maintaining their subscriptions.

      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 ...well, anything. Finally, 1 out of ten may actually be so upset about the product that they left. Those are all hypothetical numbers but so are statistics in general.

  • No, probably just tired people (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greygent ( 523713 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @11:53AM (#7569092) Homepage
    People tired of having to go through the process of creating RHN demo accounts for EACH machine just so they can install the security patches to vulnerabilities coming out, apparently, several times a week, as of late.

    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.
    • It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late.


      Number of vunerabilities, perhaps. Severity of vulnerabilities, no.

    • Re:No, probably just tired people (Score:4, Informative)

      by avdp ( 22065 ) * on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @01:07PM (#7569999)
      Two different business models.

      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.

    • 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.

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Then whiteboxlinux.org [whiteboxlinux.org] might be for you. It's RHEL with all of the trademarks etc removed, currently being sponsored by a public library in the US. It's available free of charge.

    • Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @12:20PM (#7569403) Homepage
      And they have asked not to be linked to on slashdot... guess that's why you posted it as an anonymous coward!

      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.
    • If you need an enterprise OS, then you can afford an enterprise OS. I find it a shame that someone would simply go through and remove the trademarks (which RedHat allows and even gives instructions in their license for it). To those companies using it I hope you get to see why people say, you get what you pay for.

  • and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dummkopf ( 538393 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @12:26PM (#7569448) Homepage
    think about it: RH claims 90% of their customers are loyal because they are keeping their subscriptions. the important question is:

    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...)

    • 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?


      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?

      • your question makes sense and does not. if i use redhat and am happy, then i will recommend it to others, potential paying customers. if i am not happy, i will make bad publicity for them. it is a matter of the definition of "customer", but if you provide me with a service, regardless if i pay for it or not, i am your customer.
      • That depends on what you consider payment.

        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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @01:16PM (#7570090)
    I've had the opportunity to work with Red Hat's Advanced Server in a large corporation. Red Hat has done an extremely poor job of support, only providing excuses why they don't want to provide support - eg., for a kernel issue triggered by an httpd compiled to support more than the shipping one that has a compiled-in limit of 256 connections, they refused to look at the kernel issue (it doesn't ship on our CD, so any issues relating to it, even a bug of ours, we won't support, reproduce it with something that ships on the CD and we'll talk, otherwise, it doesn't scale to support this type of problem). Meanwhile, kernels 2.4.10 (basically, any else's version of linux) contain the fix. Likewise for ethernet drivers which were supposed to be supported. The answer was "you're downrevved, upgrade!" (on their product whose selling point was a 3 year lifespan, and for which updated, working, and "void Red Hat support" drivers exist)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @01:20PM (#7570144)
    It really pisses me off that when people complain about the disappearance of Redhat Linux (consumer version), everyone assumes that they wanted a freeby?

    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?

    • An AC on target, will wonders never cease.

      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

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