Red Hat CEO Says Economic Crisis Favors Open Source 191
arashtamere writes "Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst predicts the enterprise open source software business will emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market. 'I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said, "We're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to... use open source to reduce our costs." And we've had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss ... I think we'll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,' he told Computerworld."
Re:Yes, but.... (Score:4, Informative)
www.centos.org
( or - son of redhat )
presuming you havent built really crappy apps, one linux guy to install and configure, then let it just run in the background. java webapp? tomcat ! database backend? postgres ! ldap? etc...
of course, if your business demands up to the minute support, patches, etc, redhat can provide a reasonable service for a reasonable price, and will be pretty well binary compatible with your initial centos outlay.
Re:Why is it seen simply as the cheap option? (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen 96 CPU Oracle servers (actually CPUs, not just 96 cores) kicking around databases with terrabytes of data. How many Postgres boxes have you seen at that scale?
yes, we had a postgres instance running on a 32 way sparc, later ( after my time ) updated to a 64 way e2k machine at a multinational logistics company. keeping billing records ticking over. several tens of millions of $ per day.
cpu was never the problem - linux and postgres seem to manage that quite well ( across 32 gigs of ram i believe ), what got us in the end was the slow old disks in the e10k.
that particular example aside, i have also seen/been involved with the development of 96+ ( just to re-use your 96 number above) database backed apps where postgres ran on just the single physical cpu or dual at times, and again, postgres on linux just works and works and works.
would you be so kind as to suggest just the range of licence cost the above mentioned oracle array set you back?
i can give you a hint for the total of all postgres licenses i've shelled out for : $0
Re:Yes, but.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes, but.... (Score:3, Informative)
A Red Hat subscription was a similar price to a Windows 2008 (basic - I mean, Standard - edition) yearly payment with Software Assurance. The difference being that Red Hat does way more.
Or you were comparing that with Vista? Red Hat is a server system.
I've heard they've got legendary support (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yes, but.... (Score:1, Informative)
Exactly. To have a complete mail pushing system you need to buy Windows and MS Office suite for all people in the company (not exactly cheap). If a Linux offering wants to get a foothold into corporate desktops, it is crucial for RH and others to get OpenChange stuff into shape and tart shipping exchange client alternative (later even the server stuff) based on native MAPI.
For the full scale assault (integration with AD servers, or even replacing them), we will have to wait for FreeIPA and Samba4 to mature a bit, but it is on the horizon already.
Re:random thoughts on this (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, I have called Microsoft support in the past. And I found the experience to be one of the few gratifying aspects of being a Microsoft customer. Once you get past the costs, Microsoft support is (or was) truly top notch. Certainly much more effective than Red Hat's.
Then again, I haven't had to deal with Microsoft products in 3 or 4 years, and I haven't called Red Hat for support in about as long.
There are LPI certifications. (Score:3, Informative)
There is, actually but it's not as well-known:
http://www.lpi.org/ [lpi.org]
I'm sorta slowly pursuing these. I think my favorite concept is that LPI does offer an Ubuntu-specific exam on top of the regular certifications you can get.
Re:Yes, but.... (Score:3, Informative)
Puppet [reductivelabs.com] could be the answer to the multiple system thing. It can handle different systems running different packaging systems quite well and update them all according to generic directions. For instance you could have it install a HTTP server on all Linux machines and on RHES it uses Apache and on SLES it installs Lighttpd. Puppet is completely configurable and (fairly) easy to use.