Red Hat Support Continues To Flourish 215
ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"
Not that impressive (Score:2, Interesting)
While I'm glad and all that they are so called flourishing in the recession, they are getting 194 million in revenue.
That's a pittance in corporate america.
Even if it wasn't gross income, it wouldn't be that impressive.
Also, people seeking a cheaper option in a recession?
Have we ever heard that before?
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and Microsoft reported $10.9 billion in the 3rd quarter!
However, that just goes to show that quality != quantity.
Re:Not that impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
At $609million in a year with MS at 10.9 Billion they are producing 1/20th the revenue of MS without selling a single product (where MS has hundreds) while Redhat is less than 10 years old and MS is close to 40 years old.
I'd say what RedHat is doing is pretty darn impressive. 1/20 the revenue of the largest software company in the world in 1/4 the time while only selling support and their product is available for free. Impressive doesn't even begin to describe how successful they are at this point.
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Re:Not that impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a pittance in corporate america.
Remember Bob Young's famous quote that his goal for RedHat was not to grow to the size of Microsoft, rather for Microsoft to shrink to the size of RedHat.
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Did Young suggest how long it would take for this to happen?
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Without a doubt an admirable goal.
However, not exactly close.
To be expected, really. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not surprising that a cheaper product will prosper during a recession; the McDonalds and Wal-Marts of the world are getting boosts from the general attitude of cost-cutting. The real proof of Red Hat's success will be if companies continue to choose it over Windows during the next economic boom.
Still, it's good news. Companies that switch now are less likely to go back to Windows in the future.
Re:To be expected, really. (Score:4, Interesting)
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RHAT will have have to do something to differentiate.
They do, they have much better support
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You're practically answering your own question. The next economic boom will be about leveraging those newfangled 'open source' technologies in order to gain unprecedented profits (because after all, that's what defines an economic boom). In the downturn after that we will both have a very good open source ecosystem and on the other hand a lot of people blaming open source because they couldn't get their profit out of it.
The only problems are going to be patents which, if not eliminated by or during the next
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Funny, I was always under the impression that Linux can be had cheap but not Red Hat. From what I hear the service is great and all that, but it's hardly the MacDonalds of the server world. That's more the web hosting companies that throw up cheap Linux/OpenBSD boxes in bulk.
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Funny, I was always under the impression that Linux can be had cheap but not Red Hat. From what I hear the service is great and all that, but it's hardly the MacDonalds of the server world.
You should probably have a look at CentOS [centos.org], who recompile the Red Hat sources to make a similar (but not commercially supported) distribution. CentOS is free as in no cost.
Both RHEL and CentOS are free/open source software. If you decide not to renew your RHEL license after the first year, you don't have to uninstal
Having Redhat your way (Score:2)
If you If you're running a large number of RHEL boxes / virtual environments, you could split them between fully-supported RHEL and ones of
the RHEL-clones like Centos or Scientific ( from CERN - Linux brought to you by particle physicists! That should be their tagline ).
That way you have fully supported boxes for critical stuff and save some support bucks with some unsupported clone boxes / VMs.
I don't see a lot of risk here - at least not any more than environments where the Dev boxes are smaller and chea
A slight pre-emption. (Score:3, Informative)
Linux, which is at the core of Red Hat’s software strategy, has never been a huge success on the desktop, and especially not on the business desktop. Red Hat officials have shrewdly maintained that desktop Linux is not a core focus for the company, but that virtualization and the facilitation of desktop and cloud operating systems applications are.
As I know this will become a polarizing statement on this thread, let me try (try being the key word) to neutralize this quote.
Red Hat is not implying here that desktop Linux is a failure (like it's subpoint headline apparently does). They are stating two important truths: (a) that Linux on the desktop has not taken off as much as some pundits have been forecasting for a while, and (b) that this goal is not part of their overall focus and won't be for some time.
I don't agree entirely with this viewpoint, since Ubuntu and netbook-provided distributions have contributed to its significant increase in consumer presence. Regardless, Linux on the server is where it's at, and where Red Hat has had huge control over for quite some time. Thus, it's no surprise that they are flourishing at the moment, despite the current economic situation.
Not Good (Score:2)
Doesn't this create a perverse incentive to create software that is complicated and requires lots of expensive support?
Still a poor business model (Score:2)
Microsoft
employees 93,000
revenue 58.4 billion = 627 956.989 per employee
net income 14.5 billion = 155 913.978 per employee
apple
employees 35,000
revenue 32.5 = 922 857.143 per employee
net income 4.9 = 140,000 per employee
oracle
employees 73,000
revenue 23.2 billion = 317 808.219 per employee
net income 5.6 billion = 76 712.328
there can be only one (Score:2)
That's three companies out of how many that are making real money out of 'traditional licensing'. How many venture capitalists would be foolish to get into the Microsoft, Apple or Oracle market right now. As for 'traditional licensing', that was never the case. Software was originally given away with the hardware. I see the future of this business and the way for anyone els
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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A large enterprise would almost never deploy something in production without support. For my small consulting gigs I have never bought support. I think you can see where this is going...
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Only they usually screw this up through incompetence or ignorance...
One of the most important factors of having a safety net is to make sure everything you depend on has multiple sources....
Linux - RedHat, Novell, Ubuntu - check
Servers - Dell, HP, Sun, IBM - check
Routers - Cisco, Juniper - check
Windows - Microsoft ??? - FAIL
And the same for most other proprietary software... no second source, no fallback if the single supplier has problems.
If RedHat go bust, i'm sure Novell, Oracle, Canonical or anyone else
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless your scope is kept very shallow and/or very focused, you will never be doing anything more than tweaking applications or simple debugging. The codebase for most apps is too large and if it's not your primary job / hobby then you won't have time to learn it, let alone keep up with its development.
It's wise for each company to know where they stand when making any IT expenditures, whether the goal is to have a large Help Desk for instance or outsource everything beyond a certain scope. I don't run cabling anymore, and although I could if needed, we pay contractors for that stuff. Just like I implement systems using MySQL, but I don't tweak its source or try to perform bugfixes myself (beyond Googling for answers to questions) because I have other things to do. I support other databases and systems, and I have other apps to code. My time is most valuable to my employer for these tasks, and I'm a lot more expensive than spending a few thousand a year per server for support.
Need an example? OK. We successfully implemented a fiber card in 2 of our blades (RHEL 5.4 with kernels from 5.1) and this week brought up a third blade (same model, same base OS) only this time using RHEL 5.4 with KVM for virtualization. The kernel is 5.4 and the HP drivers won't install. The issue appears that one of the RPM's (lpfc IIRC) won't install because 5.3 and higher is not supported. The support grid at HP says that 5.4 is supported. Now I need to implement the entire tested solution by the end of next week.
Do I want to play around with this? No. I have one of our network admins contact HP and work it out, and when they're finished, give me a written set of instructions which I will add to my documentation. That's how larger businesses handle this stuff.
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In this case the HP Fibre driver requires recompiling the kernel (or at least it did in the RHEL 5.1-compatible release). The Red Hat multipath driver used for KVM supposedly conflicts with the HP multipath driver... at least that's as far as my research got before handing it off to some
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Open Source software, unlike proprietary software, can be supported in-house better, more easily, and more cheaply than via outside support. Large "enterprises", at least those that take proper advantage of scale and hire competent engineers, have less of a need to pay for outside Linux support than your small "consulting gigs" do.
This is pretty much completely backwards. Medium to big business is where you're going to find the highest proportion of commercial software. It's only the huge players like G
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What exactly do you think the support folks do?
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Apparently he thinks they sit around waiting for things to go wrong, like the typical Microsoft admin.
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What I think they do is get a kernel dev on the line if that's what it takes to resolve my issue (which is funny because my company has a couple kernel devs on the payroll).
Seriously, they (RHEL) make their living by making my engineering department's life easier. We're predominately a windows shop, a fortune 50 company, but we also use linux a lot... and most of it is RHEL.
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But first they waste 3 days of your time with the guys googleing around. Their support was at a time great and is still not horrible, but it really approaching Oracle levels of painfulness.
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I've been in a company that has had consultants from the publisher of the software they're using for years. To the point, imo, they could have just hired people full-time and when they do s
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True, but honestly I think my company expenses their payroll as marketing (Look we pay for devs!) more than engineering...
Doesn't mean they aren't engineers, just that, well, I think they're PR show ponies too.
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:4, Informative)
Then you don't know that many people who use Linux in a production environment with management's approval. Here at New Mexico's Child Youth and Family Development Department, we pay for support. We pay Novell for Suse Linux support (we're a Netware legacy shop), we pay Oracle for MySQL support, and we have 'as-needed' support contracts for other important open source software packages like Splunk & OpenNMS.
So, there you are. I pay for support. But I'm married, so I guess I'm not a 'single person who pays for support.'
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But I'm married, so I guess I'm not a 'single person who pays for support.'
OK, now we know you're lying.
You're posting on Slashdot - you don't even know what a woman looks like.
Re:I don't buy it. (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older, so the joke is no longer, 'We're all single and can't get laid.' The joke is now, 'We're all married and can't get laid.' Please do keep up.
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Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older, so the joke is no longer, 'We're all single and can't get laid.' The joke is now, 'We're all married and can't get laid.' Please do keep up.
Soon a growing portion will be "This page was bookmarked on my dad's computer; what does 'laid' mean?!"
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Maybe you missed the whole not-getting-laid bit
Unless of course you're insinuating a whole lot of slashdotters have kids that look suspiciously similar to the postman.
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Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older
Perhaps in your case (4 digit UID), but there is more than one generation of us after all.
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He said he used Suse, not OSX.
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So, there you are. I pay for support. But I'm married, so I guess I'm not a 'single person who pays for support.'
As opposed to a divorced person who pays support?
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That's why they have the concept of "support levels." In most cases if you have Basic support it means you get access to their private online knowledge base and a VoIP line to an outsourced guy behind a desk on the other side of the planet.
If you're an Enterprise then you have direct access to a bunch of very smart guys who come buy your team dinner when they're in town.
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I know a lot of people who use Linux in production environments and the majority of them buy support contracts from RedHat. There are a few Novell and Oracle shops, and some that apparently buy through IBM also.
Re:I hate when names are pluralized to mean a grou (Score:4, Informative)
It means "and similar companies."
Way to restate the summary, Cpt. Obvious! (Score:5, Informative)
The summary: Redhat sells support rather than licenses
You: With Redhat, you buy support
Me: Duh.
So the fact that people who use the software keep buying support for it is not that impressive.
Um, duh? The article is not claiming, 'Ooh! Out of all the people who buy Redhat, look how many people buy support!' It is saying, 'Look how many people buy Redhat in the first place.' Redhat has continued to profit during the economic downturn, which is impressive. Come on, man, any hobbyist will use CentOS, or create their own update server, and/or download the patches and updates from another source. Any corporation or government will buy support. But they won't necessarily buy Redhat, in fact, most of them end up buying Windows, right? But enough buy Redhat to ensure Redhat's profitability. Which is the point of the story...
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The summary made it sound like it was something extremely unique, special, and peculiar. It's not. I was bringing the point that their business model doesn't make them necessarily different than someone just selling licenses, as support is not optional, something that isn't mentioned at all in the summary.
Thank you for assuming I'm an illiterate idiot, though.
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You can install RHEL then build the updates from the srpms or use centos repositories for updates.
Which means you can use it without paying!
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Mod Parent up! Great grandparent is not a troll. Summary is very poorly written and fails to capture what is interesting about RedHat.
Selling required support with free software is really not that different than selling expensive software that comes with support.
The fact that expensive software is so well supported is why people pay money for it!
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> The fact that expensive software is so well supported is why people pay money for it! ...and that support COSTS EXTRA MONEY.
Want Solaris or AIX or Windows or Oracle support?
That's EXTRA above and beyond whatever you paid for your software or server.
OTOH, I can just install Debian on a server if I am so inclined. The only thing that "forces" someone to buy something like Redhat is if they want to run commercial software like Oracle on it. Otherwise, they can use ANY LINUX that management is comfortable
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Umm, Solaris is free. So, of course support is above and beyond what you pay for it.
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The "entitlement document" is free anyway, just sign up via the sun download center and register how many machines will be running solaris.
And note that this only covers "perpetual commercial use"... Non commercial use, and temporary commercial use (ie testing/eval) does not even require this.
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Yeah... Redhat is thriving in a recession SELLING something that ANYONE can get for FREE.
That's not really RedHat's business model, it's more Microsoft's business model...
RedHat sell support services (as the article states), which you certainly can't get for free. Software is trivially copied, but a trained engineer's time isn't.
Software and services are entirely different beasts, software can be reduced to zero cost quite easily whereas services still require someone to physically provide them, even if you employ people in an asian call centre to provide that support you still have to pay them
Re:Way to restate the summary, Cpt. Obvious! (Score:4, Informative)
I think that's demonstrably false.
Most people use "expensive software" because that's what came on their computers. Plus, that's what their job/school/family uses. Most people who use "expensive software" are probably not fully aware of the alternatives and/or have chosen not to take the time to learn.
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CorelDRAW Graphics Suite or Canvas Professional are probably better suites for casual corporate users too.
I'm sure there ARE a very few tasks where Photoshop is ideal, but realistically, only serious professional design-oriented people actually need Photoshop.
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How is this flamebait?
The number of people who actually need anything near as sophisticated as Photoshop is minute. If it weren't, Adobe wouldn't charge as much as they do (largely because there'd be a lot more competition at that end of the market) and Photoshop Elements wouldn't need to exist.
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From years of maintaining fairly large environments I have calculated the amount of manual work maintaining Windows servers to be around 5-10x higher then Linux / Solaris. So I don't think it's just a question of how much the license / support fee's add up to, but rather how much everything (including personal to keep things running) add up to.
Please note I have not really touched Windows servers for 3-4 years so I don't know if things have improved significantly.
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You're comparing apples and oranges. RHEL is more likely to be used on a server, whereas Windows 7 pro will be on a workstation.
Where most Linux distributions clear up on the server is client access licenses. If you compare Windows licensing with a typical commercial Linux, the two will cost a very similar amount - but Linux distributions don't tend to charge for client access.
Re:Way to restate the summary, Cpt. Obvious! (Score:4, Informative)
Any corporation or government will buy support. But they won't necessarily buy Redhat, in fact, most of them end up buying Windows, right? But enough buy Redhat to ensure Redhat's profitability. Which is the point of the story...
Well, not necessarily. I work at a shop with over 1700 Unix/Linux servers. Yes, we also have Windows servers, but for applications that are running massive Oracle databases, Unix/Linux servers are still the only way to go. It's true Red Hat isn't the only Linux distro, but in terms of data center servers it's become pretty much the standard with Suse a distant second. There just aren't that many Linux distros that are enterprise friendly, Red Hat pretty much has a monopoly on the enterprise Linux market. So while Red Hat isn't a proprietary OS, it might as well be. Given that we've been replacing our Sun and HP Unix servers with Red Hat Linux hand over fist, Red Hat is making a pretty piece of change off of us, and I understand this is largely true in most shops. Our hardware is primarily HP and IBM, who are making up their lost sales in Unix servers to us by selling us Intel based servers for Linux (and Windows, too). That pretty much leaves Sun out in the cold - we're not buying their proprietary servers much anymore, and they never gained a foothold in the commodity hardware market.
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Usual reason for Linux over Solaris is open source software that barely compiles on Linux, let alone anything else. But someone's developed something that uses libcrufthaxx0r.
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No. The real reason for Linux over Solaris on x86 is that some of us still remember when Sun treated it like an ugly redheaded stepchild and the 3rd party vendors did the same.
Even now, Solaris x86 is still inferior in this respect.
Free Software is actually in a much better position on Solaris x86 and always has been.
It's like you just landed from Bizzaro World.
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Having worked as a Solaris-with-a-bit-of-Linux admin for the past decade, I will happily accept the description of Solaris-land as Bizarro World.
My last job had a mix of Solaris 10 and CentOS. Mostly running on Sun x86 kit, which is now quite price-competitive with Dell. (We had Dells running Solaris 10 as well, as and when it made sense.)
Current job is Sun on mostly SPARC. Lots of fat Niagara web servers. HOLY SHIT THOSE THINGS ARE POWERFUL. Hopefully taking delivery of new 32-thread Niagara build server s
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Solaris SPARC was always well supported by both Sun and 3rd parties.
It's intel that was in the doghouse. This led to the obvious situation that
you were better off running your own stuff or GNU on Solaris Intel. Although
GNU tools and other free software were also very handy on Solaris SPARC.
Free Software, despite any tendency to code to Linux quirks, is still FAR more
likely to be egaltarian when it comes to secondary platforms.
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You forgot to recompile anything that depends on what you just upgraded, rookie mistake.
Binary packages are a huge pain when you try to upgrade something on an otherwise stable system, and the only binary packages of the new app you want also require you to upgrade a whole stack of libs... Source lets me compile a new app onto an old system, and from a distro standpoint its a lot easier to maintain a port/ebuild than it is to rebuild packages for every distro release on every architecture.
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Alone, that's not such an important statement. After all, look how many people buy Windows. Neither of us would suggest that the fact that so many people buy Windows is evidence of its excellence over all others. It's interesting that the article chooses to use percentages rather than numbers of users.
I think the point that the GP misses is that lots of people are choosing Redhat over other distros because they have support. They're n
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"The point being, and I'm sure you agree, is that Redhat's model, which was a little bit controversial at one time, has proven to be reasonably successful."
Redistribute somebody else's work (which happens to be the world's most famous open source product) and sell it to customers who want a one-click update procedure.
Yes, I know Red Hat contributes to Linux, but that's a lot easier and less risky than developing an OS on your own.
You couldn't start a company like Red Hat today because you're not going to fi
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Parent is not a troll! He has a fair point. It is true that the software RHEL is made up of is free (like freedom and beer) and you can use all of that for free, in CentOS. So you are paying "just" for the support in that sense. But try getting hold of a copy of RHEL without paying someone - it's not like (AFAIK!) you can download it and optionally buy support later.
That said, I had heard (uhm, possibly from a RH employee...) that RH were reasonably sensible about support issues. The particular example
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No, you can't use it all for free. You don't get RHN, you don't get ZFS, you don't get RedHat trademarks, and you don't get built-in compatibility with VMWare and various commercial installers. You *can* run more than 4 VM's, supported, with the "server" licenses, not the desktop licenses.
You can use CentOS for many purposes quite effectively, and switch to RHEL when needed. I've done that, and used CentOS for testing setups on non-standard hardware. That's difficult to do with Windows, you need the registe
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No, you can't use it all for free. You don't get RHN
Well, you can use the software for free, right? But not the RHN servers, so you are paying for that service along with the support contract? I never really understood what RHN was for when I used RH9 and I've never used a real RHEL box, so it's still a bit mysterious to me. But I'd be surprised if you couldn't get the RHN client software for free, even if you don't get access to the servers at the other end.
, you don't get ZFS,
Do you mean XFS? ZFS is the Solaris FS. AFAIK you can use XFS under CentOS, at least if you enab
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For RHN, you don't get the service and the upstream package management and system integration tools. You get access to updates whenever CentOS gets around to them, which is actually quite fast. I have no issue with a RedHat tech being helpful for you, and helping you steer around their licensing. It's just the claim that you automatically get all RHEL software. Things like VMWare cooperation and XFS (you were right, that's what I meant) are reliant on tools that are not in the RHEL published SRPM's.
And swit
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I doubt that most RH users are FOSS developers.
And if the bosses are so smug and too stupid to understand CentOS, they probably wouldn't notice if you went ahead and ported to it.
Re:Not Optional (Score:5, Informative)
I'm quite sure that Redhat's "support" model is designed to frustrate and confuse.
You pay per server per year. That's not exactly confusing. Frustrating only in the sense that... you have to pay for it.
Customer: "I'm a FOSS DEVELOPER! YOU'RE SELLING ME MY OWN CODE!"
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/5Server/en/os/SRPMS/ [redhat.com]
No they're not. They're selling you binary packages and the ability to call them up at 2:30 AM to get your issues fixed. If you want your code, it is right there for you to download without issue.
They can smugly tell me "see, software isn't free?" and feel much more comfortable signing cheques for $1500/year.
The software is free. If they don't understand what they're purchasing, that's their problem, and only yours if you decide to make it your problem.
Re:Not Optional (Score:4, Insightful)
You have a clue, you can use CentOS or any other distribution you want. Your company can't tell the difference between CentOS and something off TPB, and they're paying 1500$/year for it. And you blame Red Hat? Sorry but I'd be doing the same thing and ask if your company would need some extended warranty or monster cables with that. As usual, ignorance costs money.
Our Guy Was Hit By The Crosstown Bus (Score:2)
They can smugly tell me "see, software isn't free?" and feel much more comfortable signing cheques for $1500/year.
... sadly, explaining CentOS to them is like telling them that I sourced Oracle from TPB.
You may not always be there.
But the Red Hat support team is a phone call away.
Your boss doesn't like being wholly dependent on his resident geek.
The support contract and the bog standard enterprise distribution are his insurance policy. His recovery plan.
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Interesting thought...
RedHat might not always be there, the recent economic troubles should have taught us that ANY company can go bust... Relying on a single supplier is extremely dangerous.
That said, RedHat are easily replaceable if they go under, there are plenty of other companies who will take up the slack.
The biggest problem is MS, if they go bust there is noone else who can support their software because noone else has the source code (or at least, don't have the rights to modify and distribute it).
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You may not always be there.
But the Red Hat support team is a phone call away.
Your boss doesn't like being wholly dependent on his resident geek.
The support contract and the bog standard enterprise distribution are his insurance policy. His recovery plan.
I personally guarantee you that by the time the average server OS has had all the necessary tweaks set up to bed it down into a company's systems, along with accounting for little things like "can't use this patch because it clashes with this other app we need, so instead we workaround using this, that other server is so critical to the business that we haven't dared patch it in five years (and I don't care how anal you'd like to be, every business with a significant IT department has at least one server li
CentOS also does paid support (Score:4, Insightful)
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You don't have to use RedHat... All your FOSS code is still available, as is lots of code RedHat wrote and released under open licenses and you are free to download that source and compile it on another distro.
RedHat is offered as a choice, and large corporations take that choice because they prefer to buy from another large company. They made the choice to spend rather than save, they could have got the exact same software for free with no support or from other sources with varying support terms. Better th
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So long as they only want support on that one box where is the problem?
We only get support for production machines.
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> To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers
Yah, it's not like they pay a large number of Linux developers.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "capitalizing on the work of Linux developers" or if that's intended as a slight against RH.
If so, I should point out that a number of the top names in kernel development are or have been RH employees.
Re:To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers.
To be even more fair, Red Hat employs many of the prominent Linux developers, and is currently the biggest corporate contributor to the kernel. In addition, they're heavily involved with GCC and gdb, not to mention MANY other GPL projects.
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Re:To be fair... (Score:4, Informative)
To be even fairer, Red Hat do employ a large proportion of the kernel and userspace developers for the software they make support income from - they even have a record of open sourcing code that they get from company acquisitions. But they are very much benefiting from the fact that it's easier to build an OS by co-operating with other companies and individuals than to go toe-to-toe with MS (and Apple, not that they're direct RH competitors in any significant way) on your own.
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I don't know if people who write with this style on Slashdot are trying to sound cool by speaking/writing in some sort of British style or what.
And if the poster were British? The "were" is in the subjunctive mood.
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"Red Hat employs doubleplusgood mofos yawl"
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Where in that person's post do you see that the person is British? Is it in his username, "Lemming Mark"? Is it his UID? What part of his post tells me his country of origin? I think you are the idiot.
I stand by my original comment posted above: Leave the "British-isms" like "torch", "bonnet", "boot" and "petrol" (and the annoying use of plural verbs with singular nouns) on your own
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To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers.
Others have noted their contributions, but really, even if they didn't? Support is supposed to be one of the approved ways to make money from open source software. Red Hat can make their own changes for their needs, but they can't lock anyone in because those changes must be made available if they distribute modified OSS software, at least with some licenses.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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Can someone point out an example showing me that I'm wrong?
You aren't even wrong. To be wrong, you have to make sense. You see, if you are one guy writing closed source, unless it becomes HUGELY popular, you won't make any money. So, what exactly are you comparing open source to, that is somehow different? You try to imply that it's hard to make money with open source coding, but you fail to provide a convincing case that it is any different with closed source coding.
As we saw in a recent article, most open
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You see, if you are one guy writing closed source, unless it becomes HUGELY popular, you won't make any money.
I argue that that is simply not true.
I point you to Spidwerweb Software [spiderwebsoftware.com] as proof. Jeff Vogel's games are not hugely popular. They have a fairly small following. They are pretty cheap, too, and they are shareware, technically. Nothing open or free, though, about them - aside from the demo's, and if you decide to pirate it/use a keygen. Which, by the way, definitely hurts his income... it's an interesting perspective on the whole "software piracy doesn't hurt anyone" thing. Anyway, he can make a living
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I'm not so sure about that. The creator and basically sole developer of MaraDNS has lamented how little his project has helped him finding work. In fact he's a somewhat regular /. reader, so he might chime-in about now.
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Since when is proprietary software intrinsically profitable? If you want to make a living from that you need to convince someone to pay you money too.
FLOSS business model, simplified (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't get it on how to make loot with this FLOSS business model stuff. I'm not even a dev and I get it. I will try and 'splain this.
Here is the example I have used before: Remember hard wired telephones? Once a year way back then you get a free book from the phone company called a telephone directory. Inside the directory are different colored pages, white is residential, blue is government, and yellow is commercial business. Notice they have the full alphabet covered in that "yellow pages" section, bus
Re:Because they haven't released an OS in 3 years (Score:5, Informative)
If the old one works fine why would you need a new one?
In the grownup server world we really don't need flashy new guis or other such silliness.
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Who actually WANTS a "major" release? If RH can keep everything compatible, they should, and continue to have each release being only a minor update from the last. 5.5, here I come!
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Ahem... Perhaps a glorious year to *become* a Red Hat stockholder. 2008 and 2001, on the other hand, were horrible.
What I can't figure out is why it dropped a buck and a half today, unless one of the corporate bigwigs dumped a ton of it.