Red Hat CEO: Bring On the Clones 182
An anonymous reader writes "Best Buy and Barnes and Noble have a problem with showrooming — shoppers checking out the merchandise in their stores and then proceeding to order the goods at a discounted prices online. And Red Hat might have a similar problem with people (not just college kids and software professionals boning up on their skills at home, either) using the free-as-in-beer CentOS rather than licensing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and paying support fees. But according to CEO Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's competitive position may actually be helped by CentOS in the same way that counterfeit Windows products sold on the streets in the Far East may have helped Microsoft — by cementing their position as the technology standard, in a marketplace that also includes entrants from SuSE, Debian, Oracle, and Ubuntu, just among Linux-based entrants. Who does Whitehurst consider to be Red Hat's most direct threat? VMWare."
Pirating Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
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THIS!!
The company I worked for a few years ago had a compute cluster for engineering/modeling with over 100 nodes. They were originally running RHEL3, which of course was coming up to EOL in a few months. The suits wanted to buy licenses for RHEL to upgrade the nodes, the IT staff wanted to use CentOS. Research was done on pricing for over 100 RHEL licenses, and after a while, the suits decided to go with IT's choice of CentOS for the compute nodes and use *one* RHEL install for the master node. I wasn't in
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The suits wanted to buy licenses for RHEL to upgrade the nodes, the IT staff wanted to use CentOS
so the IT staff didn't want to use RHEL, they wanted something identical to RHEL instead.... stupid.
If it was just down to some anti-corporate kind of dumb thinking, then surely said IT staff should be handing back their salaries.. or do you think that by not paying RedHat did anything other than give your CEO a bigger bonus?
(but sure, RH should offer some bulk discounts, idiot salespeople)
Uh... lacking data (Score:2)
The suits wanted to buy licenses for RHEL to upgrade the nodes, the IT staff wanted to use CentOS
so the IT staff didn't want to use RHEL, they wanted something identical to RHEL instead.... stupid.
If it was just down to some anti-corporate kind of dumb thinking, then surely said IT staff should be handing back their salaries..
Or.... It could be that the IT budget was fixed, so they had to make a choice between spending on line-of-business issues vs. (what is in effect) an expensive support contract so the FEA guy can run his simulations faster. Frankly, we just don't know all the facts to second guess their decision.
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as he said - "the suits wanted to buy", and the suits generally have the budget, which looks true when he also says they engaged with redhat salesmen who didn't have a flexible licencing for bulk purchases.
Ultimately its a story of redhat business models being less than perfect, but it still confuses me why someone would make the distinction between RHEL and CentOS in any way other than price, which is what he was suggesting - that IT staff somehow value the free version over the paid version for no more th
Re:Pirating Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
Why wouldn't you buy their unlimited guests license at $2k/yr, for your nodes?
http://www.redhat.com/resourcelibrary/articles/articles-red-hat-enterprise-linux-purchasing-guide [redhat.com]
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Because they'd need a license for each physical computer ? My understanding here is that they had a cluster of many computers. So they bought RHEL for the head node (1 computer) and used CentOS on all of the others.
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That is actually incorrect. The CentOS part of your installation invalidates your support contract/subscription for the RHEL part of the cluster.
Red Hat does not offer you the option of a mixed anvironment. It's either all Red Hat, supported, or mixed and completely unsupported.
I am with Red Hat on this one, actually.
Do people still show room? (Score:2)
Other than blu rays, most things seem to be the same price at best buy and amazon or newegg
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Entirely your fault, you should always disconnect cables before handling them; otherwise there is a risk of shock...
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yeah, but who show rooms at B&N? you always go to amazon first.
lately i've noticed electronics are about the same price at best buy as amazon. blu ray's generally cost $5 more. and some itunes movies are now cheaper than the blu ray
Redhat needs packages (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way I can get by using my IT mandated RedHat box is by installing CentOS packages on it. RedHat simply doesn't keep the packages I need up to date. If CentOS didn't exist, I wouldn't use RedHat at all, which would entail a huge fight with IT. Thanks CentOS!
Re:Redhat needs packages (Score:5, Informative)
Which packages would that be? Since CentOS is a clone of RHEL you would get the same packages as in RHEL by doing that.
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Freenx and R & Bioconductor. I eventually found that R and Bioconductor still lagged on centos, so I compile them myself now.
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Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn (Score:2, Informative)
CentOS, which is COMPLETELY legal and above board, has absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with counterfeit Windows products.
CentOS:
1) Violates NO copyrights
2) Is not passing itself off as something else
3) Has never been treated by Redhat as anything but completely welcome.
4) Is produced by completely building from (libre!) source, not disk copying the install media.
5) Is careful to remove Redhat branding where trademarks are involved.
Jim Whitehurst never uttered the silly parallel as far as I can see,
Re:Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn (Score:5, Insightful)
You are focusing on the differences but ignoring the similarities which Whitehurst was concerned about.
CentOS doesn't put money in Red Hat's pocket directly, but it helps cement Red Hat as a standard for enterprise Linux distributions.
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CentOS, which is COMPLETELY legal and above board, has absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with counterfeit Windows products.
Exactly
CentOS) Costs Nothing
Counterfeit Windows) Costs Nothing.
Exactly nothing in common.
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3) Has never been treated by Redhat as anything but completely welcome.
Well, not really. Red Hat obviously cannot stop CentOs but it seems clear that Red Hat does guard their copyrighted material. They have made it clear that CentOS cannot refer to Red Hat in any part of their distribution that is not covered by GPL. CentOs *always* refers to the "up-line Linux vendor" (or some other vague reference) for a reason.
No Cent OS is tolerated by Red Hat as long as they don't step on copyrights or trademarks. They are not welcomed with open arms, but there is nothing they can do
best buy high presser sales made it to showrooming (Score:2)
best buy high presser sales made it to showrooming place
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Nothing says that you can't use RHEL as a stable core OS and install any additional software that you need outside of that. It's very simple to do nowdays with Software Collections.
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I'm no disagreeing. If you want newer and/or more optimized software then stock RHEL is not really for you. The key point with RHEL is that it provides a stable ABI, and that makes it more conservative on certain things.
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What bullshit, its not a crappy product, its just aproduct not suited for your specific needs.
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Scientific computing? Have you found a better alternative to RHEL based Scientific Linux?
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Marketshare v. Mindshare (Score:2)
What you want as a software vendor:
1. Paying customer (gives you marketshare)
2. Non-paying users (gives you mindshare)
3. Users using competitor's products for free (loss of mindshare)
4. Users paging for competitor's product (loss of marketshare)
The above is only true in a market that has meaningful competition.
Re: Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Admins never needed vendor support, managers do. That means that CentOS trains the admins on Red Hat and then managers pay for the supported thingie.
Re: Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
When you have servers labeled production, that generate revenue and downtime means lost revenue, then you pay for support since its cheaper than losing revenue and customers
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Unless you have the very top level of support it's really rare to find a problem that support can fix faster than one smart dedicated admin who is working on it as top priority.
Support is mostly useful if you don't have good admins, if they are overloaded to the point they can't help, or to reassure PHB types. Plus if you have the budget spare you might want to support open source with it by supporting Red Hat.
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"When you have servers labeled production, that generate revenue and downtime means lost revenue, then you pay for support since its cheaper than losing revenue and customers"
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Ainnns...
Are you kidding, ain't you?
When downtime means revenue and you really want to do the proper thing you architect your systems so there's no downtime and you don't hire bottom-of-the-barrel technical staff for peanuts. No, sir, vendor support is not to avoid downtime but for the manager's CYA policy.
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"you architect your systems so there's no downtime"
I think you have TomorrowLand mixed up with FantasyLand and NeverNeverLand.
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Ok...
So how many people on your staff understand the complete source to your linux distribution?
Kernel Developers?
RAID adapter or HBA driver developers?
Filesystem developers?
database developers (if you use an open source db)
Network driver developers?
If your company does, then you must have quite a few of these people in case you have a problem and the one developer on your staff that understands the FCoE driver stack is on vacation...
Unless your core business is developing OSes, you'll save yourself quite a
Re: Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Informative)
something comes up, you don't know how to solve it off the top of your head. quick research yields nothing. your company is losing revenue. you don't have time to post a question on a forum and wait a day or so for a solution. for that system you pay the 4 hour or less support costs so that if you need it, you call the vendor and get someone on the phone NOW.
where i work we pay Cisco and other vendors for support for this reason and the fact that with a lot of vendors you need to pay to get patches and updates
Re: Doesn't make sense (Score:4, Informative)
There are audit and compliance issues, that will prevent some workloads from EVER going into production, without support for accredited or validated configurations.
Just PCI-DSS is tough enough - if you need to walk a QSA through your homebrew hosts.
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and lots of support software, like say backup software is only supported on official software like red hat or windows
if something doesn't work and you call them for support and you're running an unsupported config, they will tell you to get lost and solve it yourself
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I worked at a company that had that level of support from Microsoft. It cost millions. When things crashed it still took days to weeks to fix the root cause, by that time it had been worked around somehow. You can spend a fortune on support to buy nothing but a good feeling and when things fall apart and you need a fix fast you are often on your own.
Re: Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Informative)
Why do you assume Microsoft represents the industry?
From my understanding Redhat Support buys you direct access to not only kernel programmers but the distribution people. I've heard of situations where high dollar customers got Redhat to troubleshoot a problem and provide them a custom kernel to fix the problem and then rolled the changes into the main kernel.
Microsoft's business is selling licenses. RedHats business is selling support.
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Why do you assume Microsoft represents the industry?
Oh I don't. I think I gave you the wrong impression there, but the top tier of Microsoft support does get you fast access to their programmers too.
Just support often doesn't work fast enough for serious situations. I've dealt with Red Hat support and they put your ticket in a queue and if it's really serious get back to you within an hour. By that time I've normally fixed or know how to fix or at least work around the problem.
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By the same token, if you own exactly one RHEL license, you aren't getting
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I've been a paying Red Hat Support customer since before the Halloween Documents were published.
Access to their high-end people is generally being monopolized by the biggest customers at any given moment. If you have a problem, and IBM has a problem, and Dell has a problem... you're at the end of the line for access to Alan Cox. You'll probably have to settle for Nalin Dahyabhai, who has even more rudimentary social skills than Alan does.
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where i work we pay Cisco and other vendors for support for this reason and the fact that with a lot of vendors you need to pay to get patches and updates
Paying the vendors for that reason is all well and good, but when did you actually get a solution from a major vendor for a critical problem within a day or so?
I have been in the IT business for a while, and I have never seen it happen. Yes, failed hardware can be replaced within 4 hours (although even that can be problematic enough to achieve in practice) but anything that is not just a case of escaping blue smoke?
The rolling support system where they shift the case around time zones to keep working on it
Re: Doesn't make sense (Score:2)
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"for that system you pay the 4 hour or less support costs so that if you need it, you call the vendor and get someone on the phone NOW."
Having someone on the phone by itself only gives you two things: somebody on the phone and the ability to deflect blame to the one on the phone.
But then, your "troubleshooting techniques" shows the kind of professional you are: in your book the answer has to come from somebody else.
Protip: you go to the sources and you debug the problem yourself (I've done it: I've debugged
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If you have to go to a source code you haven't previously looked at to find the solution, it's likely to take you quite awhile. A good support desk is likely to have already encountered the problem, and already know what the answer is. That's LOTS faster.
OTOH, there are lots of problems that they don't already understand, and in those cases, a local diagnosis has LOTS of advantages. E.g., you can run your tests quickly, and you don't need to keep repeating them everytime someone new is added to the phone
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"If you have to go to a source code you haven't previously looked at to find the solution, it's likely to take you quite awhile."
Truly yes -or you can be lucky, it happened to me once, but you can't count on it.
"A good support desk is likely to have already encountered the problem"
Yes. But if that's the case, a reputable company would have worked on the underlying problem and then it would be already patched/known, so no need to resort to helpdesk.
In the end, I'm not against support, of course it can save
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You are absolutly ignorant about what you are talking about, so you'd better shouldn't comment on this, or you are just trolling.
Anyway, and just for the record, nothiing you say is either true or makes sense.
Debian modifies sources in two ways:
1) in order to stick to Linux Filesystem standard policies and in order to stick to Debian's own conventions.
2) in order to backport security fixes on Stable.
Anyway, is more conservative than, say, Red Hat.
Debian only activates services if this can be done in a safe
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Provided that RedHat will actually support it. We have sent people to the training, set up equipment to the standard *their certified instructors taught* us, and then had support hang up on us because our disk setup wasn't according to RHEL support's standard- which apparently has nothing to do with what you learn in their certified classes. WTF?
Cisco doesn't do this. Even EMC doesn't do this. But RedHat did do this, several times. RedHat support also did a lot of the whole "it must be the hardware ven
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The support helps you fix whatever is causing the downtime faster, and patch the problem so it doesn't cause downtime in the future. They can also help with configuration, installs, etc. that all help you get a system online faster in the first place.
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It doesn't prevent down time.. It prevents unemployment time.
Situation: Server down due to OS security hole - revenue being lost .... Cut to executive management office
CTO: What's up with the server!? We can't sell our widgets and the CFO is saying we are in danger of not making our numbers now. We got to fix this NOW or we are all toast!
Middle Manager: Well, sir, we've contacted our OS vendor who is looking into the problem and as soon as they have a fix, we will get it installed.
OR would you rather
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I saw a trouble ticket last year that had this line in it (I think it was after Sandy):
[date/time] Site router still down. Technician not en route, no ETA. Escalated to GiantTelCo 8th level support.
I don't care how stupid a manager is, at some point even the dumbest is going to recognize "8th level support" is bullshit. Then they finally might start asking "what are we paying for, exactly?"
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I saw a trouble ticket last year that had this line in it (I think it was after Sandy):
[date/time] Site router still down. Technician not en route, no ETA. Escalated to GiantTelCo 8th level support.
I don't care how stupid a manager is, at some point even the dumbest is going to recognize "8th level support" is bullshit. Then they finally might start asking "what are we paying for, exactly?"
I don't see a problem with the above. Obviously, the operations managers over at GientTelCo were fervently praying to whatever supreme being they believed in--because that was the only way the situation was going to get resolved in a timely manner. Given that level 1 is front line, level 2 is escalated support, level 3 is your subject matter expert, and level 4 is usually the engineer who designed the thing to begin with, level 8 is obviously almighty god. Had the guy working the ticket provided more com
Re: Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Funny)
I always thought almighty god was zeroth level support. As in "You turn this sucker on and I'll pray to god that it works this time!"
From there, it's not good. You pick up the phone and descend to to the first circle of limbo, reserved for call center operators doomed to read from scripts. Next is the second level, where the phones are answered by system support groups, pummeled eternally by threats full of hot air to call their managers. The third level is a noisy, cold, icy machine room where system administrators are berated every time they take a call. The fourth level is where engineers are forced to joust with managers to keep their jobs while their phones ring endlessly. The fifth circle is where the VPs are tormented by joyless CEOs, members of the board, and majority stockholders in status meetings. The sixth circle is reserved for the salesmen who lied about their company's products, where they are surrounded by stacks of flaming four color glossy brochures touting features their systems never supported. The seventh circle is where the CFO sits in a rain of fiery charts of accounts and charges of embezzlement. The eighth circle of callbacks is where the company lawyer sits in a tarpit, where judges and prosecuters jab him with pitchforks full of product liability lawsuits. And the ninth circle is where the CEO is strangled and choked by a rack full of ethernet cables and fiber optic pipes, never understanding why none of them can ever hook up his iPhone to his PC no matter how hard he tries, and is bludgeoned by passing stockholders throwing dead batteries at him.
At least that's how we do support.
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This.
I have never used their support, but we pay for it on any server running commercial software since their license always requires it.
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Sure, and admins do not need to make sure the OS is properly funded, cause everything come for free and most of them have so much time to contribute.
And of course, admins do not need any training, do not need to have certified hardware cause they can perfectly guess what is working just by looking on specifications. And of course, none of them never read the documentation, nor call the support for complex problems, because all admins are experts in every possible domain.
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"admins do not need any training"
They do. What they don't need is "payed vendor certifications" except for their manager.
"do not need to have certified hardware cause they can perfectly guess what is working just by looking on specifications"
Of course they do. Why they shouldn't? But even then, right now we are entering the 10th damn month! with heavy performance problems on a solution deployed by a big name vendor on a fully certified stack, or just few weeks ago we needed to update the full firmware on
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Admins never needed vendor support, managers do. That means that CentOS trains the admins on Red Hat and then managers pay for the supported thingie.
Does CentOS actually do that? I thought that the only thing they did was provide - for no cost - the CDs or downloads of RHEL rebranded, and then let the 'customer' handle it on his own. Which would imply that the Admins presumably already had whatever expertise is needed.
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I think he meant that anyone can get a copy of CentOS and train themselves to acquire the necessary skills, so when they need a paid-for, licensed and supported linux, they go with RHEL.
Its a bit like how Microsoft sells technet subscriptions for next to nothing, so people can play with all the toys like active directory and exchange and learn how they work with some hands-on experience. Oh wait... like how Microsoft *used* to do that [enterpriseefficiency.com], dumbasses.
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Admins never needed vendor support, managers do. That means that CentOS trains the admins on Red Hat and then managers pay for the supported thingie.
Does CentOS actually do that? I thought that the only thing they did was provide - for no cost - the CDs or downloads of RHEL rebranded, and then let the 'customer' handle it on his own. Which would imply that the Admins presumably already had whatever expertise is needed.
You're simply not ready the GP correctly (and/or he wrote it ambiguously). The comparison is right in TFS.
Red Hat's competitive position may actually be helped by CentOS in the same way that counterfeit Windows products sold on the streets in the Far East may have helped Microsoft — by cementing their position as the technology standard...
IE. admins cut their teeth on CentOS, or get introduced to it in various environments where they're not paying for Redhat support... effectively, they train themselves on it simply due to exposure. It gets it into places where it wouldn't otherwise be feasible, might eat some profit in the grey areas (dev boxes and cheap clusters), but allows for a migration path to RHEL. To be honest, I don't know why
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"To be honest, I don't know why Redhat ever split fedora off on its own."
For the very same reason Linus abandoned the odd/even versioning for the kernel: to gain exposure for their "beta code".
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We moved to CentOS for one reason: It's basically the same environment as RHEL, which means that if we ever need to move up to the paid support model, we already know the quirks of the environment.
There's only like (4) possible choice
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WOW... Linux has no bugs? The documentation-- haha, man pages-- is 100% correct?
Not everyone needs to pay for support to fix things. All the Red Hat fixes end up in CentOS anyway.
Plus the people Red Hat get the software from are normally receptive to sensible suggestions and patches.
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Don't like the documentation? Don't use the software if all you can do is complain about it and its documentation. The manual pages seem good enough for me 95% of the time, while the remaining 5% is trying to use some much more complex program and honestly, there is much better documentation to be found elsewhere, including a quick Google search. Like, say... the project's own web site. You might laugh at the man pages, but at least they're available.
DOS sure as hell didn't have that luxury, and Windows
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They are happy that a lot of people learn how their system work so that they are more likely to choose Red Hat once they're in a position where they want to pay for Red Hat's services.
Re:Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if people (not managers, but hobbyists, students, and bored IT folks on their own time) learn RHEL-like distros, then that means there are more people who are familiar with the environment. That in turn means more software targeting that environment, a bigger talent pool for companies to hire from, and greater mindshare.
Better for RedHat to 50% of enterprise Linux and 40% of those users paying than 100% of the users of a distro with only 10% of the enterprise Linux market. More marketshare is pretty much always good.
One can easily imagine a scenario where some startup hires a bunch of guys who "know RedHat" and set up servers using Cent. As they grow and start needing additional support and enterprise-targeted features, though, who are they going to turn to? Switching to RHEL is going to be less disruptive than pretty much any other option at that point, right?
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Yes it does. Because this approach is an open and inclusive approach as opposed to one which is exclusive. Microsoft's market share stats once included "pirated copies" and still might as far as I know.
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The only people who pay significant money for linux support are multinationals, they buy RHEL licenses by the thousand. If everyone else uses CentOS instead of Debian or Ubuntu it's just more people who could use RHEL if they ever got a job at a multinational.
My company uses CentOS. There is no way I'm paying for something that I can get for free when I barely have enough budget to keep the hardware running.
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Red Hat is a viable support solution for larger companies. Small shops are better off relying on local Linux talent, either in house or small shops. People that wouldn't be likely to buy RH services anyway. So RH figures that if any of these small enterprises grow to be big and wealthy enough to afford them, its better if they are already in the Linux ecosystem. Even better if they are used to a distro that does things the Redhat way.
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How many of these "Linux geeks" can support an entire OS stack for the same money?
Re: Why pay Red Hat (Score:2)
A lot. I've seen enough "enterprise-grade" services contracts from RedHat to know it.
Re: Why pay Red Hat (Score:3)
Because it is not geeks that pay for Red Hat but their bosses.
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It's hard to go wrong with RedHat. From a management perspective, it's a lower risk to just shell out for RHEL vice even thinking about something like CentOS. It's the "no one ever got fired for..." thing at work.
And as far as a company to give money too, you could do a lot worse than RedHat. They contribute a lot of stuff we don't think about.
Also support is one of those things that's undervalued by the technically minded. Yes, there is a great community around linux, and yes, a technical guy can probably
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My first inclination would just be to hire competent people on my own - if I'm the one paying their paycheck directly, and I treat them with respect, I would hope that a sense of loyalty and a desire to keep from collapsing the company that issues their paycheck.
But if I t
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not just favouritism towards open source. If you, as a company, made your money doing nothing except support... your support will be damn good.
Microsoft, Oracle etc, might (do) have some great 3rd line support engineers... but you have to get past the army of call centre drones and basically beg for help.
So it shouldn't be just because you like the idea. RH, Canonical will just be significantly better.
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But I agree with your point - Red Hat and Canonical make almost all of their revenue from support, so if they get that wrong they're screwed. They have a bigger interest than Microsoft in getting it right.
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There is also the reason that the bulk of the reason that Linux is where it is today is b'cos of Red Hat. Oracle never got into maintaining their own fork - they just take every RHEL version, rebrand it and then tweak it to work w/ their software. CentOS wouldn't exist w/o Red Hat. Also, applications that previously used to run on Sun or HP workstations - the CAD packages, for instance - have all migrated to Lintel, and they're not there on all distros like Firefox is. They are supported on only one - R
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I guess there is not enough Linux geeks for every company, I guess even experts do not know everything, and as long as you can do everything, we just ask you to do more for the same price.
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Geeks are very hard for non-geeks to hire and manage. They don't really understand us.
Companies often hire incompetents. Usually it goes something along the lines of: 'I'll hire just 1 HR drone, to handle only paperwork etc. I'll stay in charge of all hiring decisions'. 2 years later...air thieves are everywhere and dice has a new, regular customer.
For almost all cases getting you to hire an incompetent is a double win for HR/staffing companies. They get paid and you'll be back...
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Why a company outsource security (watchmen) to a 3rd party, or office cleaning services?. Because they don't want the overhead of having to schedule people times, vacations, salary payments, hardware they need, training. Instead of tha,t they contract some service that do that for them. You take care of the people you need for your core service or product, let the rest to others
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No. Not unless you like locking up everything in every office, every night.
You hire a competent office manager, he manages all the cleaning and support staff.
The cleaning services are _all_ bottom feeders. At what they pay and who they hire, supplementing income with anything not tied down is 100% expected and tolerated. Once the cops arrest the cleaner, the service might accept they _had_ a problem. Not having thieves in your offices nightly is part of taking care of your people. It sucks to have pers
Re: Why pay Red Hat (Score:2)
I've never had anything go missing overnight at the office - and that includes wallets with cash and cell phones. Personally, I trust cleaning staff more than the typical office drone...
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You leave your wallet in your office overnight? I'm going to call bullshit on you. You're just a class warrior, trying to make some point.
Re: Why pay Red Hat (Score:2)
Not on purpose but I've been forgetful a number of times in the past.
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With all the Linux geeks running around, why does anyone pay for RedHat's service?
Because Red Hat keeps a stable of well equipped Linux Geeks on staff to answer the questions from Linux Newbies (and geeks) might ask. They also have SLA's so you have assurances that an answer will come in a known time. It is also WAY cheaper to pay Red Hat for a year's worth of support for those 10 servers than to have a 24x7x365 staff of Linux Geeks of your own.
Cheaper, plus the added benefit of having somebody else to blame when the CTO comes gunning for blood because the CEO is on his case for the se
In that case, why would devs support Linux? (Score:2)
Linux dudes,
With all the Linux geeks running around, why does anyone pay for RedHat's service?
Aren't there plenty of Linux folks around the World where you can get anything RedHat provides cheaper?
With that attitude, it's no wonder that plenty of people would be disincentivized to write Linux applications, or package Linux distros. Why do it, when the bulk of the people interested in it are freeloaders not willing to finance their work? And please don't give us the service aspect - not every developer wants a career in supporting services - they'd rather either market or build product.
The reason Linux is seriously considered at all in business is Red Hat - if a company wants to base either its pr
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Re: That's funny (Score:2)
What he's saying is that Red Hat doesn't really care who uses Red Hat, even if its called CentOS, because they make most of their money on support contracts, NOT licensing. So the threat is not that you might pay someone else for the CDs (or get them free) but that you might pay someone else for support.
Buying from VMWare might give Red Hat the price of a license but VMWare gets the lucrative support contract.
It's kind of like how MS practically gives away windows to OEMs because then you're likely to buy O
Re:That's funny (Score:4, Interesting)
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But VMware's USP is that they support Windows VMs as well - something that's not true about KVM or Xen (not sure about VirtualBox). VMware is not a threat to Red Hat - they own the market, while Red Hat is trying to challenge them. But the biggest obstacle for Red Hat is that VMware supports Windows - another competitor to Red Hat, but in the OS space. If the only VMs that were needed were Linux VMs, Red Hat would probably have had the edge, but that's not the case. Therefore, it's indeed silly of White
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You can run windows inside kvm just fine
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If you don't mind the attrocious IO.
Re:That's funny (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think you need to check your data again. Others say Windows runs fine under KVM (I don't have much experience there), and I can attest to quite a number of Windows server (2003 - 2012) installs under Xen without so much as a hicup.
Re:That's funny (Score:4, Informative)
That's silly, all open source visualization is shit. no need to be threatened when you already suck.
No it isn't. Xen and KVM are both at least as capable as anything vmware has.
Amazon web services is based on xen.
Rackspace cloud uses xen too.
Linode uses xen.
Digital Ocean uses kvm.
Any of them could have used vmware if they thought it was better.
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If someone offers you a "free beer", that's getting something most people expect to pay for, but for free. That's what "free as in beer" is alluding to. You shouldn't call other people idiots just because you don't understand what they are saying.