RedHat business (was: Re: [vox] OT: Contemplating the unthinkable...)

[Nathan Johanson]

I agree with these sentiments.

We just migrated all of our servers to Red Hat
Enterprise Linux... I initially baulked at spending
money, but then I also get Apache, Sendmail, IMAP,
MySql, SquirrelMail, MailScanner, SpamAssassin, and
several other beautiful open-source packages for
nothing. Suddenly, $150-$300 per server doesn't seem
like that much. Red Hat cannot make money giving their
product away, and they had "the balls" to make the
final move toward a "real business". It's not the
"free" that makes any Red Hat distro appealing, it's
the underlying OS combined with Red Hat's polish and
undeniable permeation of the open source community.

I figured that this sort of thing was imminent when
they first announced their new errata policy several
months ago (this is when I started investigating the
RHEL product and other distros). It was clear that the
consumer distro wouldn't fit for those of us trying to
make money off the Linux platform (where extended
product life and priority bug and security fixes are
critical).

Nathan


--- David Margolis <margolid@ecs.csus.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 
> > a lot of kernel and GNU development is largely
> funded by redhat.
> >
> > i sure hope they know what they're doing!
> >
> > pete
> 
> I thought these guys were giving up on everything
> that made them what they
> were and shooting themselves in the foot by cutting
> off their user base
> and all sorts of other nasty stuff.  Then I started
> reading their (heavily
> biased, obviously) press releases and started
> feeling pretty good about
> the whole thing.
> 
> When is the last time you went to Office Depot and
> bought that dusty $39
> copy of RedHat 9?  I think RedHat realizes their is
> no viable business in
> that market and needs to focus on their enterprise
> offerings.  Fedora is a
> LOT closer to Slackware (my distro of choice) and
> Debian (which it seems
> a lot of you guys use) now that it is a community
> based project.  The fact
> that it is sponsored by RedHat's enterprise efforts
> means Fedora will be
> pretty reliable, stable, etc.  Fedora 1.0 (or
> whatever it's called) is
> also way less conservative than Redhat 9.0 (it seems
> Fedora will need to be
> a bit more _testing_ oriented, which I think is
> good).  Much more recent
> versions of software packages are already there.
> 
> RedHat's commitment to support Fedora users for free
> (via up2date?) seems
> pretty generous too.  They probably figured they
> couldn't charge for
> something every apt user was already getting
> (especially with the recent
> howto on apt for rpm that was just printed in one of
> the magazines).
> 
> As far as the customers go, Desktop users still have
> boxed sets of Suse,
> Mandrake, etc. or they can just use Fedora and call
> it RedHat 10 if it
> makes them feel better.
> 
> At my work, one decision maker just went ahead and
> plunked down the $1,500
> for the enterprise edition because he figured he
> really wanted the
> support, so we know at least one customer wasn't put
> off by the changes.
> 
> --------
> 
> Don, as far as your original question goes -  Don't
> do it!  If you want to
> buy stock in a good computer company look into
> Apple.  You can have your
> open source (somewhat) and your reliable company all
> wrapped into one.
> Don't anybody flame me on this, it's just an opinion
> based on my view of
> that company.  I have no right to give anybody
> financial advice (although
> I'm probably less likely to get flamed than Don was
> coming in here asking if
> he should buy MS stock).
> 
> You could also consider stock in HP, Dell, or IBM in
> that those companies
> seem reasonable commited to supporting Linux.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> vox mailing list
> vox@lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox


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