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Red Hat Takes Aim at SuSE, Mandrake
gowen writes "The gloves have come off in the competition between commercial linux distributions. The Register is reporting that Red Hat is offering a $10 rebate to people who upgrade to Red Hat 7.3, including those who previously used Mandrake and SuSE. Previous users of Windows are not eligible for a rebate."
The one place RH probably beats Mandrake is in polish, in the UI and the packages but it's still a major sacrifice.
What kind of pressure can MS possibly exert if RH were to extend the rebate to Win OS users as well? MS can influence plenty of partners/customers, such as content providers, OEMs, and schools (not anti-MS necessarily, just saying that they do have a great deal of influence), but what can they do to a Linux company?
IANAL, but I can offer upgrades from anything I want for a product - in fact MS has frequently offered discounts for competitive upgrades. Eg from Notes to Exchange, or WordPerfect Suite to Office.
So I think the real reason for this move is clearly to win over current Linux users, not those of Windows. And as someone pointed out, this will hardly grow the market overall, but perhaps might do something for RH's revenue.
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Previous users of Windows ARE eligible for upgrades, if they also used Mandrake or SUSE. It's not just ANY users of Mandrake and SUSE though - it's only those who have purchased a retail copy of the OS, in a box, with a manual. RedHat might give me $10 back for purchasing RedHAt 7.3 after purchasing Mandrake 8.2, but I'm saving even more money by not buying either. In the UK, you could buy Windows 98 for less than the price of these two OSs and the rebate. Just goes to show it's not easy to please everyone :-)
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For me, numerous packages is not a selling point. I run Linux because I want precise control over what's running on my machine, whether it be a desktop or a server. I don't want layers upon layers of crud.
Example: You cannot install recent Redhat versions without installing sendmail, because cron needs sendmail, and a redhat install needs cron. But I don't want sendmail. In many cases I don't want cron. If I want sendmail functionality, I'll install something less gargantuan and less cumbersome. And if I want cron functionality, I'll install something substantially cleaner than the heavily-heavily patched Vixie cron that comes from redhat.
For me, the perfect "distro" (it's not even really that) is Linux From Scratch. Complete control over everything!
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A competitive upgrade from Windows makes a great deal of sense.
You see, right now I think the retail version of RH 7.3 is selling for $60, give or take. So you offer a $10 competitive upgrade for anyone who brings in ANY evidence that they've used Windows. A CD, a case with a sticker, a printed screen shot, doesn't matter.
Sure Red Hat is giving up $10 a box if they do this. But, assuming they can still make money on every box they ship at $50, this gets them a ton of publicity that whatever they pay out in rebates could never buy otherwise.
Magazines would cover it -- and I'm not talking about the usual ZD rags, I'm talking about Time and Newsweek. It's a natural for thirty seconds of coverage in the business section of every local TV news show in America. If whoever does Red Hat's publicity is smart, they'd be making or fielding calls from talk shows and newspaper reporters.
I wouldn't expect they would sell all that many more copies of Red Hat with the Windows competitive rebate, but in the end it doesn't matter. One of the big obstacles to Linux right now is the public's complete lack of awareness that it exists, or if they know about it, it's some high end computer smart guy thing they see on those IBM commercials.
I don't know how much this could help, but I can't see how it could possibly hurt.
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