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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.
The whole point (usually) of offering competitive upgrades is to get someone to switch to your product, but in this case, I think it would be better to make that offer to Windows users (e.g., send in your authorized Windows media and key with a purchase of Red Hat Linux and we'll pay you the cost of the Microsoft tax) than it does to compete with other Linux vendors. This kind of internecine fighting is what let Micrsoft get a foot in the door on UNIX to begin with. The last thing we need is fragmentation and infighting in the Linux space.
What is your Slash Rating?
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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Windows users already have enough incentive to upgrade.
> What is more important to them - encouraging Windows users to "upgrade" to RedHat or taking existing customers away from other distributors
Neither. They're in business to make money selling an OS based on an open source kernel. They need as many customers as they can get. Apparently they think it's easier to get people already using Linux to switch to RedHat than to get Microsoft windows users to switch. I think that makes sense. It's not unethical, certainly not compared to some of the tricks other companies in this business use (think Microsoft, Larry Ellison).
Need I go on?
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
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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Part of what you pay for when you buy a Redhat box is installation support. Users of other distros are less likely to make use of that support as they are already at least somewhat knowledgable about Linux, thus it's less costly for Redhat to provide to those users.
People migrating from Windows would be more likely to use that support.
(For what it's worth I'm a Mandrake user. I got my Mandrake CD from a local cheap CD burner, donated some money to Mandrake online and purchased Ximian Red Carpet premium service and I'm happy with all of it. I just see cost related reasons why Redhat would do this for people owning Linux and not Windows).
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Stealing customers? Underhanded business practices? WTF?!
People. Red Hat is in business to make money. That's it. Nothing more. If you really think any of the commercial Linux distros have their top priority at promoting open source you are crazy.
My guess is that people aren't jumping from Windows to Linux as well as people had hoped. So, in that case, how do you expand your market share? Easy. You get more people on your distro than other distros. Makes sense to me. Then once you get them on your distro hopefully they'll keep buying YOUR upgrades. Competitive upgrades have been around a LONG time. I think it's a smart move for Red Hat to do this.
Bills have to get paid. Employees have to eat. That's the way things work.
Oh, how my trollish side comes out whenever i log onto slashdot......
1. Buy SuSe 7.3
2. Buy redhat, and get $10 dollar rebate.
3. Return both, pocketing yourself a whopping 10 dollars
easy money...
Go Mandrake today!
Any which distro do you think Mandrake is based on? Are you not slightly worried that if RH goes down, then a lot of the development work that made mandrake what it is today, will also cease - therefore there will be less of the cool advances that RH made?
Anyway, if the company goes down, their software won't it's open and free. You can still install an up-to-date Kernel, a new version of Gnome or KDE, and whatever else you like on it. It's not like what would happen if MS stopped producing Windows updates.
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Well, that could be. If a company starts offering advantages to customers to switch, and these advantages have nothing to do with the quality of the product or service offered, such as cash rebates, they abdicate themselves a certain moral high ground. In my opinion anyways, uneducated as that may be.
But what do I know!
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!
I won't use Redhat, or for that matter any linux distribution based in the US. It doesn't matter if they are good (and Redhat is) or if they offer me a rebate, or even a free boxed set.
The reason I won't is that I don't trust people like the senator from Disney (Hollings). I think there is a real chance that oss will be outlawed or at least restricted in nasty ways in the US in the next five years.
Even by slashdots low standards, this post reaches a new low in, twisted illogical reasoning. Disney and Microsoft are bad so you're going to punish Red Hat???? What if we extend your analogy a little? "I'm not going to have anything to do with Black people or Jews because with the recent wave of synagogue bombings, political gains by fascists, and anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe, there is a strong chance they may be outlawed or restricted in nasty ways in the next five years. So I'm going to stick to White Christians until European lawmakers get their shit together." Does that make any sense?
If the political situation in the US is your concern, you should be buying Red Hat (and other US open source companies) products by the truckload so they have the resources to fight back.
Have done this a couple of times and it took me less than 15 min to upgarde.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
(Warning: the following information eventually devolves into a rant!)
:)
If anything, this only validates what many Mandrake and Suse users already knew - these two products are getting incredibly easy to use, even for the "newbies". Yes, Redhat may have a larger commercial share, but that seems to be more in the corporate world, at least from what I have seen.
Personally, I like Mandrake, which makes it very easy to show Linux to someone who is Windows-trained without scaring them too much (grin). Sure, they're not REAL Linux users, according to some, but frankly, thats not the point. I usually get non-geek friends to at least TRY Linux, and the more people that retain a good impression of it, the better! Imagine when NON geeks have a conversation like this:
Non-geek 1: Wow, I just got ANOTHER Outlook/IE/VB Script virus! I hate this crap!
Non-geek 2: Hey, that sucks for you! I'm using KMail on Mandrake Linux that a friend installed for me, that stuff doesn't even hit me!
Non-geek 1: Yeah, but you can't use your windows stuff anymore!
Non-geek 2: Sure I can - I can do something called "dual-boot" so I can use Windows or Linux -
I don't have to give up Windows just to try it!
Etc, etc. If Mandrake, Redhat, and Suse users care about getting more people into Linux, I think we should concentrate on pushing the dual boot issue, and "interoperability", the main reason being that the more "user-friendly" (and yes, I hate that term too) we can make a Linux Desktop, the longer they will stay in the Linux Desktop (besides, sooner or later, they'll need the space Windows is taking up for MP3s, Files, etc
The Red Hat rebate is a nice feather in the cap of Mandrake and Suse, but I think they should have been giving it for WINDOWS users, not as an upgrade, but as a "Use us too!" kind of thing.
People coming off Windows need a good 12-step program, not a rebate.
I won't use Redhat, or for that matter any linux distribution based in the US.
If you don't buy a US distribution, you're supporting terrorism! Think of the children!
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Part of what you pay for when you buy Red Hat installation support. People who already own a Linux distro are unlikely to need it so it seems reasonable to pass some of that saving back to them.
Windows users on the other hand are more likely to use that support.
It seems to me that Redhat aren't targetting other distros so much as passing some savings on to those who already know Linux to some extent and therefore will be less of a drain on Redhat Support.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
It wasn't a beta, it was a fork. Forking is what you do when the maintainer drops the ball. HTH,
Gee, this $10 rebate was mentioned right on Red Hat's page and marketing, and if anybody just bought it (my boxed copy came yesterday) it has a sticker and form on the box. So you guys need a Register story to discover this?
Many software packages come with these rebates you know. Quicken came (or used to come) with an upgrade rebate. Adobe Photoshop Elements came with a competitive $30 rebate offer. Common practice!
How about the scoop on the REAL story: where are the goddamn Red Hat stickers? When I bought 7.0 it came with STICKERS! Do you think I shelled out $many dollars for my Red Hat 7.3 Personal box set for NOTHING? Where are my stickers!!!
I think the lack of stickers in the box is a clear sign that Red Hat is ready to file for chapter 11, or maybe even indicative of an Enron-style debacle. First the stickers go, next thing you know, Red Hat's backing the SSSCA and supporting Al Queda. What do you folks think??
This is a caution about dual boot systems:
... not at all what I had been expecting. I thought my hard disk had gone bad.)
Dual boot is quite useful, and I use it on my main system at work. But I don't really trust partition resizing tools. I've ended up with a few too many corrupt partition tables. So now I have a second hard disk. But if I install the boot partition on the second hard disk, then after awhile that installation fails at boot.
It took awhile to figure this out, but in the end I backed up my windows partition, reformatted my primary disk, with a boot partion, a swap partion, and a windows partition. Rolled the windows program back in (I used ghost for this). And then installed Linux. Now it works fine, without much problem. But figuring out what I needed to do was largely a matter of try something, wait til it crashes (sometimes a couple of months). Figure out what to try next. Repeat. And for the longest time, the only reliable way to boot Linux was from a floppy.
I'm not really sure that it would be appropriat to expect things to work better (though it sure would be nice). I am sure that it's appropriate to expect better diagnostics. Partition tabel corrupt is a terrible diagnostic to be the first warning sign. Particularly when it keeps you from even accessing the disk. (Interestingly, when I reformatted the system to put the boot partition on the primary disk, fsck magically recovered all of the missing data, and nothing ended up lost
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
# apt-get install redhat-rebate
...
Couldn't find package redhat-rebate.
Damn! First abiword, now this.
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.
Someone you trust is one of us.
I do not see anything wrong with this. What notion of reality is everyone subscribing to wherein a rebate is a bad thing?
This is not stealing customers, sorry. It is giving a rebate for an upgrade which, as someone else pointed out, is probably due to the savings in technical support by non-newbie customers.
Second, I own RedHat 7.2, now I own RedHat 7.3. I get $10 back. Thanks, RedHat. If they did not give a rebate you would complain it cost too much.
Next, someone complained about ripping up your manual - it is your old manual they want the cover of. Read the directions - "eligable product's manual" and the eligable product is from the list, i.e. old verions of RedHat or SuSE or Mandrake.
Now, RedHat is a business and you just bought a box with paper and CDs in it. Not a religion or a political agenda. Sorry to rain on anyone's parade. I got $10 bucks - yay! If you buy RedHat, you can get $10 bucks back, too. Or not. Have fun.
Finally, the real complaint is why does this version not have the free stickers of previous editions!@!?
There goes my karma...:)