Slashdot Mirror
Redhat Reports 90% Return Subscription Rate
jasonbowen writes "In this article from ZDnet, Redhat claims a 90% return subscription rate for its Enterprise line. Sounds like Redhat is doing just fine providing a quality product for people that want to pay the money for it." (And for people who don't want to pay money for it, too.)
I've moved all my redhat machines (200+) over to apt.
As long as RedHat still posts updated RPMs in a timely manner, you can make a cronjob to check and update packages.
Please - be clear on this - Red Hat CORPORATE (ENTERPRISE) desktop line is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and isn't kaput!
(for those who don't know exactly what he's referring to, here's the link.)
i think you're misreading the apple license. it doesn't mean you can install it on as many servers as you like, it only means you can connect to it with as many file-sharing clients as you like at one time. kind of like the windows server line - the basic license only allows 5 clients to connect at a time.
red hat may turn out to be a better deal since they don't limit the number of clients that can connect to your samba server.
jon
-- http://www.cerastes.org
Red Hat Professional Workstation is $99
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
You could look at this the other way, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL. The way the RHEL license/contract reads, if you decide not to renew, you have to remove RHEL.
No, you just don't get support, updates and new releases.
But what do I know,
-edfardos...
I reread the agreement hoping to tell you that you were an idiot, but the egg may be on my face. Where it does say that the annual payment will be automatically invoiced each year unless explicitly terminated, I couldn't see anywhere where it says you have to remove software if you don't remove.
My bad. Touche.
You have scores of machines that you're managing through the free service? RHN allowed you to manage these for free (maybe the cost of a demo subscription or a single $60/year fee that you bounced from machine to machine). It put a load on their servers for both the rhn-applet, the up2date, and the package information that's stored there. There's a $20 update service now until EOL that you can buy.
You have many other options -- you can use yum, apt, synaptic to upgrade your machines. If you have all these scores of machines in a single facility you can create your own yum/apt repository and have the machines check each day via cron. If you want a centralized view of the state of your machines then maintain a database of each machines packages. Periodically check the repository against the package database and send an alert if any are out of date.
For example:
rpm -qa --query-format "%{name}\t%{version}\n"
For each machine store this information in a mySQL table. Then as new packages enter the repository, store that information inside another table. You can then select packages based on name between tables then inform the user that a package needs to be updated. Or count the packages that need to be updated. This will give you 90% of the RHN functionality. Won't be as pretty but it works.
Or you can pay RedHat for this service.
In looking at the Contract I recently recieved when I signed up for RHES 3, the only part I found about removing software is if you have a "Red Hat Network Proxy Server and Satellite" (Subscription agreement, Section II, Subsection B, Item 1).
If you have a proxy server or satellite and your subscription ends, you must remove and destroy all RHN code in your possesion.
Well, for one support.
For another, Fedora is becoming their development platform with little regard to having to support or promise stability. So while bugfixes will be applied to the distro, you can bet an equal amount of broken feature enhancements will come in to offset stability benefits. Like running Debian unstable, essentially, but likely to be more bleeding edge and off the beaten path (i.e. the X based init, the kernel with nptl support, and a host of other things that are neat, but not well tested in Fedora).
So if you want to stay redhat-ish, on your servers and workstations for other people you support, RH enterprise is cool, but for your own desktop if competent, I would say the Fedora 'releases' are neat and any breakage can be worked around by an expert.
Of course, I think SuSE has the most appropriate business/pricing model in terms of being competitive against MS. SuSE professional is reasonably priced compared against what the actual cost of an MS OS license is for a workstation, whereas Redhat is really really expensive in the Workstation context. I'm quickly becoming a SuSE fan.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Then whiteboxlinux.org might be for you. It's RHEL with all of the trademarks etc removed, currently being sponsored by a public library in the US. It's available free of charge.
Number of vunerabilities, perhaps. Severity of vulnerabilities, no.
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
Two different business models.
MS: you pay dearly for the software, they throw in the Windows Updates for free.
RedHat: we give you the software, you pay yearly subscriptions if you want the easy Windows-Update-like RHN.
The fact that RedHat had demo accounts in the first place is to their credit. It's really hard to feel bad about the fact that it's a hassle to abuse the demo account concept (by signing up for an account for each machine). And also, you don't need RHN to get updates anyway - you can always download them from their errata page.
I've had the opportunity to work with Red Hat's Advanced Server in a large corporation. Red Hat has done an extremely poor job of support, only providing excuses why they don't want to provide support - eg., for a kernel issue triggered by an httpd compiled to support more than the shipping one that has a compiled-in limit of 256 connections, they refused to look at the kernel issue (it doesn't ship on our CD, so any issues relating to it, even a bug of ours, we won't support, reproduce it with something that ships on the CD and we'll talk, otherwise, it doesn't scale to support this type of problem). Meanwhile, kernels 2.4.10 (basically, any else's version of linux) contain the fix. Likewise for ethernet drivers which were supposed to be supported. The answer was "you're downrevved, upgrade!" (on their product whose selling point was a 3 year lifespan, and for which updated, working, and "void Red Hat support" drivers exist)
Yet, even after shipping a distribution which hasn't worked very well, and having them give the run-around instead of support, the business still keeps the support contract. Why? Because it's a blanket requirement that the software used have support. Perhaps in case the sysadmin and engineering teams weren't able to pull together and work around Red Hat, they would be better posisitioned to "have my CEO call your CEO". Anyway, 90% retention doesn't mean Red Hat is doing a good job or that everyone is pleased. It could mean they're still not sure about switching to SuSE because they're not sure how badly Novell is going to mess it up.
While there is no licensing requirement to remove your old Red Hat software, as others have pointed out, you are still correct. It is likely that you will have to remove your old Red Hat software because without purchasing an upgrade and subscription you will no longer be getting updates and this is unacceptable in an enterprise production environment.
That means that the more accurate way to view the statistic is that Red Hat has lost 10% of its existing customers. Now, the story doesn't say what their new customer subscription rate is compared to previous new customer subscription rates so, we aren't able to see the big picture. Is Red Hat's subscription customer base growing overall or not? I hope for their sake that it is growing. But, at my company, anything that causes a 10% loss in the existing customer base without massively increasing the new customer rate will result in close scrutiny and the likely termination of those responsible.
It's totally permissible to run their Enterprise products on as many machines as you like without any RHN subscription or support contract. Just buy one copy, and install it everywhere. You can then setup a cron job to grab the errata SRPMs from ftp.redhat.com (which have been available for free since the first release of RHEL) to a local server, build them for your arch, put them in an apt repo, and rebuild the apt repo headers. Then have allyour local machines check against that in-house repo. You don't get the centralized, stateful admin interface that is the RHN website, but you could even build that yourself with a php/mysql solution.
I hate to be negative, but I do not actually think that this is legal.
Look carefully at the RHEL EULA. Here are some quotes, emphasis added:
Of course Redhat is not allowed to impose this EULA on third party GPL software, but the problem is that not all of RHEL is third party GPL software. A lot of it is third party free software under licenses other than the GPL. Moreover a substantial fraction of the GPL software in RHEL is actually owned by Redhat themselves.So, ironically, the only way to install RHEL on multiple machines without support is not to buy RHEL and compile your own copy.
That depends on what you consider payment.
For years I've used Redhat, yet never paid a dime for the distro itself. However, I have gone out of my way to supply others with Redhat CDs, help if them when needed it and recommeded Redhat to customers looking for an alternative to Windows.
I've also spent a lot of time on the Redhat mailing list, answering questions for the most part as well as getting some answers myself.
In my mind, Redhat got to be the distro of choice not because it's rock solid (there have been plenty of bumps on the road), but partly because there is a large community of people using Redhat who are willing to share their time to help anyone get Redhat working for them.
How is Redhat losing money by pissing on us "non-money" folks? Do you have any idea how much GOOD word of mouth is worth?
Anything is possible given time and money.
Just a little note for all those left in the cold by Red Hat's recent moves; Kevin Fenzi has a paid subscription service where they supply a customized version of RedHat with all the paid errata and updates and a bunch of extra apps. They also have krud2date, an excellent updating tool. He's doing the support Red Hat doesn't want to do. Check it out - if you're worried about support for your RH system (and you are actually willing to pay for it), it may work for you.
This blatant karma whoring post brought to you by bfg9000 and the number 7.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
It's worth noting that aside from the only 5 CAL your Windows xxxx Server license comes with, it also doesn't come with support (at least not with a SLA). That's extra, and not cheap. The $799/year from RH is the support contract, the software is free. Yes, I understand it might appear to be a bit of a technicality.
To answer your question, legally speaking, nobody. But then again, legally speaking, if you read your MS EULA you'll notice that they legally have no responsibility whatsoever to do anything, and have no responsibility if anything bad happens to you as a result of using their products. Of course, I suppose you could sue MS in case of problems (good luck with that).
Don't get me wrong, I am not happy that the "regular" RHL went away, I will miss it, and I will change to another Linux distributor, both at home and at work. I was just addressing the technicality. RHEL is still GPL, and is therefore still free. The fact that this project exists illustrate the point.
But again, I was originally just addressing your rant about RHN and the free entitlement.
Apart from RHEL AS/ES/WS (which can be a little pricey), there is also Red Hat Professional Workstation. It's based on RHEL3, and contrary to what the name suggests, it includes most server daemons.