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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.)
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.
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.
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.
And they have asked not to be linked to on slashdot... guess that's why you posted it as an anonymous coward!
From the website:
(One immediate problem will be bandwidth. The Beauregard Parish Library is a small parish (county) library in rural Louisiana with a single lowly T-1 connection to the world. Even with BitTorrent, serving up six or seven full ISO images will get insane very fast if the word spreads very far. So PLEASE! For the love of all that is Good, Holy, Just and generally pleasing to the Great Penguin, DO NOT SUBMIT THIS PAGE TO SLASHDOT!!)
The Google mirror is here for the curious who want to view the site without killing their bandwidth.
Beep beep.
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.
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.