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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.)
We're looking for alternative Linuxes(eses??).
If RedHat can't make their older model work for them, that doesn't work for us.
For instance will all the Oracle optimization still be in Fedora?
based on the subscription rates, this doesn't seem to be a better deal than OS X's $999 unlimited client license. Yeah, the hardware is cheaper, but if you have 20-30 servers...
What's the renewal rate for Microsoft? 99.999%?
Yeah, I'm not too happy with ole Redhat these days. Our enterprise RHN subscription runs out December 11, but I still can't get any info about the alleged rumored educational version of RHEL out of them. Christmas holidays would be a perfect time for migrating our servers to RHEL Academic, but I fear they are going to shaft us on this one as well.
It's almost like they don't have a well thought out business plan and are making it up as they go along. All of this should have been mapped out several months in advance, giving customers the ability to plan their own migrations. The Academic piece was just forgotten about and filled in a week or so ago, and it's still vaporware.
I dunno about now but three years ago I was trying to get a sendmail (don't ask) box up and running for a client and was a complete newbie to Linux. I purchase a one time incident for like $250 and spent about 3 hours on the phone with them. They put me on the phone with their e-mail admin and he helped me get it up and running.
I will probably fork out the dough for the enterprise version for my home machine simply because I think Red Hat is great at what they do, play nice as a community member and produce quite a great product as far as I can tell.
There is no louder way to vote than with your wallet. As for me, I vote for Linux and Red Hat seems like a great company to push for. Don't forget they didn't hesitate to fire back at SCO. I will gladly help fund that effort.
Maybe they can contribute some code to make it actually work on my machine. I know, I know, it's easy to run out of memory (or so it said)during install when you only have 512M of RAM and 6G of HD space just for Linux.
Why do I think that I should have just used the entire HD for XP? Hmmmm....
At least Mandrake does install, and only crashes every other time I shut it down. Boy, that sure beats my crappy, unstable, one-crash-per-month-or-two eXPerience, when it gets used 98% of the time. I know, I probably misconfigured something by clicking that "Mozilla" icon.
Even without RHN's impending disappearance, there is simply a greater volume of knowledge out there for RedHat users.
While the expiration of a valuable resource like RHN is a bit discouraging for the OSS movement in general, there is simply no other distribution out there with as large a user and knowledge base as RedHat.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
If it breaks, you can call some RH engeneer and he'll help you.
If you have to stay up allways, then you need that red phone.
I Hope that gentoo don't start charging money for sync as redhat did with up2date. That will make me cry!
Exactly why I think SuSE has a great window of opportunity, their 'Professional Linux' distribution is still reasonably priced for the support offered. And frankly, once one looks past previous RedHat training experience, a lot will realize that SuSE does quite a few things better.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We should remember that, even if we don't like m$ business model, they are at least selling their own product. Red Hat is a 99% of the work of the GNU Comunity, and a 1% of work of redhat itself. They are selling something that just don't belong to them. If you want, i can sell you the moon, it's a perfect business, the work is allready done, i have no inversion to make, and if something is broken, it's not my fault, i just wait for the people who actually wrote the software to fix the problem, in the meanwhile, i tell my customers i'm not resposable for that problem, it's a problem of the people who wrote the program, when the fix is done, i just put it in a nice package and give it out (just for my customers, i want give anything back to the comunity).... sounds like money ... the moon analogy??? ... damn, i just got angry and forgot about it, but you get the point.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
How are you a "customer" if you didn't pay? How is Red Hat losing money if people that don't pay them continue not to pay them?
Right, and it's only tracking existing RHEL customers, which is probably a very tiny group compared to the number of companies who have purchased ongoing RHN/Up2Date support for their Red Hat 7.x - 9.x systems.
I suspect that more like 75% of their existing Red Hat Linux customers are looking for a new distro. I have 200 up2date licenses myself, and my employers are looking at a huge upgrade nightmare. We are already managing binary imcompatibilities in our existing upgrade process, as well as things like incompatible back-end databases in Red Hat's OpenLDAP releases. We still have two systems on Red Hat 6.2, because we weren't finished the upgrade to 7.3 when Red Hat rapid-fired the abortive RH8 and soon-to-die RH9 out the door.
Red Hat claims that these actions are a response to customers desiring more stability in the release and support cycles. But their actions in regards to Red Hat Linux have been tremendously disruptive and destabilising to their large customers who have been paying to run Red Hat Linux.
There are lots of us out here. Many of us will not go to RHEL because we're afraid RH is torpedoing their own business model by alienating their previously loyal customers.
An AC on target, will wonders never cease.
Redhat has yet to answer the SOHO masses who are wailing "What about us?". These folks certainly can't afford $1000 per cpu, yet they are willing to pay something for services they perceive as valuable.
I'm a perfect example. I have 10+ servers, I don't need hand holding, I have never called Redhat support, but I certainly do appreciate security updates. Am I going to pay $1000 per machine for that? No way!! What's my option, Redhat?
*sound of crickets*
Redhat, whose history of comminication is poor at best, seems to think doing all the work, making a plan and then making a press release of the latest licensing options is enough.
NOTE TO REDHAT: STOP IGNORING FOLKS. TAKE A PAGE FROM GENTOO AND ANSWER THE DAMN QUESTIONS.
Anything is possible given time and money.
We have over 100 RHN servers that we maintain. We have been building RH processes and customising our own business distro for 5 years now. Once April rolls round bad news. So we have no choice but to either upgrade(rebuild) to enterprise and fork out $1700NZ per server or change to a different distro. Giving only 4-5 months notice sucked. Downtime, risk and labour costs to our customers for no additional return. Customers and ourselves are not very happy with RH. If they let RH9 run its normal support life cycle and then did this it would have given us a reasonable period to change everyone over. Just waiting for our SUSE download to finish. Hope they don't get greedy as well.