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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.)
For instance will all the Oracle optimization still be in Fedora?
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.
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.
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?
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.