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.)
Is this the result of corporations really beleiving in the quality of the product, and its usefullness in their corporation?
Or have corporations just not yet had the chance to fully investigate the red hat alternatives since the desktop line went kaput.
We have been QA'ing a new default burn for desktops for the past 6-8mnths, in the meantime, we keep purchasing what we had before.
If there is going to be a dip because of the drop of the desktop line I wouldn't expect it untill at least next quarter
paul reinheimer
After months of therapy, I finally came to terms with the fact that I'm upset because RHN is gone. They locked my entitlements and prefs, and so now I can't manage the scores of machines I have deployed. I'm reasonably okay with the whole Enterprise-Fedora concept where there is one supported enterprise product and one free personal edition, but I just feel kinda worried about when my RHN subscription goes away for good and another buffer overflow exploit comes around.
Isn't a yearly subscription the same thing Micro$oft considered for their software model, and people brought their pitchforks and torches?
What do you think Fedora is?
It's not like RedHat just handed them a site and told them to get on with it. RedHat employees are very actively involved with the whole thing, and are contributing tons of code.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
For instance will all the Oracle optimization still be in Fedora?
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.
This doesn't say jack about conversion rate from 6.x-9.x Red Hat to the Enterprise product though.
I am interested in that. You would assume that people who bought the enterprise product would pay for their support - otherwise why buy it?
Sounds like the bleeding obvious to me. They lowball an expectation and their analysis is proved flawed. This is news? Must be a slow day.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The report doesn't suggest overnight riches for Redhat. It doesn't say anything about their financial position either. What it does say is that Redhat wants a new call center. This is most likely going to coast a fair bit so don't expect them to spend more time on fedora from now on (although from what I understood they are still actively involved with that as is).
Sig? What's this sig thing I hear people talking about?
That is a pretty blatant example of doublethink propaganda. Red Had drops support and release for RHx, and we see an article singing their praises on how great a job they're dowing throwing Fedora over the fence because they can claim some customer retention on the Enterprise front.
No it's not a great job, the reasonably priced support option is gone, and there's nothing they offer between outlandishly expensive enterprise support and free no support. For an Operating system they mostly package, not author, they are doing a really bad job at providing affordable support options or stable releases that the ordinary user might want (like the vast majority of Linux users using RHx who were abandoned). Of course they have explicitly said they're not interested in that business, (probably abandoned to protect margins in the Enterprise business). Why anyone would pretend this is all rosy and RH are doing a great job after leaving such a gaping wound on the Linux desktop is beyond me.
(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
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.
Red Hat Professional Workstation is $99
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
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.
This is about the *existing* RHEL users keeping the product...
I suspect a fair few RH9 people (like me) are now evaluating their options. There are several distributions out there that the non-enterprise peeps can take a stab at before they decide to fork out for the RHEL edition.
There are a couple of advantages that RH offer - they are the de-facto standard, so if you use qualified software from a supplier, chances are it'll be qualified on RH, not debian...
They also offer support, and I've had to use it when installing on troublesome motherboards, but once something is installed, I'm reasonably ok on my own, so this isn't such a big deal for me...
The business imperatives to stay with RH are significantly less than with MS, so I would say 90% is a good figure, despite MS probably being able to claim higher than that. There is more choice on the linux OS, that's all there is to it...
Random thoughts...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
If they are doing so well as the report suggests, maybe they can dedicate some more time to developing the free (money) ones as well, to entice new people to Red Hat who might be buying the enterprise additions.
Hint: RedHat is a corporation. Corporations like to make money. They've tried the "Free as in $0 to entice people to pay for Linux" route for years now. They're scaling that back significantly, and putting more effort in the purchase-only version.
Do you think it was working well for them, and they decided that it would be a good move to become less profitable? I mean, I know that you know a lot more about the economics of free software than Red Hat does....maybe you should send them an email explaining the obvious.
these goddamn hippies, can`t even speak gollumish.
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
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!
People tired of having to go through the process of creating RHN demo accounts for EACH machine just so they can install the security patches to vulnerabilities coming out, apparently, several times a week, as of late.
Hell, even Microsoft doesn't force you to go through a lengthly (or much of any, besides activation) registration in order to use Windows Update. It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late.
Now that Red Hat is becoming more popular, I see these problems only getting worse.
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.
think about it: RH claims 90% of their customers are loyal because they are keeping their subscriptions. the important question is:
How many customers of RH did actually pay for a subscription before the change? And from those how did not pay (but were loyal Rh customers), how many are sticking with it?
The ones who paid before the kaboom do not care in spending bick bucks. The users who supported redhat but could not afford such a pricey OS definitely will not stick with it -- as it is the case in Academia! If RH were smart, they would offer site licenses for academia and big clusters.
I am willing to be my officemate (he is a good catch) that from the RH users who did NOT pay in the first place, 90% will switch to another OS if RH does not offer something "in-between". How about also releasing this information, RH?
(As one always learns in statistics: the outcome depends on HOW you present the data, and not what it actually looks like...)
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?
your question makes sense and does not. if i use redhat and am happy, then i will recommend it to others, potential paying customers. if i am not happy, i will make bad publicity for them. it is a matter of the definition of "customer", but if you provide me with a service, regardless if i pay for it or not, i am your customer.
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.
It really pisses me off that when people complain about the disappearance of Redhat Linux (consumer version), everyone assumes that they wanted a freeby?
I ALWAYS paid for RH linux, because it was stable and did what I wanted, and had supported updates.
Fedora does not meet this requirement, and I don't need a corporate version.
I want to keep paying and getting RH linux.
But Redhat screwed me. Why should I do business with some that treats me that way?
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.
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.
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.
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..."