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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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
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?
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.