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Dell Calls For Red Hat To Lower Prices
VaultX points to an article on CNET (linked below), writing "According to Dell, Red Hat needs to lower pricing. 'We believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, for the small and medium-sized business market, was out of the price range of these customers.' With Dell's strong presence in the Linux server market, Red Hat may want to listen."
Time Warp? WTF?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
'We believe the Ferrari F430 Spider, for the small and medium-sized automotive market, was out of the price range of Mr. Coward.' With Coward's strong presence in the local Ferrari dealership, Ferrari SpA may want to listen.
The can always get this 'free' linux beer I have been hearing about and switch to an alcohol business with 100% profit.
The prices are a little bit on the high side, but you are buying support not the software for the most part and they are certainly not higher that Windows Server 2003 which they are setup to compete with.
RHS 3 is a pretty solid server IMHO, after using it for a few months on a web server and finding it far superior and simpler to manage than the Solaris box the company has its other website on.
Was that some kind of sarcastic editorial about Dell's "strong presence?" You can, on a good day, for a high premium, *maybe* get a Dell rep to sell you a server with Linux in addition to Windows.
Yeah, the college I worked at balked at the prices too, until I told them about the $50 .edu price (workstation is $25) ... Couldn't find anything on their website, but a email to the sales department took care of it.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Couldn't/Shouldn't Dell look into other Linux server packages? After all, that is the nature of the free market. If Dell drags Red Hat and, say, Turbolinux, or god forbid... SCO... into the fray, that would make the bottom line for companies looking to switch to Linux even more appealing.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I imagine it'll happen. I have a feeling RH gets most of their sales from Dell, it's the ole'Walmart syndrome, where they either lower their prices, and go out of business, or go out of business because they lose their main client.
Damned big companies.
here's one of them. It's a personal account of working inside of the "dell beast." Written by the site maintainer of www.amdzone.com it was written only a few days ago. Most of the thoughts reflect my sentiment and experience with dell..
here it is
John Allen Mohammed
Way too arrogant of a company for what they do... they are losing OEM support and customers who don't feel like being extorted.
As faras IBM is concerned, Suse is the only linux. And Novell is willing to discount things very heavily.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Users and tech journalists have been pointing this out for the last couple of years. If RH drops their prices they'll look even MORE like M$. Okay, the analogy breaks down in the general sense but M$ did drop prices in other countries when they feared losing market share.
It still looks bad for ANY linux distro to have high pricing. If Linux is evet to get a decent foothold in any market, it has to appear to have both a low TCO and a low initial purchase price. Managers do not look at what it can do, just what it costs. The take up, and major market share has no bearing on stability or operability, we all know that already.
They could always add support for something like Debian, which is known for its outstanding stability in spite of its lack of big commercial backing. Dell could then offer graduated support options, including, no support. I'm sure lots of businesses that would jump at the opportunity to get a server with Linux preinstalled (that way they are sure all hardware is working and configured out of the box) even if they have no need of a full support package.
Isn't RedHat Server cheaper than Windows 2003 Server? And RHS is supposed to compete with Win2k3.
RedHat ES -- $349.99
RedHat WS -- $179.99
Win2k3 -- At least $400 from what I can pick up.
BTW, if Dell doesn't like RedHat, why don't they use something else? People vote with their dollars.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
If It's too expensive why is Red Hat doubling their sales every year/quarter, and alternitives like SuSE show little to flat growth?
Yes, It's expensive for me or a 5 worker business, but It is still selling. Isn't it up to Red Hat as to what consumer base they want to sell to?
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Dell is, and has always been, a very conservative company. Look how long they have stayed with Intel even though AMD has had a superior price/performance ratio for years now.
With Novell having it's own plans for SUSE I don't think that would be an option. I don't see them switching to an out of country distro like Mandrake or Turbo. And after that your into "hacker" distros like Slack or Gentoo which is basically out of the question.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
CentOS is basically just totally free and open version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, and it's really nice. Although there's no one to call if someone goes wrong, it basically offers everything feature-wise that RedHat does. check it out here.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Seriously, Linux is GPLed free software!
Paying 3 digit sums per license for free software boggles the mind. I know, I know, you get support. Well, most of us don't need no freakin support contract. Google is our tech support specialist.
Le français vous intéresse?
Ultimately pay the price or start supporting another distro. IMO it seems UserLinux could be a player in a few years if someone dumped some cash into it. It's not like Microsoft, there are other choices.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
If Dell really wanted a price adjustment from RedHat they would engage them in confidential talks. This sounds more like a prison movie, you know, the one where Dell tells RH to bend over and pick up the soap.
As one earlier poster suggested, Dell has become the WalMart of computer vendors. And in my opinion, that is not a good thing.
Isn't that what companies do with Microsoft when MS prices are too high? ;)
Agile Artisans
Will the RedHat drop - I mean, is their business plan flawed?
You want the source? You can't handle the source!
Free Mac Mini
I completely agree with Dell's views on RHEL's overpricing. I bought a Dell PowerEdge server for a small business back in August but Red Hat's Enterprise Linux was overpriced and we felt uncomfortable buying a subscription at the rates we were offered from Dell. Instead I recommend we choose Suse's offereing which was a far more viable option for the company. I can see why Dell went for Novell a month or two back. Let's not beat about the bush though, it could be construed that Dell spoke to Novell so they are now in a better bargainig position with Red Hat.
CentOS is basically just a totally free and open version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, and it's really nice. Although there's no one to call if someone goes wrong, it basically offers everything feature-wise that RedHat does. check it out here.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
they could if they gave you an option of no os and installed your own linux youself. or even bsd
Just look at this $300 rock bottom server from Dell. Three years of Linux costs $800, over twice the cost of the box! I can buy Windows XP Home and run Apache on it for half that cost, and I get free security updates for life. Basically, Linux needs to compete on the bottom line. The problem is probably too many high paid developers.
Does this mean RH will be outsourcing their support to India as well?
But otherwise their statement is just so much empty posturing, not unlike how Microsoft says that hardware should be free (as in free beer).
Maybe they just want RedHat to charge an easy per-unit price. Doesn't RedHat charge companies primarily for support subscriptions, based on the number of incidents? I know Microsoft charges up front by the number of processors that its operating system is running on, in addition to the support incidents.
Dell likes to sell users the whole enchilada: hardware, software, and support, as one tightly integrated package, which works better with the MS model from a pricing perspective. If they were reselling the support pacakge, they would have to track companies more closely, which makes sales a bitch.
And RedHat is kind of pricy. However, if I were firing ideas to The Boss, I'd probably mention RedHat or Solaris, the latter only because my employer's server guys have a Sun fetish.
The price is too high, that is why some of us have been using White Box Linux for some time. It's 100% binarily compatible with RH, and it works.
From the above linked website "This product is derived from the Free/Open Source Software made available by Red Hat, Inc but IS NOT produced, maintained or supported by Red Hat. Specifically, this product is forked from the source code for Red Hat's _Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3_ product under the terms and conditions of it's EULA."
So far - and 10's of servers later - no complaints, works like a charm. Since it works so well. Why pay? For their support? Lets be honest, we generally find the bugs before RH does, and our staff can handle anything - including figuring out the undocumented changes that RH makes to their own products (example: static routes anyone?).
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
RHEL was definitely far out of our price range, especially since we have absolutely no use for the support that we would be paying for. We ended up going with CentOS on our fourteen Dell servers that run everything for somethingawful.com.
CentOS is a community-supported build of the RHEL source RPMS. They closely follow RedHat errata and release updated packages shortly after the official RedHat packages appear. We've used it for over six months now and it's been great. It's perfectly stable, and it's easy to rollout updates via a local yum repository that rsyncs off the CentOS mirrors.
Try CentOS or WhiteBox!!!
CentOS
http://www.caosity.org/
WhiteBox Linux
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/
I think its understood that RHEL is a premium distro with service behind the name...Red Hat will change its pricing when the market fails to respond to it product and services. Maybe Novell can bring the necessary competition to bear...or maybe they will try to support the same high price points and margins.
If Dell is successful, then any one 'entity' should be able to demand that X should be cheaper.
If we band together, we can demand the following to lower in price (in no particular order):
4GB USB Flash Drives
Any Adobe Product
3CCD Video cameras
Plasma TVs
Viper RT-10s
Diamond Rings
The Stupid Housing Market in LA
That would help us (or me) a bit. Thanks!
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
you're right about the cheapest issues, no os, rhel, then windows.
but um, dell is calling for rhel to lower its support costs?
does microsoft even provide comprehensive support?
(sue me im a naieve linux user)
but i believe windows' prices to be alebit inflated too?
but um, why isn't dell calling for lower prices on windows servers? as if the world isn't round.. sheesh!
--kingpunk
The OpenSSH developers won't support Redhat users, because of their messing around with the distribution tarball and ongoing refusal to discuss the issue in public.
Why would RedHat do this? Volume discounts to one customer make sense because the support loads will be much smaller. But with 5000 different customers, RedHat would be fucked.
What RedHat really needs to do is somehow differeniate between "Enterprise" and small business customers. Problem is that it's hard to do with open source software because it's simply not designed for hardcoded limits.
someone look up a term called restraint of market
I'm sorry, but Dell sucks. Their "award winning support" is gone, which I find funny it won awards anyway. Their pricing is so friggin over-board it's not even funny. I can actually outprice damn near every server they have and you won't have to worry about it failing on you (near as much since nothing is 100%) like they do since I actually test everything before it goes out.
If Dell was actually concerned about the pricing for small and medium businesses, they might, just MIGHT consider using something other than RedHat. Since there are better distros out there anyway. But then what can you expect from a company that's so far up MS's bum that you can barely see a toe and is completely unfamiliar with linux to the point that they can barely install it, let alone configure it.
Whatever. Buying a Dell server with Linux was easy for me. I can even transfer the Redhat Network license/updates and the server's warranty online to a customer. And I did NOT buy Windows.
This guy is way out there
It's called what the market will bear. Red Hat sets their prices based on their best guess about the value of their product in relation to how many people are willing to buy it at any given price point. If they're charging too much ... hey, this isn't Windows, people -- there's competition in the Linux marketplace, and someone else will step in to fill what Dell perceives to be an unfilled market for a "value" enterprise Linux.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
With Coward's strong presence in the local Ferrari dealership
So that's where that smell is coming from!
Duh.
I run a small hosting company (about 100 servers) and we're currently running alot of RedHat 9. We've been testing Fedora core 3, RH EL, Solaris 10, Suse 9.1, Gentoo, CentOS, you name it.
So far Fedora is winning out, with maybe Solaris for some applications where we need to run commercial software (oracle 10g). RH EL is way too expensive, particularly in SMP versions, it's not just Windows 2K3 they're competing with and they need to address that somehow.
Red Hat is overpriced IMO, especially the enterprise edition. If they really want to compete, they should be less than Windows Server.
If Dell isn't happy with RedHat's value, they're welcome to support Gentoo and Debian instead.
My bet is that RedHat does provide decent value for the dollar, so Dell'll stick with them.
I for one am embarrased the Red Hat charges so much and is seen as a leading Linux Solution by naive onlookers.
After my department (at a Canadian university) decided that it couldn't afford the .edu prices, I investigated the clones, and settled on White Box Linux - and we're now using it on about 30 Dell Poweredge servers with no problems to speak of. We're very happy with it. I hear good things about the other clones, too.
I'm all for paying for RHEL, mind - they do great work, and give a lot back to the community... but the price did turn us away.
No sig for you.
You aren't paying for the product when you buy redhat...you are paying for theh support.
redhat offers more support with their product than microsoft does with any of their products.
I remember a time when redhat was selling their 50 dollar distro and nothing else...it came with phone support, and you know what? I used it once or twice and they actually helped me resolve the problems I was having.
Does xp or windows 2000 or any other operating system that micro$soft sells come with technical support via the phone? NOPE!
This is a HUGE opportunity for Sun. They could drop Solaris 10 for x86 in there, and offer Dell two interesting pricing options: free and supported. The free option hits an impossibly low price point while getting Solaris 10 on the street (displacing Red Hat), and the supported option would allow Dell to white-label the license so that they could sell a single vendor corporate contract. Um, wait, Sun won't move on this in time, so never mind.
Dell Calls For Red Hat To Lower Prices
Think about that headline for a second.. Linux has really hit the bigtime. A pure play OSS company with the power of Sun, IBM, DELL, HP? I knew there was a movement, but Red Hat wedging its way in amung the big boys is quite the accomplishment. Kudos you guys.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
. . . by issuing a call for Dell to lower hardware prices.
...about small and medium sized business. Or so it appears to me. I get the impression that they want to play with the big boys, who WILL pay the premium for RHEL 3.
For other businesses, there are always the "RHEL rebuild" projects, like Centos, WhiteBox Linux, Tao, X/OS, etc. And at some point, if they haven't already, some enterprising company will step in and offered fee-based support for one of these distros (or will roll their own rebuild distro ), and take that SMB business that RH is passing up.
For everybody else (well, everybody who is "Red Hat centric" ) there's Fedora.
So it all works out, really. RH is making decent money, apparently, by focusing on big business. SMB can take advantage of the fact that RHEL is Free software and use a rebuild distro, and hobbyists and those who want to be on the cutting edge use Fedora. There's something for everybody.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
My problems have been mainly involved with patching systems and having that break systems completely. We patched a few systems with an autofs patch on RHEL 3.0 and found that when they decided to fix some bugs, they just upgraded from 3.x of autofs to 4.x. This caused automount maps to stop timing out and any changes we made to the NIS maps wouldn't get fixed until autofs gets restarted. Here is the bugzilla This problem has existed for weeks and I don't even have an ETA on the resolution.
In the end, the service they provide for their cost isn't worth it. If I was choosing an server OS, I would go elsewhere. The only thing they bring to the table for us is Oracle support.
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
If they got a guaranteed sale of 5000 units, it probably would be worthwhile for them to offer a fairly steep discount.
Did that include the price of renewing the RHEL support contract for the next five years? You do realize, of course, that you can't just buy it once and be done with it; you have to pay that $350-$1500 every single year that you use the operating system. Nor do you have the option of dropping the contract -- once you buy in, you're legally hooked for life.
Kudos for coming up with a subject line that uses up every bit of space available to you!
Dell is very careful to establish close relationships with their suppliers. This helps them control costs. Few things inflate costs more quickly than expanding the matrix of available OS offerings. Every new OS has to be completely tested for compatibility. The testing and development costs go crazy.
The more you scare people, the more they will pay you
Slightly offtopic, but if RHEL isn't an option what are the major differences between CentOS and Whitebox? They both seem to be clones of the same thing.
disclaimer 1: i used to work for Red Hat
disclaimer 2: I have done contract work for Dell
Dell always will badger vendors to shave prices wherever/whenever/however possible. Every dollar they can save somewhere equals X% increase in marketshare or volume for them. Dell is a ruthless selling machine.
Up until recently, Dell really didn't care so much about Linux for the SMB market, only in the way that their customers wanted it (and it gave them an option). I would imagine that:
1. Dell has done the math, realized that SuSE isn't penetrating the way they had hoped
2. without serious competition (which was supposed to exert price pressure on RH) Dell has resorted to publicly whining about RH prices
3. This public whining is supposed to snowball and "force" RH into reducing prices.
The problem is that the SMB market is actually more resource-intense in terms of support. As such, Red Hat has never really liked it (compared to Enterprise), but Dell's volume volume volume absoultely depends on it.
If Dell agrees to shoulder more of the support burden, I would imagine they could get very good deals with RH.
davejenkins.com |
...it must mean that it's possible to provide their product (support, not software) for a lower price. So, if Dell thinks it can be done cheaper, why don't they try doing it themselves?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
For the most part Dell can't dictate Server OSes, the customer choses which one they want from a dropdown or just gets it bare. (Dell also must ship way more than 5K units of RedHat a year.)
during the support period? I ask because Red Hat does.
Per-incident support sucks, as you wonder about whether you should keep tawling google and your LUG vs burn a support incident on something which could be trivial.
Did that include the price of renewing the RHEL support contract for the next five years? You do realize, of course, that you can't just buy it once and be done with it; you have to pay that $350-$1500 every single year that you use the operating system. Nor do you have the option of dropping the contract -- once you buy in, you're legally hooked for life.
Or you can buy it bare and install TaoLinux/WhiteBox/CentOS, which is binary compatible. This works for 99% of server installation.
Or buy with RHEL and then switch to TaoLinux/WhiteBox/CentOS via yum for updates after your subscription expires.
Either way you have options, perhaps you have the infrastructure to support your own linux servers then why pay for support. Perhaps you don't, then getting RH is a great deal.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
As has been pointed out, the fee RedHat charge is for their services. If you can forgo the services and the brand there are freely (beer/speech) available alternatives.
Whitebox Enterprise Linux 3 has taken the RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 source RPMs, removed trademarks and RedHat artwork and produced their own binary distro of those source RPMs. The resulting server is RHEL3 RPM compatible (which is useful if you are using 3rd party repositories.
WhiteBox Linux release erratta fixes following on from any that RH release. So the distro is kept up to date (using up2date or yum, or if you're like me, apt)
There are other projects with RHEL3 based distros as well.
Don't you just love the GPL?
--
WBEL3 Based Linux VPSs
Except if you don't WANT to pay you don't have to... right? You can manually patch your system -- you are paying for a SERVICE. Try manually patching Windows... oh, you can't!
For Windows XP Pro, you pay $200 for one year and get security updates forever for free.
untrue. Microsoft has precident for dropping security updates when it is convenient. Try getting the security fixes from XP in WIndows 2000. You know you can't.
I see you registered on Slashdot today, just so you could post on this topic. Nice try, Microsoftie troll...
RHEL ES has two versions, priced at $350 and $800, depending on the support level. W2K3 SBS (Small Business Server) is available at different prices from different vendors, but is typically around $500. All prices in US dollars. The prices are quite similar. If you need support for more than installation and basic configuration, Windows 2003 is actually cheaper.
If small businesses find Windows easier to setup and maintain, then it could be worthwhile. I'm not able to personally confirm this one way or the other, but various people I know who have configured both Linux and Windows 2003 as servers claim that Windows is easier to configure and tune for performance.
Perhaps Dell simply means that for the market they are selling into and the price they are charging, there is a better product available from Microsoft. It's hard to see how Red Hat could compete on price; they really aren't charging a huge amount. For businesses that can't afford a full time server administrator and don't have any Linux expertise, it is quite possible that Windows just plain is a better choice.
Going off topic, Red Hat's website has the Ghandi quote that Slashdot loves: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." A year ago, Microsoft was fighting Red Hat. Now they are laughing at Red Hat. Linux still has a chance, but this battle definitely isn't going the way that Red Hat planned.
I hate to say it, but with IBM preferring Novell and SLES, I think Red Hat has lost.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
That describes my situation six months ago exactly. Then I had a problem with up2date.
So I called RedHat for the first time in the decade I've been using it. I found out:
I challenged them that there was no indication on their website that RedHat Linux upgrades were unsupported (they always were in the past so it's not unreasonable to assume they still would be) and they conceded the point and offered to get a notice up within a week, but weren't any more helpful.
So, what kind of support are you getting for that money? It's alot like Microsoft support. Completely useless so a waste of money by definition.
It's too bad - I was 3 licenses into a 30+ server effort over multiple clients, and that's as far as I got. There's a huge base of installed RedHat Linux users they're completely ignoring. I want to help pay Alan Cox's salary, but they don't make it feasible for me.
Instead of throwing good money after bad, I ditched it and put Fedora Core 2 on. Yeah, I'm out $300 but yum will set you free. Plus firewire works perfectly in the current kernel releases.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I beleive it is time to end the "Red Hat Tax!"
Now Dell wants to act as if it is a friendly member of the Linux community and suggest what the pricing should be? Hey! Violating the GPL is not what a member of the Linux community should ever do. Doing it for over a year and a half is a clear indication that Dell doesn't give a damn about the linux community or the licensing terms they have choosen.
Bottom line: Dell has terminated the grants of the GPL by violating the license. Regards of what price Red Hat chooses, Dell has no legal rights to be redistributing the Linux kernel who's license they decided to actively (and continues to) violate.
What can you do? Redhat is in demand, and they have to look at the pofit curve and extract the most money. Do you blame em?
Everyone keeps hearing about this thing called Linux, too many companies are pushing it out there. Maybe your windows servers been crashing since NT 3.51, so you start looking. Redhat is the biggest Linux vendor with support. You want a big BIG company base behind your OS, and a software base, Redhat is it, with Suse coming in second regardless of price or quality of support or binaries or whatever.
So you go with the top Linux vendor. With Sun, IBM pSeries slowly defeated, and HP's HPUX platforms, well, I dont know anything about them... and Apple too vertical a market for your taste with all server apps in the wild against it, you'd head for none other than Redhat, after Microsoft, in OS sales.
For us, Redhat needs to be a rich successful company. Thats more important than the number of sales they make. Reason being their success attracts other vendors, and several competing vendors are much better than one vendor with the global supply of commercial Linux. Their success also puts them in a position to improve the Linux market itself, we've seen Redhat ads compete with Microsoft ads. Slackware couldnt do that. We've seen Domino, Oracle, and many other major server apps released in redhat packaging and supported as such. Debian couldnt do that.
So let Redhat get rich. Please. Beyond a threshold, Dell will purchase it. Below the threshold, Dell will purchase the next best thing and improve competition. If people need 'Redhat' Linux, let them pay for it until something better comes along.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
When are people going to realize the best support you can have is hiring someone actually qualified to do the damn job in the first place. Just for fun I like to apply for jobs and get interviews to see how the market is doing in my area. I always get the "How important is it that you make what you currently do?" line. My favorite part is when other employees interview and are so proud of their projects that are minor at best.
When you hire the best that is what you get. When you hire the cheapest that is what you get. Quality isn't free. I guess when all the software development jobs are in India/China we might start to understand there is more to being an excellent employee/partner than just understanding how to program. Or maybe not! Either way I'm on my way out of programming asap.
RHEL: Annual subscription, unlimited clients
Win2k3: Outright license purchase, CAL cost per-client.
You can't effectively compare the prices of the two without a context, such as the lifetime of the server and the number of clients that are expected to be connected to it.
ACME Company buying servers to run GNU/Linux should think about hiring a sysadmin capable of actually running the damn thing. Hopefully they hire someone competent, who doesn't give a rat's ass if it runs Redhat. Who does, except Oracle and other proprietary software fanboys, opportunists and their ilk.
People wouldn't be buying it if they could just get free copies, but Red Hat has now prevented that and thus they're making more money.
You actually can get free copies, or as near to it as makes no difference. For example, check out White Box Enterprise Linux. Totally legal, totally legit.
When companies buy RHEL, what they really want (and get) is the ability to call up Red Hat and have useful discussions.
If you think Red Hat charges too much for this, why don't you start your own business and undercut them?
Getting into a long drawn out opinion fest with Theo De Raadt seems like great fun.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Frankly, I think win2k3 and RHEL are both priced out of the SMB market. The fact that people buy them anyway probably has more to do with their lack of knowledge of the alternatives than anything else.
RH has a fairly hefty annual subscription - not too bad for US companies, but fairly punishing for many outside the US. OTOH, you can connect as many clients to it as you want.
Win2k3, on the other hand, only costs you once, but you have to pay fairly hefty fees to connect new clients to it.
In the end, while I think it does depend on what you need to do, I think BOTH are just too darn expensive.
Urr... free?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Seriously, Have anybody seen the postage stamp size ink cartridges in their all in one printers?
Nowhere on the cartridge, box, or website does it list the amount of ink you get. A quick side by side comparison of cartridges shows the HP and others provide much more ink for the same price.
In a nutshell. Kettle Pot Black... The shoe fits.
The truth shall set you free!
I have suspected for a long time that Red Hat have had aspirations about being the Microsoft of the Linux world.
There are plenty of other distributions available which are not only technologically superior, but also more open than Red Hat's offerings. I think anyone who uses a Red Hat product in future also needs to think about what they are contributing to with their money as well...This does not seem to be a company with the best of intentions.
In short, I definitely recommend a boycott of Red Hat's products. You'll be doing yourself a favour in terms of just about any other distro out there being more technically sound, and you'll be doing Linux as a whole a favour by not giving money to a commercialist who wants to take the OS in a direction which is the opposite of what most of us stand for.
On a related issue, we need to find a way to do something about Red Hat's having moved the development of several GNU projects to their own servers as well, IMHO. This is a company in urgent need of a reminder that it surely is desirable to give back rather than just take.
We were unhappy with RH pricing so we switched to Debian and never looked back. One regret though: had we known that Debian is this good, we would've done it sooner.
Dell has terminated the grants of the GPL by violating the license. Regards of what price Red Hat chooses, Dell has no legal rights to be redistributing the Linux kernel who's license they decided to actively (and continues to) violate.
So who's going to sue them over the broken license? You're not, and I'm not, because they're "doing good" to the Linux community by distributing it.
So what do ya do?
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
"Novell was able to step in and offer us that price point." WTF is up with people saying "price point" instead of just "price" all of sudden. Go back and re-read the sentence without the point. Did it mkae any less sense? Didn't think so.
Well actually you don't have to buy their support every year. RHEL is a gpl'd product so the source code for it and all updates are really available. You just have to compile them yourself.
Or you can do what alot of people do. Buy one supported copy so you can download the binary updates and install it on multiple machines.
Dell has sold clusters on the top 500 list. Those machines aren't running windows.
It's "Voilà", with an grave accent. Accute accents on any other letter than 'e' don't exist in French (unlike, say, Spanish, where it is used to indicate tonal changes).
Whilst we are (sort of) on topic, I am looking at putting Linux on a couple of workstations and a couple of servers. I am looking at cAos http://www.caosity.org/ (built from RedHat Enterprise source) and Debian Sarge http://www.debian.org/ (assuming it is released when I am ready to install).
Does anybody know of a good comparison between these two (or even RHEL vs Debian)? rather than relying on potentially missing something by looking only by myself.
Technically, that is against the license. I'm not attributing any moral or ethical status to it, it's just against the letter of the license you agree to to get those binary updates in the first place. Just downloading the source RPMs of the updates and running rpmbuild --rebuild on them should get you the exact same thing as the binary updates (if it works for their kernel packages, you can feel safe that it works for the rest of them).
350 to 1500 dollars per year, eh?
Now ask yourself, how much does a qualified full time Linux technician cost? I don't mean someone who follows the directions and installs the software -- I mean someone who is there for you, 24/7, to make sure your servers don't go down, who knows everything about the OS that's running on your computers, etc. How much would you pay to have someone like that on call, per year?
350 to 1500? I don't think so.
See, the service industry for Linux systems is in most respects exactly the same business model as medical insurance. Redhat employs some techs that know their distribution inside and out, makes sure they're aware of every little kink, and provides them on call any time your business needs them.
In the meantime, they offer you Linux, which is extremely stable and getting more and more stable every day. As many people on Slashdot point out, who needs support? 99% percent of the time, you put the machine(s) in a corner and forget about them, and they just work.
But not having support in case something goes wrong is like not having medical insurance. You may be willing to risk it for yourself, but would you risk it for your family? The businessman thinks the same way about his company's servers. Sure, in all likelyhood nothing will happen, but what if it does? If I were running this server in my basement at home, well, no biggie. But what if I need really solid uptime? Guarantees?
Insurance companies make money because most of the time, people don't get sick, but when they do, it's expensive. Insurance companies take the monthly check from the people that buy their policies and basically pocket the money as profits, keeping a margin to pay for the 5% of people that actually need the medical care.
Redhat makes money the same way. It's much, much cheaper to pay 1000 or even 10000 dollars per year for an unlimited no hassle support contract than it is to hire the support people yourself (they typically cost upwards of 80 grand per year). Because Linux is really stable, most companies will probably never call in support, so Redhat can bet that most of that money will just go straight into their pockets. When something does go wrong, they have the capital necessary to make sure that it never happens again. Typically companies that make their money this way will have a tech at your company at 3 in the morning to fix whatever the problem is, no questions asked.
That's how a support based company works.
Now Microsoft tries to make its money on the initial cost of the software, and not on support. So they offer "free" or "low cost" support contracts that without exception suck ass. You need to buy the premium support contract to get anything resembling what RH and Sun offer standard. And you also have to pay a massive initial licensing fee, usually per server or even per CPU.
You have to understand that RHEL is free (both as in beer and as in speech). All you're buying is insurance. They're going to show up and take care of it if shit hits the fan. That's how they make their money.
And really, when you compare a 24/7/365 no questions asked support contract to the cost of hiring someone on site to do the same job, as long as it costs less than 80 grand per year, you're on top.
damnit. updates
Of course but it's still done whether against the license or not.
Due to corporate policies, we are generally a Windows shop as far as the global infrastructure is concerned. If I want to setup a mail server with Windows, I am looking at purchasing Windows 2003 Enterprise version, Exchange 2003 Enterprise Version, Client access licenses for the servers, and possibly Terminal Server licenses as well. Figure the server hardware will cost around $10,000, and to get fully decked out with an Enterprise Level OS and Email system from MS will cost me around $5000. That is 50% the cost of the hardware. This doesn't even begin to address support costs.
I have switched from Dell in the server room to HP, so I am not sure what the Dell server prices are like in terms of dollars, but I do know they tend to be cheaper (at least in Asia). I recently compared a similar hardware Dell quote and an HP quote for a Korean associate and the Dell quote was 40% cheaper. So, if we say a Dell server is around $6000 and the enterprise level OS that runs on it is $359, we see that the software is priced at roughly 6% of the hardware. Even the $799 version is only 13% of the hardware price, and this is assuming the hardware is 40% cheaper than the Microsoft comparison.
Not exactly over priced in my opinion in. In fact 2 support calls to Microsoft cost this much. Once we get into the higher level offerings from Redhat then the ratio changes a little, but the point to remember here is that this includes support!
RHEL AS Server is $2499/year and includes Web and phone based comprehensive support 24 x 7 1 hour response Unlimited incidents 1 year Red Hat Network
1 hour response time costs! You have to have higher prices to even begin to offer this. For environments where you do not need 1 hour response (the best Dell offers is 4 hours -- in Japan ;) ) time from your vendor, you do not need to pay for it. With the Microsoft offering, I am paying large sums of money without any support included.
I personally run Debian at home for my mail/web server (and Gentoo when I feel like getting frustrated) but if we were ever to switch to Linux in the server room, one of the biggest deciding factors would be the quality and availability of support. Red Hat's target is certainly not the geek home user who balks at a $359 price tag and doesn't require support. It is the Corporate Enterprise market where when the server is down and the company's business is impacted people are glad to have paid for support. In that market, their prices are excellent in my opinion. If they were charging peanuts, they would not be taken seriously by the people making the business decisions for a company. Businessmen tend to understand that you can't get something for nothing, especially service.
Ok, after reading the 5th post comparing RH to Win2K3 pricing, I had to respond...
What is scary is how quick people were to post links to Microsoft pricing and RedHat pricing - either they keep them on hand for such an occasion, or they actually did a little research for their post.
But if they were going to do research for their post, don't you think they would read the freaking article?
2nd paragraph:
"Indeed, Red Hat's pricing was instrumental in Dell's decision to sign its October pact to sell Novell's SuSE Linux."
Microsoft was not mentioned at all. So, while everyone on Slashdot WANTS this to be an article about Dell being in Microsoft's pocket and part of the conspiracy to kill Linux, its really just about finding the vendor that will offer the best deal.
If you want Windows, Dell will sell you Windows. If you want Linux, Dell will sell you Linux. That has not changed.
http://www.caosity.org/projects/centos its a community rebuild of Redhat Enterprise 2/3. Many (admittedly mostly non-critical) machines at the lab I work at are being converted to CentOS machines. The rest that need support are being Suse-fied. What really needs to happen is someone to scare redhat by exposing an open source world that can survive without redhat.
On top of this, we have to pass all first and second level RH EL3 calls through Dell. It's such a pity that their engineers appear to have little grasp of the updates to technology, which I suspect is due to lack of training. It may be that Dell need to invest more money in keeping their engineers up to date supporting the software they supply with the hardware they assemble?
On another note, Red Hat haven't particularly impressed anyone with their overall support expertise either (though I've had a couple of quick and useful answers). My first three support calls were given, in order, a completely wrong answer, a succinct and correct answer, and a 6 month plus wait which trailed off to nothingness...
Too expensive? Then switch to open-source software......oh, wait
Table-ized A.I.
you forgot to say *duck*
A cheaper way to get Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to buy Red Hat Professional Workstation. It is a boxed retail version of RHEL WS 3 that comes with 30-days of tech. support and 1 year of updates through Red Hat Network.
You can go get Fedora free of charge or just download any number of other free distros.
What's the problem? With Linux, you have a choice.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
to switch to windoze...
Get your torrents...
Bad? To who? You don't understand how people at the level RedHat is playing think. If it doesn't cost a lot, it looks bad. If you're not forking over thousands for something, that means it's not serious. How can you expect to get serious support and put pressure on a vendor to pay attention to you if you payed $10 for a CD? You can't.
TCO isn't how much you pay for a distro. It's total cost. It's the number at the end, the sum of all the other little ones. That's what the cost of RHEL is... just a little number along the way.
In short, Linux is much further ahead in the commercial market because we have high-priced distros like RHEL.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Well gee whiz! There's no license included with my MS-DOS boot floppies and I don't see M$ slapping me with a six figure copyright suit for giving a boot floppy to my mother. It's only a boot disk, not the whole OS, and you can find those floppy boot images all over the web and I have yet to see M$ use a DMCA threat on any of them. Should we forget how much more restrictive the M$ EULA is compared to the GPL? It's not like they're trying to pirate XP or trying to be dickheads like The SCO Group trying to sell Linux IP licenses contrary to the GPL. If M$ doesn't care about DOS boot floppies, then why get upset about Dell serving up Linux boot floppies? Isn't Linux supposed to be about freedom?
You're right in saying that a company may wish to hire Red Hat to provide support instead of an in-house expert. But what about our case, where we already have in-house experts and thus don't want to hire Red Hat to duplicate that service? We have been running various versions of Red Hat for over 7 years and have never thought to buy a full support contract from Red Hat because we haven't needed it. We can do it ourselves!
Dell's point is that Red Hat is losing customers by not offering a complete range of products. They obviously believe that by not having a lower-end Linux option to offer on their servers, Dell is losing business as well. So, the end result will be one of two things: either Red Hat will offer a cheaper version of Linux with basic support, or Dell will add other, cheaper options to the mix. I personally believe that Red Hat is shooting themselves in the foot, but they are free to do so -- I just won't be the one footing the bill for it.
... since they started offering SuSE about 1 month ago.
...
But of course, if you had RTFA, you would have known that
Is it legal or not to borrow a copy of RH
Enterprise Server (for example) from a friend,
make a copy and use that copy on several
of my machines ? Assuming I am not using any
up2date or other RedHat-supplied service,
of cousrse.
Could you explain exactly how they are violating the GPL by providing a boot floppy with updated versions of the GPL drivers that are available in the later RH kernels (as I understand, this is your issue)?
...
Since Dell currently employs developers who work on open-source drivers for a number of SCSI cards, and has contributed a number of other pieces of software, I don't see that you should criticising their involvement in the community
So, please provide us with a more detailed description of this supposed GPL violation, or I'll write you off as a troll.
I once liked Hed Rat. That's what I get for getting all pissy and hitting the wrong button. Guess I really did make an ass of myself, but at least I can live with that! ;-)
It's "a grave accent", not "an grave accent". For the most part, "an" is only used before words beginning in a vowel. For instance "By criticizing his use of an accent, while using poor grammar, you are an illiterate asshole."
....EVERYTHING is out of price range for my poor, sorry butt, and with MY strong presence in the whole world economy, everybody may want to listen. Or maybe not as the whole world shrugs and says, "So? Pay me or fuck off!" On a more serious note, I don't care to give my money to either Dell or Red Hat. I'll decide later if I'm going to tell them to F off or not.
Dell is squeezing every penny from all their subs.
When times are tight, manufacturers go back to every supplier or partner and try to cut costs. When that doesn't work, they issue press releases claiming costs are too high, or "concern for the customers that Red Hat Linux is out of touch with prices for Windows..."
Dell has a long track record of being in bed with Intel and MS. Customer demand finally led them to reluctantly handle Linux. I'm sure MS beats them up about it all the time.
The PC market is tight. IBM has seen the future and sold out. What's Dell going to do? Sell everything? Doubtful. They'll play the game, pinch their suppliers as much as possible.
Dell is not concerned about the consumers or small business, they are concerned with staying alive. They want to increase profits for now, but stay alive in the long run.
Too much competition from overseas no-name equipment has reduced margins. Personally, I don't find buying a Dell (or any pre-built machine) a good idea.
I've built my own machines since AMD was offering the 286-20 and the 386-40 CPUs were cutting edge alternatives to Intel's 386SX-16.
Personally, I think the manufacturers need to sell solid machines without bloatware, nagware, etc. They need to go back to putting a Windows CD in the package. I can't stand the "restore" CDs. Who wants all those music downloading and ISP services put back on their machine? It's sick. I routinely help people with their machines, and it's such a waste.
-- No sig for you!
Probably a bit late to comment on this post, but lets all wake up and think about the question at hand.
Do you *really* think that DELL buys Red Hat Enterprise Linux at retail prices ! Neh ! It isnt so. Dell are supposed to provide the support contract when you buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
All that Red Hat are supposed to do is provide the updates.
Dell being the vendor is just using this to push negative feedback at Red Hat, to make them "appear" to drop their Prices for DELL.
Dell appears to be "spanking Red Hat for the little guy", making them feel better about a "Price concious DELL", but meanwhile I'd bet that Red Hat does not stipulate a specific price markup.
I didn't know that Dell was getting in on the FUD market these days ?
Several broken Dell units at former job. All of them under warranty. Always had on-site repairs done within 24 hours of the dispatch.
Granted, I had to spend an average of 3 hours on the phone with them before they'd do the dispatch, but after that was done and it was determined to be hardware, things went ok.
I own a small business, and RedHat's price increase has certainly reduced our volume with Dell. The Dell servers with RedHat preinstalled used to make a very nice package for us. At one time these were the only servers we bought-- I was very happy to pay the small premium over commodity servers to receive very nice boxes with RedHat preinstalled that were only a few hours away from being ready to go into the data center.
We have not purchased a single new Dell server since the RedHat price increase. Now that we manually install Debian on new machines, buying a Dell machine with no operating system preinstalled makes it much closer to the commodity rack mounted servers, just more expensive. The fancy Dell BIOS that we all adore, with the on board remote control computer (DRAC and ERA) is too difficult to get working from within Debian, and the amazing support contracts Dell's servers come with are almost useless if we are using an unsupported operating system.
Consumer Groups say:
'We believe Microsoft Windows, for the small and medium-sized business market, was out of the price range of these customers.' With the customers strong presence in the Windows Desktop server market, Microsoft may want to listen."
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
An example of why paid support gets you nowhere is the current disastrous RHEL 3 kernel for anyone who has an Adaptec hardware RAID controller that uses the aacraid driver - RHEL 3 will actually crash on an "insmod aacraid" during boot most of the time ! The Bugzilla entry shows that a fix was posted in mid-September, the bug was marked Priority: High, Severity: High and yet the latest RHEL3 kernel that was released on 2nd December did not roll in this crucial fix.
I phoned up Red Hat Support and the guy really didn't offer anything "extra" above what Bugzilla did (in fact, the workarounds are all mentioned in the Bugzilla bug listing) and even suggested I ran a beta kernel on a production server, which I politely declined. With Bugzilla open to the public, I really cannot see the reason anyone would pay for phone support !
The prices are a little bit on the high side
but you are buying support not the software for the most part and they are certainly not higher that Windows Server 2003 which they are setup to compete with.
As if *nix shops wanted to switch to Windows
We have even more choices now with a free open source Solaris 10 for AMD64 and x86. Solaris 10 costs nothing and is typically faster than Red Hat. Linux is still superior as a desktop OS than Solaris IMHO, but lacks some of Solaris' features.
RHS 3 is a pretty solid server IMHO, after using it for a few months on a web server and finding it far superior and simpler to manage than the Solaris box the company has its other website on.
Nobody really doubts the stability of RHS, but as far as "far superior" goes you have to be smoking something, or perhaps you are only using Solaris 9. It's going to be tough for Red Hat to sell over Free (as in speech and beer) Solaris 10 which offers:
-Military grade security
-128bit zFileSystem
-Solaris 10 Containers (AKA N1 Grid Containers) which are perfect for hosting multiple systems on the same box.
-Fastest OS for AMD64, x86 and SPARC.
-DTrace
-Free (as in beer AND speech)
-non endian feature removes performance penalty of heterogenous systems communicating. Freely mix AMD64, SPARC and x86 (32-bit).
If the sales figures are anything to go buy I think we are going to be seeing more and more "Soleron" (Solaris + Opteron) servers in the datacenter.
Word is that Sun is also working on 8-way Opeteron servers. Shame on Intel for trying to push 32-bit Xeon and 64-bit Itanic.
All this while I am laughing my head off at a Microsoft "get the lies" campaign advert.
Has a better price for the small and medium-sized business market?
Do this market need support? I mean, windows has a better price because piracy... but with a full lack of support (obviusly).
LOL so when well Dell call for Microsoft to lower their costs. Phttt.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Why is everyone so RedHat this, Fedora Core that? It beats me, the only distro worse than RH/FC is Gentoo as you only need one package tool command, so that even the biggest of n00b can this or that.
Dell should not try and make people think that they can migrate from Windows to Linux just by using RH. They should make it clear that Linux is more than just , why not let the user get their distro of choice on cdr instead of RH preinstall junk? This benefits Dell in that they do not have to support the end product software.
Why UNIX?
Please post what experience you have with RHEL and dealing with their support. Your paying them for support, and that is about it. I use RHEL 3.0 and have used their 3.90 beta (cough Fedora Core 3). I find that when you find a bug, it takes an unacceptable amount of time to get it fixed. This is compared to mainly Solaris and other proprietary Unix solutions. I have been waiting for a kernel bug (caused by one of their patches) to be fixed for two months. I also find that their errata causes more harm than good. I have a poorly written comment about their autofs packages below. They break shit. The kernel bug above was a patch that they added in an errata kernel. Everyone else is screaming about how stable it is, has anyone had any bad experiences like mine?
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
I have worked IT for a big government contractor (think Boeing/Ratheon size) for the past 3 years. Every time I call technical support they bend over backwards to make sure that I am happy with the service. It's almost annoying how much they suck up.
For example, our Dell support contract is the "Gold Level", and they will send someone out to the site if need be (to a small town in rural NC even). Same deal with our Cisco contract.
I never got that kind of treatment when I worked for a small ISP here.
Mr. Dell, you lower your prices... many more linux(es) might come to you.
Did he wear a hat with a little propeller on top which spun faster every time he touched the anti-static mat?
I knew I wasn't the only admin to switch to Debian after the RHL debacle! Debian has great (automated) updates is very stable and is entirely free. It has everything that RHEL has except the price tag and fake support.
Expensive! don't make me laugh. Compared to most of the other support contracts it is still cheap.
And the price depends on what you want/need, comming as cheap as $350. And you know what, Linux wasn't even considered (at least at my current job) until they suddenly came up with this 'expensive' support plan. Guess what, companies just want to pay for this crap support.
For the smaller companies out there, linux is still the cheapest choice. plenty of distro's to pick from, which _are_ supported by the towns local IT support shop.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
So Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is too expensive ..... boo hoo. Red Hat are not the only people to supply a Linux distribution, and Dell are free to go elsewhere. The Linux kernel is GPL, and almost all of the userland stuff is BSD or GPL. It's not as though it's difficult to put together a Linux distribution, FCOL!
..... and if they release the drivers open source, they need not worry about users choosing other distros later on {for example, in my workplace, we use Debian on servers and Mandrake on desktops}.
A business the size of Dell ought to be able easily to afford to create their own custom Linux distribution, with drivers for all their hardware
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Perhaps they can offer enterprise alternatives like Novell SuSE.
Or better yet, just throw a Knoppix CD in the box. This will save tons of time installing an OS image that needs to be (expensively) licenced just to test the hardware.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Hell.. Redhat and dell as a combination is a nightmare often having massive file system issues with the adaptec perc based raid cards. Raid cards reporting as being 32bit when the card is shown as 64bit in everything except redhat. Kick it with SuSe 64bit with an lspci -vvv I personally am not a big fan of redhat. But Redhat and dell together is the worst problem ive ever faced as a system administrator. And its not just a one off we have probably 200 servers from dell running linux that are all crap. thankfully we are replacing the dells with HP servers based on operton. So far no problems :) So far no redhat.. (thanks suse).
In summary.. redhat + dell = bad news
dell advising anyone on anything = rubbish
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
Or at least HP and others provide much more packaging.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
To continue your example... the Anonymous Coward can now buy a Jaguar XJR-15, Viper SRT/10,Lamborghini Diablo and all other top sports cars at 1/4 the price of a Ferrari F430. Not to mention that you CAN'T BUY THE FERRARI, you can only LEASE IT. With all other car companies you can buy the car.
:-) I personally love Ferrari.
So in this case the dealerships are saying that Ferrari needs to lower it's prices to be competitive. Ferrari could ignor its' dealerships and see how it goes, or they could listen.
RedHat is a fool to belive their competition is Sun, and as such they charge what they do. Their real focus should be on Windows servers, but their upper management has become greedy and stupid.
Now the other issue is the HUGE price differences that have occured in the last three years.
3 years ago. RedHat 7.1 was ~$60. You load it on as many machines as you wanted for no additional cost. You could also pay for support on a per server basis.
1 year ago. RedHat ES 3.x for X86-64 was $2,500 minimum a year per server. If you did not renew your license, you were NOT allowed to run the server.
Today - RedHat ES 3.x for X86-64 is $350 a year per server. Again, you must pay per server EVERY year.
So using your example. Ferrari releases the F40 for say $30,000. Then next year releases basically the same car for say $300,000/year lease. Then the next year releases if for say $60,000/year lease. All this while their management seems hell bent on taking down Leblanc (2% market of high performance sports cars), while Porche owns the vast majority of the high performance sports car world, and they don't force people to lease. So to continue this example more... Lets say Porche isn't as fast, and can't brake quite as good.... but they are working on it, and have enormous resources, while Ferrari has about 1/50th the resources as Porche.
NOTE: The car percentages are just examples, not real world
I for one would love to see Dell start pushing SuSe more, or ANY OTHER DISTRO.
My last complaint is this.
RedHat does not do the following:
1. Code a majority of Apache.
2. Code a majority of the Kernel
3. Code a majority of KDE or GNOME
4. Code a majority of TCP/IP stack
5. Code a majority of FTP/DNS/SAMBA servers
6. Code a majority of SSH
7. Code a JVM for Linux.
They just take what other people do, build a good installer, and make sure that everything works well together and make a good update program. Granted that is some significant work, but it doesn't compare at all to doing all that development in house. So why do they charge so much?
The good news is that there is competition out there, and this will balance itself out. I believe it was SuSe alone that forced RedHat to lower it's X86-64 prices.
I believe that RedHat should release a version of their product without support that you own, not lease for $350. That would get you one year of updates and can be loaded on as many machines as you want, however to get updates on those other machines would cost you $75/year per machine.
Again you would OWN the product, not lease it.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
The black cart I use holds 42 mL of ink. That volume is larger than the entire Dell cart for the same price. The Dell cart can't hold that much ink. As a bonus, the HP cart is easy to refill and make work. No such luck with the Dell.
Nice try at trolling. I do realise the HP color cart comes in two varieties, both the same physical size. One is only half full. They are 19 mL and 38 mL. Dell is not telling how much theirs holds. I doubt it's possible to fit 19 mL of colored ink in their tiny cart. Even though the cart is only a quarter the size of the HP half full cart, they want the same price for it + shipping and handeling. With the HP cart, I don't have the add on S & H charge.
We never intend to replace the original carts in the Dell. It has run out of black. The wife uses the scanner to send faxes. To save space, I'm replacing it with a flat bed scanner. She can print to the networked printer instead.
Just for grins. See if you can find anyone with a Dell printer. See if you can find out how much ink is in the cart... Now hold the cart next to an HP cart. That's where you get to grin. Someone else gets to buy the Del carts.
The truth shall set you free!
To my brother poster: Gentoo on the server? If you were my employee I'd have you fired. And no, I don't want to hear about building then distributing binary packages.
If you are going to listen to developers why don't you follow through? Developers have a tendancy to recommend you build from source then you know what you are building, and it allows for customization. Firing someone because they have a different opinion, why not have them stoned in public too?
Perhaps the article might appropriately be titled, "Dell Walmarts Red Hat on Pricing".
The purpose of enterprise support is to help assure the stuff stays up, and when it goes down, gets back up ASAP. It's about as close to 100% uptime with as few hassles as possible.
At least, that's what we pay for.
I work for a high tech startup. We have a compute farm with over 150 systems, 50 or so desktop workstations, and a dozen or so infrastructure systems, all running Linux. Right now these are all on RH8. Sooner or later, we'll probably have to switch to RHEL because that's what a lot of the software we use is migrating to.
But that's a whole lotta beans to suddenly pony up. I haven't checked in a few months, but when I did ask RH for pricing, I think we got a 25% discount for that many systems. That's still a lot of beans.
So more than likely, when it comes time to upgrade, we'll buy one each of ES and WS (and possibly AS, we'll see). And install Scientific Linux https://www.scientificlinux.org/ on all the rest.
I want to support RH, who (IMO) has done a great deal both to advance the public awareness of Linux and to improve Linux. But they're asking for absurd amounts of money. There's no way it's going to cost them anywhere near 200X (less 25%) the cost of supporting one system to support 200 systems here. There's a very short list (4) of people here who would contact them, and they wouldn't be contacted until we'd done everything possible. There have been only 3 times in the past two years we would have contacted them had we had support in place. They could charge somewhere between $10 and $50 for each additional system, and we would consider it. But right now they'd be charging us more than the hardware is worth.
They really need to rethink their pricing, especially for sites with more than a very few systems.
Red Hat sucks. It is the Microsoft of linuxes.
and fix those flaky onboard video chipsets on the G270 Optiplex while you're at it
There are always alternatives like Pie Box Enterprise Linux for those that require the longevity of the RHEL product line without the support.
Crap, I just bought 2 copies of RH Enterprise from Dell last week! This is twice they are trying to screw me. I bought 2 servers from them last Thursday. On Monday when I got into the office there was a piece of mail from Dell on my desk with a coupon code for my next purchase. I thought "Damn! I just spend $10,000 and NOW the coupon gets here." I looked at the bottom of the coupon code and it says it expired on Dec 2nd (The day I ordered the servers), but I thought I would type it into their site for the hell of it. The coupon itself expired at the beginning of October, whereas the offer expired Dec 2nd. NOW they want to lower the prices on RH ES too?! Grr, I'm glad its my company payin' the bills and not me :) Though I do agree that RH ES is priced pretty darn high ($320ish I think).
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Well, it IS 2-day support. You don't get that from Microsoft short of a 20k$/year Premier support package.
Well, Premier gets you free forks for wierd problems too, but it's not needed by most companies.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
Per subject. I've found SLES9 to be a vastly better product than RHEL3, and Novell's support is excellent (ie. phone# for the home office of an engineer we can call for any problems we have wedding our product to their OS; personal names/numbers/email addresses of other folks we can talk to when we have problems).
Plus they handed out T-shirts and stuffed monkeys. We're in Austin, TX, a good way from the Bay Area, so we don't get trade show schwag very much.
Do you happen to have a reference to their license that states an expired license requires immediate removal of the software?
It was my impression that the yearly license was a maintenance license allowing access to RedHat's binary packages. If one wishes, one can continue to run the system unpatched. Or one can find another source for updates (either a different package repository or build one's own packages).
I know Dell has a focused market plan but this question about the RH pricing only begs another question - why doesn't Dell expand their business model and roll their own distro for their workstations/servers? Maybe they have looked at it and deemed it either out of their scope or not cost effective. But it is a question to be asked.
Is it really over priced or are people unwilling to pay very much for one Linux distribution when a freely downloadable distribution will due?
like I know Suse..
I had a project that would run on Linux, but it was a mission critical application, and I had no idea what the performance would be like under Red Hat Linux. The application was heavily threaded, and Linux is not known for it threading performance. I had access to a large PC server for a couple of months but RedHat would not do a demo and the price was high enough that I just bought a Solaris server. It may have cost more in the end, but I know what I bought and what my performance was going to be. I did not have time and money to go spend on a piece of software that may have been a total waste of money. Today the application is VERY LARGE, runs on 10 LARGE Solaris servers, and it would be a very good deal for Red Hat - and probably Dell, since we tend to use their servers, but RedHat's prices kept me from going there.
Call their sales and ask.
:-)
:-)
I have called them on three different times and have been told the same answer.
Only on slashdot have I been told this is incorrect
So my advice is to call them yourself
Ask this question though.
Am I legally allowed to run the software if I don't renew my contract (pay xxx dollars)
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Ummm...I think you are mixing some things up. Here is the way I remember things, although I could be wrong.
RedHat 7.1 through RedHat 9 - retail boxed version, only 60 days installation support, $60-$80; you can also download it for free (but no support)
post RedHat 9, retail boxed version no longer exists, you can still download it for free (both Fedora and source packages of ES/AS)
Redhat ES/AS - tested, debugged, optimized version that is targeted at business audiences, price jumps around but includes support package (updates, patches, phone, on-site, software/hardware compatibility), support contract has to be renewed every year, support contract is tied to a particular server
Support is what RedHat sells. They don't make any money distributing the software. They charge competitively for their support contracts, and they do a damn good job. If you don't want/need the support, you can still download the software and distribute it freely.
Awsome. How about I get Redhat AS for free with no support. :-)
Call their sales and ask them if you can do that. They will say no.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
We were told the same things by the RedHat reps. That is why I spit in their general direction and am pushing our company to flip to SuSE. A reasonalble license and reasonable fees.
Ummm...go to their website and download it for free. Yes, you can. It isn't openly publicized, but you can get the source packages (without support, which means no RedHat Network) of the advanced server distribution from their download servers. Here is a mirror. Now, you can quibble about them only distributing source packages, but a) it is already more than is required by the GPL (they don't have to host the packages) and b) there is already a free cutting-edge distribution that fills in the place of the old retail version (Fedora). The only reason to go after AS is if you need the support package, otherwise the only differences are in package versions (AS software is mostly out of date, which is what you want if you are running a server).
I will give you the scenario.
You have a production Web Server, Application Server and a Database Server. All run RH AS 3.0. You pay for those with support because they are mission critical.
You now need to setup an exact duplicate setup for Testing.
You then must setup a very similar setup for development, but in this case you may have multiple development boxes.
Now you patch your production boxes with up2date. You are now screwed because production is different than test.
Fedora is good but it is different than a supported distribution.
Now lets start talking about replacing Windows servers with Redhat. It use to be an easy sell, now it is almost impossible. Why? You may disagree but a lot of people look at the cost of Windows vs RedHat and go with Windows for stuff like file/print and email.
It use to be possible to bring Redhat in to I.T. departments "under the raidar" of everyone. It could then grow and start to replace other boxes. In my experience it was mostly Windows servers it replaced. You could load RedHat 7.x and then go get the latest patches (for 30-60 days) and you would be off and running. Now that is impossible.
Could you do that with Fedora? yes but when the system(s) got out from "under the raidar" operations people would generally ask if it is on a supported platform. The answer use to be yes. Now it is no.
The great news is that SuSe has filled in where RedHat left off. You can get SuSe 9.2 for a fair price and be off and running. Yet SuSe still offers a "server" edition if that is needed.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Bullshit. Which Linux distributor codes a majority of anything?
As for Gnome.. perhaps you should grep through the gnome codebase for @redhat.com adresses?
Then perhaps you'll figure out why they had 4 candidates, (more than any other single entity) for the board of the Gnome-foundation.
Red Hat doesn't code a JVM for Linux?
Obviously you haven't made any contributions yourself in this area, because you really don't have a clue.
The bulk of work in GCJ (which compiles Java to native) and it's VM GIJ has been done by Red Hat.
Do you know how many people they have working on this stuff? Of course you don't. (Hint: Number of contributors to the GNU Classpath Java class library: 10)
Tell me, which other commercial distributions are contributing?
They also do a majority of work GCC. You know that little compiler-thingy?
so lesse, main reason why we use RHEL (instead of rh7.3 and fc1 as we do on most of our servers):
- Oracle requires it
- BEA requires it
so on the boxes that run Oracle/BEA we run RHEL. and the RHEL license is at most 10% the cost of the BEA/Oracle license (and generally closer to 2-3%). Basically the software budget on those servers is obscene anyway so what is $1500/server for RHEL.
Sun support is fantastic. The techs (not the first line who direct your call) get months of training, they are good, and they help. They've gotten a little more difficult about contracts lately (they used to answer questions first, ask for serial/contract numbers later), which can be tricky if you're doing remote admin, but the support is great.
Red Hat should follow the model. Fix the problem, don't hide behind the fine print.
I wonder if it was the RH tech's first day? Does anyone else have experience with RH support?
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
I've also seen an HP support tech pushing as hard as he could for 30 minutes on a system board that still had the plastic caps on until some of us came back to find out what he was doing and took them off (first remove packaging, THEN install). The guy who started working with him had gone catatonic with frustration.
HP phone support is OK, but the techs they send to your site get promoted if they have any brains. The non-promoted techs don't ever get booted or retrained from my experiences with them.
I've worked mainly with smaller companies. No M$ on-site, but HP and Sun still provide good support.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Funny, from the quality of his English I thought it must be his second or third language. I guess I was wrong.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
I am sorry did you say java and compile to native.... That is NOT a JVM. So lets go look at Blackdown or see how much the RedHat guys have helped in getting any VM to linux, or how about IBM's JVM for linux... Redhat all but hates Java. Look at the abomination they did to get Eclipse to run. The only thing they want with Java is the ability for it to be compiled to "their" OS. In this case they are no different than Microsoft.
I agree that RedHat does do some development, but are you seriously saying that they do anywhere near what Sun or Microsoft do? Now do they charge about the same? yes. That is the problem.
They do very little development and charge a ton for "support". Have you ever thought to ask why they don't offer a per incident support packager like say ummm Novell and Microsoft? It is greed and nothing more. Greed of their upper management, not their lower level workers.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I am sorry did you say java and compile to native.... That is NOT a JVM.
Yeah, and I also said GIJ, which is NOT native-compilation but a JVM.
There are several other VM's out there, Kaffe, JamVM and SableVM, which all use the GNU Classpath library and thus also benefit indirectly from Red Hat's work.
What about Blackdown? It's not open source. Period. It's under Sun's license.
Look at the abomination they did to get Eclipse to run.
Yeah, sure. I've seen it. Have you?
Note particularily the line: No Eclipse changes are needed.
how about IBM's JVM for linux
They have several. What about IBM JVM? It's not open source either. They do have one though which is, JikesVM. And It has GNU Classpath as its library. IBM hasn't contributed any code at all towards the runtime.
(And the class library is the major issue with Java, not the VM. VM's are small by comparison)
Redhat all but hates Java.
Yeah, which is why they hosted an open-source Java summit as recently as two weeks ago.
The only thing they want with Java is the ability for it to be compiled to "their" OS.
Which doesn't quite explain why they're contributing by writing cross-platform Java library code, does it?
I agree that RedHat does do some development, but are you seriously saying that they do anywhere near what Sun or Microsoft do?
No. Nobody said that. You were the one saying Red Hat doesn't contribute to open source software. Now you've suddenly changed this to doing as much development as Sun or Microsoft??!
I do say this: They contribute a hell of a lot more code to the community than either Sun or Microsft does, despite having far smaller resources.
Yes. Red Hat charges a lot of money for support. So does Microsoft for their Enterprise solutions. You are making the stupid mistake of comparing consumer products with enterprise products. These are completely different things. Rest assured that Windows with enterprise support isn't cheap either. Nor is AIX, or Solaris or anything else.
I suggest you stop commenting on stuff which you obviously don't know much about.
You have a production Web Server, Application Server and a Database Server. All run RH AS 3.0. You pay for those with support because they are mission critical.
You now need to setup an exact duplicate setup for Testing.
You then must setup a very similar setup for development, but in this case you may have multiple development boxes.
Well, for your production servers you should really have the support contract (as you said). For the testing boxes, you don't need the AS option, so you can go with either ES or WS (software is the same). For these you also only need to renew the RedHat Network subscription, not the entire support package (unless you want it). For the development boxes you can just use WS or Fedora. What do you consider a supported distribution? If all you need is updates, Fedora is there. If you want to be able to talk to someone on the phone or have them come out for an on-site visit, well, you will have to pay for it.
Could you do that with Fedora? yes but when the system(s) got out from "under the raidar" operations people would generally ask if it is on a supported platform. The answer use to be yes. Now it is no.
I understand what you are saying, and I'm not trying to be overzealous about RedHat (I prefer Debian, actually), but you either get free software with no support, or you buy the support. As I said in an earlier posting, if all you want is patches and updates, you can already get them in Fedora. So if you don't mind installating a distribution, testing your software, tweaking, patching, deploying, and maintaining all by yourself, you can do the same thing with Fedora as you used to be able to do with RedHat. However, a lot of people don't want to do that, especially in a production environment, which is why RedHat sells support and people buy it.
With respect to the cost of Windows, you need to compare apples to apples. Windows Server 2003 along with a hefty support package (which you do have to buy) most certainly does not cost less than RedHat AS. If all you want to do, though, is setup a WinXP box with file/print sharing, you can do that for free with Fedora. Or you can pay for RedHat ES and get support and get a bunch of other services that WinXP doesn't have.
Have you actually tried talking to the RedHat folks about your situation? They are usually pretty reasonable, which is why they now offer an academic package. Universities need site-licensing options. I'm sure you could get a custom support package if there isn't a way to get what you want from the already available plans.
I suspect there's some sort of shenanigans going on with RedHat's sales staff. Which wouldn't suprise me. Sales is sales; the only difference is company policy.
In any case, I looked at the license and don't see anything that would hint at what you've described.
I agree with you, but I did not want to get burned buy them. So I called. You could be correct in their sales though.
Given that I talked to three different people (sorry I don't have names), I would think one of them would have had told me different. I was very clear in what I said.
The reason I was so clear is that our company hit hard times about three years ago (travel business) and going to ask for money at that time was like asking to be fired. You just didn't want to do it. So EVERY penny was watched. I could ill afford making that big of a mistake.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Fair enough. And I don't blame you. This kind of message would have me very cautious too. I've also nixed products in the past due to unclear or unsupportive behavior from a supplier.
There is no doubt that RedHat has an internal identity issue. I'm willing to cut them slack - they've had a fairly good history of supporting the community. But there are some distinctly disturbing mixed messages coming out of RedHat. They need to get their act together or learn the tough way that a big selling point of a Linux-based architecture is a lack of vendor lock-in.
I did talk to RedHat, and you brought up a point I didn't think about. It would be possible to use ES or WS versions. Thanks!
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
More like the Redhat bathroom wall.
Wet some toilet paper, throw, and see what sticks.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
get fedora then.
If you want cheap and no support get Fedora if you want tons of support get ES. Problem solved we can move on now.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Yeah, and I also said GIJ"
:-)
You also said a lot of other stuff. My point on the JVM is valid.
RedHat could be working with Sun and or IBM (Like SuSe) and include a good JVM in their EXPENSIVE distro- and then they could use the exact same Java programs that everyone else uses. They don't. That is a fact. There was an excellent article in Linux world about two months ago that talked with Redhat in all the steps they went through to get Eclipse to run. There are changes, not many but some. None were needed if they used a good JVM.
"They have several. What about IBM JVM? It's not open source either. They do have one though which is, JikesVM. And It has GNU Classpath as its library. IBM hasn't contributed any code at all towards the runtime."
Yes but RedHat could include it for FREE. Other distros include good JVM's. RedHat seems obsessed with making a JVM that is complied to Linux. They don't have too. You mention they are hosting a JVM summit. Great! I didn't know that. My first question would be why don't you include a good JVM now like Sun's or IBM's and then start work on a true open source implementation of a VM, NOT a compiled version of a VM but a true VM?
"You were the one saying Red Hat doesn't contribute to open source software. Now you've suddenly changed this to doing as much development as Sun or Microsoft??!"
I never said that RedHat doesn't do ANY development. If you read my post I said that RedHat doesn't
"Code a majority of XXX" The only one that I said they don't do is code a JVM. That is a fact. Are you saying that they do develop a majority of anthing I listed? If so let me know. Now back to my overall point... They do a small fraction of the development that Sun or Microsoft does and yet they charge like they do it all. That is what bothers me. Granted, if they are selling it, and the market can bear it, then I guess that is ok. But someone like me who "bet the farm" with RedHat in his company, only to have them jack with the pricing every year now for the last 4 years, has made it easy to critisize them. Their moves have forced us to migrate a significant portion of our servers over to SuSe, not that we wanted to but because of the price shifts we had to. When we did, we found that suddenly the JVM and other stuff came with the system. That then posed the question "why can't RedHat do this?". Not that we care much, because in a few years there may not be any RedHat servers left. (We just need Crystal Reports to support any other Linux vendor).
"I do say this: They contribute a hell of a lot more code to the community than either Sun or Microsft does, despite having far smaller resources."
I would agree with you. However OpenOffice is somewhat significant. But I agree.
"Yes. Red Hat charges a lot of money for support. So does Microsoft for their Enterprise solutions. You are making the stupid mistake of comparing consumer products with enterprise products. These are completely different things. Rest assured that Windows with enterprise support isn't cheap either. Nor is AIX, or Solaris or anything else."
Microsoft and Novell offer per incident support calls. Why doesn't RedHat? Both offer their product without a lease. Why doesn't RedHat? Both will let you have developer versions for free, why doesn't RedHat (They may now, but a year ago they didn't). Now I will say now that they have lowered there prices, they are far more in line, but I believe you have companies like mine that switched off of RedHat and went to SuSe to thank for that.
"I suggest you stop commenting on stuff which you obviously don't know much about."
This is slashdot isn't it.
Seriously, I want to see RedHat do well. I do believe they will get their pricing model staightened out. I use to talk to RedHat guys on a semi regular basis, and they are great guys. They do want to do what is right for their customers, but their upper management was hell bent on taking down Sun. Their
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
If we weren't an edu and got special pricing on RHEL3, even though I have my RHCE for both 9 and EL, I would have recommended moving to another distribution.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
Both will let you have developer versions for free, why doesn't RedHat
:-)
Hurrumpt....I think "Fedora" is the developer version of RedHat Linux.