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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."
'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 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.
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
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.
Timewarp?
Version 3 is the current version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEL is different than Red Hat Linux (RHL) which was end of lifed after version 9 to be replaced by Fedora Core.
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
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.
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.
> Well, most of us don't need no freakin support contract.
you are not the intended market.
For those that do want support, 3 digits is nothing - without support they'd probably end up paying more than that per instance for a third party to come in and fix something...
Besides, I don't think it's the ES and WS versions that are the trouble - they're pretty reasonable, it'd be the AS version that could do with some lowering.
It seems like it's in the "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" range, as it's very difficult to impossible to find a price for it on their website.
Advanced users are users too!
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/
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.
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
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.
It depends on who you are. If you're Pixar, then you're right -- $350-$1500 per year per server is manageable. If you (like me) work for a mid-size corporation with a hundred servers, a shrinking IT budget, and a need for only the security updates, $35,000 per year for just the support on the operating system is too much. We have always used Red Hat products in the past and are very satisfied with them, but we simply cannot pay that much money.
Dell is right; Red Hat has lost us as a customer. We would love to stay with them, but it doesn't matter now. We are now choosing between SuSE and Debian, with Red Hat not being part of the equation.
...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
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.
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 |
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
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
Thse are all the reasons not to use it for a server.
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.
The only truly free options for servers is Debian stable. Long release cycle, vast package repostiories, security backports so your servers don't break, seamless upgrades in place. Everything Fedora is not. Use it or at least something actually meant to be stable, be it Whitebox, SuSE, etc.
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)
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.
"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.
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.
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...
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
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.
Oh, there we go. Mod someone a troll for telling it like it is. Guess I'm going to have to lay it on the line right here and risk making a complete ass of myself just to prove a point. I don't like Hed Rat! I never liked Hed Rat and I never will! First, their RHL 7.0 was junk because they broke compatibility by using a bastardized GCC 2.96 compiler. Far as I remember, they apparently had the arrogant attitude that the GCC developers were moving too slow in releasing GCC 3. Second off, their so-called support left a lot to be desired. Hey, when they EOL a distro almost as quickly as they release one, then that's almost kin to non-support imo. Let's face it. Even M$ don't EOL their older and crummy Windows OS's that fast! Lastly, abandoning the 'stable' RHL and the general user and using them as guinea pigs with the 'unstable' Fedora Core. Sorry, that was the last straw for me. Now don't get me wrong. I have no problems with any company making money off of Linux. I just have major problems with companies that piss all over and stab the backs of a lot of users just to serve their own self interests. We already have M$ for that. Last thing we need is another company doing the same damned thing. Guess I pissed off every Hed Rat user that's out there, but hey. It's ONLY my opinion based on my experience. If you're happy with Hed Rat, then I'm glad for you. For myself, I simply can't bother with such a distro anymore. It saddens me, too as I first had my taste of Linux with RHL 5.2 and thought it was one of the best CDs I've ever bought. Too bad they forgot their roots. For the record, I dual boot XP Home and Slackware 10 if anyone cares. I don't want anyone to misunderstand me and think I'm one of those 'anti-Linux' idiots out there. It's just that reading the parent post brought back a lot of anger. It's the type of anger you get when you feel wholly and utterly betrayed by something you once really believed it. Kinda like my ex-girlfriend of long, long ago but that's waaaaay off topic here and a long story anyways.
With Linux, you have a choice
With Linux, yes. But with Dell, not necessarily.
Everytime you order a new Dell system it will be a question if it will run Linux.
Dell supports Red Hat Linux. That will work.
But we use SuSE, and nasty things happen.
For example, we have ordered a number of SC400 servers and were very happy. Then, it was replaced by the SC420. So we ordered one of these, without OS. Red Hat is supported on it.
But SuSE 9.2 does not recognize the SCSI controller. Why? because Dell got a modified 39320 SCSI controller from Adaptec that can only work in the "HOSTRAID" mode (Adaptecs swindle to make you think you buy a RAID controller while it actually is just a SCSI controller with a driver).
The problem is that Linux does not support the HOSTRAID mode, and Adaptec only provides a (binary) driver for the OS versions it likes. SuSE 9.2 is not amongst these.
So the machine is sitting at the YaST installation screen, waiting for a solution. I know I can solve it but it takes hours of extra time for what should have been a smooth install.
This is not the first time this has happened to us. Dell just buys what is cheapest for them at that moment (the SC400 had a MPT SCSI controller), and lets the customer sort out the problems.
LOL so when well Dell call for Microsoft to lower their costs. Phttt.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
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.
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.
How much are you betting? If you RTFA you will see the Dell just signed an agreement with Novell for SuSE Linux. So, yeah they ARE supporting someone else. So where can i collect my winnings?
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 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.