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Red Hat Sales Surge
head_dunce writes "Red Hat has reported earnings from its third quarter, and it did quite a bit better than expected. Even with the movement within the business by Oracle and SuSE/Microsoft, Red Hat came out quite a bit ahead. TheStreet.com reports on the company's $29.6 Million dollars windfall, and some of the tough times the company has had in the past year. From the article: 'CFO Charlie Peters said on a conference call with analysts that the company is "cautiously optimistic that competitive efforts by some of the largest technology companies in the world are actually expanding our opportunity."'"
Maybe Redhat Enterprise Linux is not specifically for the desktop?
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Unless I missed something, the article doesn't break down the figures into server and workstation. It's possble for the surge to have been an even mix, mostly desktop, or -- more likely -- mostly server.
No need to freak out on contradictory reality just yet.
I think we're supposed to scream and yell about how they're a money-grubbing Corporation (with a capital C) that never did anything for Linux, while ignoring all the @redhat.com addresses on contributions to the kernel, RPM (which, like it or not, *is* used by other distributions), various config tools (which, while no one else seems to be using them, are available for other distros to use if they want), debugging, funding of various projects, etc.
But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans^W^WRed Hat ever done for us?
And there in lies the key.
Oracle is not viable, their CEO does not support open source and has made it clear that you don't put value into open source because then your competitor has the same value.
Microsoft is not viable, do I really need to go into this one, just read the many press quotes from Microsoft's CEO.
Novell is somewhat viable, but they've been selling SuSE for a few years now and haven't presented much competition for Red Hat. In addition I supsect the Microsoft deal will do more to scare away customers rather than bring more into the fold.
Corporations don't buy into linux for altruistic reasons, they buy into it because it makes business sense. That said it doesn't make sense to purchase linux support from a company that has made it clear that they intend to destroy open source as a competitive strategy when your own business relies on open source solutions. Most decision makers are going to look at statements coming out of Microsoft and Oracle and they'll know that they are not the proponents of open source that they want their businesses to depend on. Red Hat is just about the only true open source enterprise level support available.
I think you have some valid points concerning the changes Red Hat made and to this day I think they are missing out on some easy revenue with smaller companies/individuals that need an inexpensive support solution, but some of what your saying doesn't make sense.
You see no value in Red Hat's services, yet you continue to buy them.
You see Windows as a cheaper solution, yet you use Red Hat linux.
You can support linux yourself, yet you want to hire Linus so you can use an unsupported distro.
There must be more value there than you personally see because not only is your company expanding their use of Red Hat's services but so to are many other companies.
This is not new to the business, or even the *nix world. Few years back I was part of a Solaris admin team. Before I joined, they already subscribed to a really expensive SMB server product for Solaris, which charged ungodly amounts monthly for even just a 2 concurrent client access license. I recognized that users were understandably upset over being 200 people who could rarely access their files from their windows boxes unless their department ponied up funds for a commercial nfs client for windows. I suggested samba as a viable alternative, but was denied because they couldn't possibly call for support at the time. I asked if they had ever actually called the vendor for support, and the answer was no, but they perpetually lived in fear of having to, so they paid the exorbitant fee.
It *seems* like they are selling an essentially free product hoping no one will notice, but the customers are mostly damn well aware of the free alternatives, and they make the conscious decision. Liability in a sense of the word is applicable. If IT uses their budget such that they have a couple more servers with money saved from not buying RHEL licenses, no one will notice or give them praise. However, if it hits the fan, even if the technical result ends up the same, if CentOS was installed, the finger pointing stops at the IT dept, if RHEL was installed with support contract in place, IT can redirect the finger to RedHat as not delivering on promises if it comes to that
As to your points: A) RMS/GNU will complain that Redhat is violating the spirit of the GPL by not providing 100% equal access to free-loaders and then change the GPL Not likely, CentOS is the perfect counter-example that RHEL is following the GPL fine and the license is working as intended without loopholes. RedHat hasn't been overly noisy, but some acts they've done clearly demonstrate they aren't keen on the existence of CentOS, but accept they can't do anything about it. B) One or several competing corporate entities will successfully be able to offer the same updates (so-called "support") by free-loading off Redhat's efforts... That is in essence what Oracle is doing. That's one of the scary competitors that RH has been talking about. If they were too successful in impairing RH's ability to fix the core stuff, they must either pick up the slack themselves or the product will perish (much like a parasite that gets too greedy will die when the host is killed). Too soon to tell if this relationship ends up parisitc (but perhaps mostly harmless) or symbiotic. C) Redhat will be forced to include some proprietary software that will truly seperate them from the free-loaders... At one point I know RH shipped with the package some extras, including a JRE. Don't think they've done anything serious yet outside of GPLed projects. That does seem like a reasonable path if Oracle or Novell start achieving overwhelming success and RH is finally forced to differentiate themselves from the competition on a technical level.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
...Mark Shuttleworth is making it very clear that Ubuntu is a for profit venture. He could very well start charging money for something soon, and end up ticking off the Open Source world the same way the heroes of a decade ago (Red Hat) tick you off now.
If you want purity of purpose, you'd be best off with Debian, and good luck with it.
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