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."'"

Comments

Re:Make up your mind

[someone1234]

Maybe Redhat Enterprise Linux is not specifically for the desktop?

Re:Are we still angry with them?

[Kelson]

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?

Re:"Support" model seems to be a misnomer

[Junta]

I think also saying they make their money from "support" may be a strong word, but it isn't so far off, they make money by selling the promise of support. I've seen numerous installations where the organization deploying knew for all practical technical reasons, they could go with either RHEL or CentOS and have the same experience. However, they were willing to pay for the support contract they more often than not never use.

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.