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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."'"
Wanna see the actual numbers? Red Hat's report to investors is here.
Is it just me, or did they spend almost twice as much on marketing as they did in the same quarter, previous year?
I'm both angry at them and happy that they exist. I'm angry enough not to use Redhat Linux, because of what they did to the free RedHat scene - turned it into a legion of beta testers. I'm happy about all the money they spend on various open source projects. Of course, RPM is a giant pile of shit that should never have been invented - who is the fuck-ass who thought up using cpio with a fucked up header on it so you have to use dd (or something) before you can even manually unpack the archive? He needs a serious ass-kicking. But that's a digression and something I can forgive them for :)
They've clearly done a lot for linux and OSS in general. It doesn't mean I have to like them. They're not doing any of it out of altruism. They're doing it because it makes good business sense. I'm supporting Ubuntu instead, because they're making actual promises not to change the entire way they do business overnight.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
how bad Suse has been lately. Despite all the deals they made with MS (recent news) they have a bigger problem. Suse has become fundamentally bad. 9.3 was great. 10.0 was ok (but much worse than 9.3). 10.1 can only be described as unbearable (wouldn't even install half the time). And 10.2 tried but couldn't really to improve on 10.1. FYI, it does install now... after days of synchonizing package information with suse website. Google search for "suse 10.1 sucks" yeielded more hits than I cared to count. Debian is having internal infighting. Until the dust settles, RedHat is all that's left.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Every single site which I know has moved away from Tru64 unix has gone to RHEL or a close derivative of it. Maintaining those systems 5, 10, 15 years into the future is going to deliver a lot of work to RedHat.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Those of us that work with the RedHat products will note that not all things are as they seem. Our company feels that we are not getting value for what is paid. Our loaded cost for a Windows machine is cheaper than that for Linux. I'm a die hard linux evangelist, but the numbers don't lie. Linux makes for better servers, and Windows for a better desktop (for now). Redhat changed their licensing for RH8 to RHEL3 right while many corporations were in mid-stream of adopting RedHat Linux. Corporations cannot change course that quickly so all this money RedHat made is from businesses following the corporate plan developed pre RHEL3. Our company adopted RedHat as our Linux standard based on RH8 and the costs at that time. Many company plans and projects began to be based on the use RedHat Linux. RedHat blind-sided us with their licensing change and it didn't make many here very happy. Corporations don't like uncentainty, thus the initial choice of RedHat instead of a less stable distribution. We really don't need the support. It's sort of like a security blanket. There... but really not needed.
We are a large enough company to be nearly self-supporting on Linux issues. Thus the RedHat cost per RHEL3/4 Workstation license is out of line for us. The only feature we need of the RedHat server is multiple CPU and memory capability. We don't use GFS or any of the other stuff. So the $1k server cost is WAY out of line. All the RedHat support we sometimes use are the updated RPMS for the distribution. Yet RedHat seems pretty oblivious to this until recently. We have bought more licenses in the last half year than all previous. Many of our data crunching processes are moving from Windows to Linux (Linux is fast and perl/python work better there.) Yet... we are unhappy with the perceived value. We paid RedHat enough last year that we probably should have just hired Linus to come work for us and gone with Fedora or Whitebox.
My point is this. RedHat is too expensive for what you get. Oracle and MS/Novell smell opportunity and have only begun their campaign. When Oracle comes out with their version of Linux, watch RedHat get completely ejected from corporate use as Oracle database servers (the $1000+/yr cash cow licenses for RedHat). When viable alternatives become available, will we evaluate them? Oh yeah.
It seems to me that, contrary to the vision espoused by RMS/GNU/etc, most of these companies which are based around-GPL products truly aren't making their business by selling "support", i.e., actual people delivering support by phone, in person, or by other electric mediums. "Support" instead has devolved into the fairly convoluted idea of delivering a stream of updates while the other GPL/Linux companies really depend on selling closed-source licenses to their GPLd products (e.g., MySQL). I'm glad Redhat is succeeding thus far, but it seems to me a fairly unsustainable business model given the realities....
It seems to me that is only a matter of time until one or several happen:
A) RMS/GNU will complain that Redhat is violating the spirit of the GPL by not providing 100% equal access to free-loaders and then change the GPL
B) One or several competing corporate entities will successfully be able to offer the same updates (so-called "support") by free-loading off Redhat's efforts...
C) Redhat will be forced to include some proprietary software that will truly seperate them from the free-loaders...
Either way, the system seems unlikely to generate the kind of revenues needed to pay for massive improvements to the open source components of the linux platform over the long term... without some pretty fundamental shifts at least.
Firstly, don't be so certain that Linux will be as easy to beat. With two federal judges looking over Linux source code and saying 'its clean, nothing stolen from anyone' after the SCO/IBM fight, microsoft saying "Linux stole our..." really is calling the federal judges ....liars? But their rulings are final. The SCO/IBM fight, might have just taken every last bit of wind from microsofts sails. The final verdict is that Linux is ultra-clean. Further, you jest when you say 'M$ will do damage'... Rubbish! Remember who was defending Linux in the IBM/SCO fight? IBM has the massive 40,000+ patent portfolio. Microsoft has less than 500 (and Linux alone has 300 patents of its own). This is not a fight M$ has the slightest chance in hell of winning. The half-second microsoft tries to actually pull this kind of stupid patent fight, IBM will be shutting Redmond down (all the offices, all the staff, all the packaging, all the websites, the games consoles, the whole thing). Cease and desist all around. Microsoft will in an instant, stop being the golden-egg laying goose, and become the cooked one. Not that they haven't been doing anything but flopping around the last seven years anyway.
I 2nd this statement. In fact, Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu have already begun doing things that undermine the idea of free software. For example, Ubuntu now ships with binary blobs in the kernel, non-free wireless drivers, and proprietary nvidia drivers (for which free alternatives readily exist.) See Scott James Remnant's blog for details. Likewise, it's been reported and substantiated that Mark Shuttleworth is preventing the Debian GNOME maintainer (who also works for Canonical) from updating GNOME packages until after Ubuntu LSO had shipped. Of the two top committees governing Ubuntu, the Ubuntu Community Council and the Technical Board, are both made up of Mark Shuttleworth and people he employs, and Shuttleworth has been given "benevolent dictator for life" status within the project. A lot of people do not trust Shuttleworth either, and some, such as Debian Developer, Otavio Salvador, have made comments like, "what he says and what he does are different." You should be wary of supporting Shuttleworth's efforts as there's good reason to question his commitment to the ideals of free software and to the interests of the rest of the community.