Slashdot Mirror
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."'"
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.