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Red Hat CEO Says Economic Crisis Favors Open Source
arashtamere writes "Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst predicts the enterprise open source software business will emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market. 'I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said, "We're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to... use open source to reduce our costs." And we've had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss ... I think we'll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,' he told Computerworld."
www.centos.org
( or - son of redhat )
presuming you havent built really crappy apps, one linux guy to install and configure, then let it just run in the background. java webapp? tomcat ! database backend? postgres ! ldap? etc...
of course, if your business demands up to the minute support, patches, etc, redhat can provide a reasonable service for a reasonable price, and will be pretty well binary compatible with your initial centos outlay.
The subscription gets you any new release while you're subscribed. For Windows, you need to buy the new OS. You can also seamlessly migrate to centos or migrate from centos if you want to try if it fits your needs.
No doubt. Red Hat is the only company that I know of that will support other vendors apps to the point of fixing it themselves, or even having one of their kernel devs patch Linux. If fact, Red Hat is the only company that I know of that can really claim that they can get fixes for customers directly in to both the mainline Linux kernel and Samba. My understanding is they'll also support any of the products created by the thousands of vendors that are part of the Red Hat Exchange. Microsoft just can't offer that, even if they wanted to.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
In fact, I have called Microsoft support in the past. And I found the experience to be one of the few gratifying aspects of being a Microsoft customer. Once you get past the costs, Microsoft support is (or was) truly top notch. Certainly much more effective than Red Hat's.
Then again, I haven't had to deal with Microsoft products in 3 or 4 years, and I haven't called Red Hat for support in about as long.