Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Support Continues To Flourish
ruphus13 writes "As the pure-play Open Source companies continue to dwindle, Red Hat has thrived through the recession. Its support revenues have grown 20+%, and account for 75+% of its revenues. 'Instead of the traditional strategy of selling expensive proprietary software licenses, as practiced by the Microsofts and Oracles of the world, Red Hat gets the vast majority of its revenues from selling support contracts. In the third quarter of last year, support subscriptions accounted for $164 million of its $194 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year. All 25 of the company's largest support subscribers renewed subscriptions, even despite a higher price tag.'"
You haven't seen a lot of big production environments then. They're more than common in larger buisnesses.
A large enterprise would almost never deploy something in production without support. For my small consulting gigs I have never bought support. I think you can see where this is going...
It means "and similar companies."
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche
The summary: Redhat sells support rather than licenses
You: With Redhat, you buy support
Me: Duh.
So the fact that people who use the software keep buying support for it is not that impressive.
Um, duh? The article is not claiming, 'Ooh! Out of all the people who buy Redhat, look how many people buy support!' It is saying, 'Look how many people buy Redhat in the first place.' Redhat has continued to profit during the economic downturn, which is impressive. Come on, man, any hobbyist will use CentOS, or create their own update server, and/or download the patches and updates from another source. Any corporation or government will buy support. But they won't necessarily buy Redhat, in fact, most of them end up buying Windows, right? But enough buy Redhat to ensure Redhat's profitability. Which is the point of the story...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I think RedHat really shines because of the variety of enterprise hardware support they have; places like IBM, Dell, HP, etc. all really work out-of-the-box with Redhat installations (pending some pretty new hardware that you have to use the suppliment CD stuff for), so it's not like it was back in the day when SGI and even Sun (since they broke into the x86 market) where you need your in-house hardware to jive with your in-house operating system. There's going to be the opposer's that will argue the stability factor that SGI and SUN have/had in regards to their hardware because it was tailored for it and not made to be as bloat as the Linux kernel has gotten in areas to support the mass hardware platforms. Again, Redhat IMHO should be thanking the enterprise hardware vendors for their posted OS support for RedHat.
So long as they only want support on that one box where is the problem?
We only get support for production machines.
They're either small companies or they'll most likely be in deep shit when things do go wrong. A large company can't wait around for someone to search for solutions on the internet.
Then you don't know that many people who use Linux in a production environment with management's approval. Here at New Mexico's Child Youth and Family Development Department, we pay for support. We pay Novell for Suse Linux support (we're a Netware legacy shop), we pay Oracle for MySQL support, and we have 'as-needed' support contracts for other important open source software packages like Splunk & OpenNMS.
So, there you are. I pay for support. But I'm married, so I guess I'm not a 'single person who pays for support.'
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
But I'm married, so I guess I'm not a 'single person who pays for support.'
OK, now we know you're lying.
You're posting on Slashdot - you don't even know what a woman looks like.
That is all.
While I'm glad and all that they are so called flourishing in the recession, they are getting 194 million in revenue.
That's a pittance in corporate america.
Even if it wasn't gross income, it wouldn't be that impressive.
Also, people seeking a cheaper option in a recession?
Have we ever heard that before?
It's not surprising that a cheaper product will prosper during a recession; the McDonalds and Wal-Marts of the world are getting boosts from the general attitude of cost-cutting. The real proof of Red Hat's success will be if companies continue to choose it over Windows during the next economic boom.
Still, it's good news. Companies that switch now are less likely to go back to Windows in the future.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
What exactly do you think the support folks do?
They aren't missing a lot. They have outsourced the entire thing to India and on the rare occasion I did have a question the "support" I got was totally worthless. It was apparent that they didn't even understand the most basic of commands. I opened about 4 tickets and solved all of them on my own. After that I didn't even bother with it. Not worth a damn dime.
Monstar L
> To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers
Yah, it's not like they pay a large number of Linux developers.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Can someone point out an example showing me that I'm wrong?
You aren't even wrong. To be wrong, you have to make sense. You see, if you are one guy writing closed source, unless it becomes HUGELY popular, you won't make any money. So, what exactly are you comparing open source to, that is somehow different? You try to imply that it's hard to make money with open source coding, but you fail to provide a convincing case that it is any different with closed source coding.
As we saw in a recent article, most open source coders work for companies that pay them. And the other ones aren't doing it for the money anyway. Think of open source coding as a demonstration of your skill, that will get your foot in the door of almost any company you want to work for. Or, a hobby. Not everything in life is about making money. Some people make money, yet still do things they enjoy without getting paid for those things.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Since when is proprietary software intrinsically profitable? If you want to make a living from that you need to convince someone to pay you money too.
I'm not sure what you mean by "capitalizing on the work of Linux developers" or if that's intended as a slight against RH.
If so, I should point out that a number of the top names in kernel development are or have been RH employees.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Parent is not a troll! He has a fair point. It is true that the software RHEL is made up of is free (like freedom and beer) and you can use all of that for free, in CentOS. So you are paying "just" for the support in that sense. But try getting hold of a copy of RHEL without paying someone - it's not like (AFAIK!) you can download it and optionally buy support later.
That said, I had heard (uhm, possibly from a RH employee...) that RH were reasonably sensible about support issues. The particular example I'd brought up, probably on a Xen project mailing list, was that if they only support 4 VMs then they might not support you if you'd been running more than 4 RHEL VMs on your server. But I was told, at the time, that actually the worst they'd do would be to ask you to have only 4 VMs running whilst they help you fix it - fairly reasonable really. So in that sense your contract with them really is just constraints on the support, not on how you use the stuff.
since this is slashdot, it could be a gay marriage.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older, so the joke is no longer, 'We're all single and can't get laid.' The joke is now, 'We're all married and can't get laid.' Please do keep up.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Apparently he thinks they sit around waiting for things to go wrong, like the typical Microsoft admin.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers.
To be even more fair, Red Hat employs many of the prominent Linux developers, and is currently the biggest corporate contributor to the kernel. In addition, they're heavily involved with GCC and gdb, not to mention MANY other GPL projects.
That's why they have the concept of "support levels." In most cases if you have Basic support it means you get access to their private online knowledge base and a VoIP line to an outsourced guy behind a desk on the other side of the planet.
If you're an Enterprise then you have direct access to a bunch of very smart guys who come buy your team dinner when they're in town.
What I think they do is get a kernel dev on the line if that's what it takes to resolve my issue (which is funny because my company has a couple kernel devs on the payroll).
Seriously, they (RHEL) make their living by making my engineering department's life easier. We're predominately a windows shop, a fortune 50 company, but we also use linux a lot... and most of it is RHEL.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
To be even fairer, Red Hat do employ a large proportion of the kernel and userspace developers for the software they make support income from - they even have a record of open sourcing code that they get from company acquisitions. But they are very much benefiting from the fact that it's easier to build an OS by co-operating with other companies and individuals than to go toe-to-toe with MS (and Apple, not that they're direct RH competitors in any significant way) on your own.
If the old one works fine why would you need a new one?
In the grownup server world we really don't need flashy new guis or other such silliness.
Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older, so the joke is no longer, 'We're all single and can't get laid.' The joke is now, 'We're all married and can't get laid.' Please do keep up.
Soon a growing portion will be "This page was bookmarked on my dad's computer; what does 'laid' mean?!"
The Long Now Foundation
But first they waste 3 days of your time with the guys googleing around. Their support was at a time great and is still not horrible, but it really approaching Oracle levels of painfulness.
To be fair, Red Hat is capitalizing on the work of Linux developers.
Others have noted their contributions, but really, even if they didn't? Support is supposed to be one of the approved ways to make money from open source software. Red Hat can make their own changes for their needs, but they can't lock anyone in because those changes must be made available if they distribute modified OSS software, at least with some licenses.
And one could add that the more people that use Linux distributions, and the more that buy support from people proficient in the development and maintenance of various systems and distributions; the better it is for Linux in general.
The Long Now Foundation
So, there you are. I pay for support. But I'm married, so I guess I'm not a 'single person who pays for support.'
As opposed to a divorced person who pays support?
You see, if you are one guy writing closed source, unless it becomes HUGELY popular, you won't make any money.
I argue that that is simply not true.
I point you to Spidwerweb Software as proof. Jeff Vogel's games are not hugely popular. They have a fairly small following. They are pretty cheap, too, and they are shareware, technically. Nothing open or free, though, about them - aside from the demo's, and if you decide to pirate it/use a keygen. Which, by the way, definitely hurts his income... it's an interesting perspective on the whole "software piracy doesn't hurt anyone" thing. Anyway, he can make a living for himself without being hugely popular.
No, you can't use it all for free. You don't get RHN, you don't get ZFS, you don't get RedHat trademarks, and you don't get built-in compatibility with VMWare and various commercial installers. You *can* run more than 4 VM's, supported, with the "server" licenses, not the desktop licenses.
You can use CentOS for many purposes quite effectively, and switch to RHEL when needed. I've done that, and used CentOS for testing setups on non-standard hardware. That's difficult to do with Windows, you need the registered licenses.
If you If you're running a large number of RHEL boxes / virtual environments, you could split them between fully-supported RHEL and ones of
the RHEL-clones like Centos or Scientific ( from CERN - Linux brought to you by particle physicists! That should be their tagline ).
That way you have fully supported boxes for critical stuff and save some support bucks with some unsupported clone boxes / VMs.
I don't see a lot of risk here - at least not any more than environments where the Dev boxes are smaller and cheaper than the Prod
boxes even though both might be running the same fully-supported OS.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Linux, which is at the core of Red Hat’s software strategy, has never been a huge success on the desktop, and especially not on the business desktop. Red Hat officials have shrewdly maintained that desktop Linux is not a core focus for the company, but that virtualization and the facilitation of desktop and cloud operating systems applications are.
As I know this will become a polarizing statement on this thread, let me try (try being the key word) to neutralize this quote.
Red Hat is not implying here that desktop Linux is a failure (like it's subpoint headline apparently does). They are stating two important truths: (a) that Linux on the desktop has not taken off as much as some pundits have been forecasting for a while, and (b) that this goal is not part of their overall focus and won't be for some time.
I don't agree entirely with this viewpoint, since Ubuntu and netbook-provided distributions have contributed to its significant increase in consumer presence. Regardless, Linux on the server is where it's at, and where Red Hat has had huge control over for quite some time. Thus, it's no surprise that they are flourishing at the moment, despite the current economic situation.
I'm quite sure that Redhat's "support" model is designed to frustrate and confuse.
Before Redhat switched to this model, we could throw up servers right-left and center. Virtualization around the corner, we could sprout servers like mad. Pay-per-incident was reasonable, and RHEL certification desirable.
Big corps standardized on Redhat as a target distro. It was the big American Software Company which looked like it was going to stay around for a long time. People bought in bigtime in development dollars and in the datacenter.
Then the model changed.
The talk wasn't so colorful, but that was the gist of it. Redhat made me and other FOSS proponents look like idiots. I'm not a Redhat fan, I just use it at work.
This little stunt took a LOT of steam out of the mainstream adoption of Linux. I'd really like to see Debian pick up, but Redhat already seems to have had the branding and developer lock-in, and the big name seems to make bosses feel comfortable. They can smugly tell me "see, software isn't free?" and feel much more comfortable signing cheques for $1500/year.
... sadly, explaining CentOS to them is like telling them that I sourced Oracle from TPB.
Grr. The most annoying part is that like I said, Redhat does good work outside their distro... I wish I could hate them. Doing FOSS advocacy and development and being charged licensing fees is like being a philanthropist being robbed by Robin Hood. Robin's a real jerk. We were ALREADY paying and contributing!
FreeBSD ports are awesome. I just portupgraded postfix and it broke sasl and therefore broke SMTP authentication.......super awesome. Give me binary updates any day.
Well, the choice is a management decision, of course. The selection of x86 over proprietary was obviously one of cost. I can only speculate on the reasons RH was selected over Solaris x86.
First, Linux established itself on x86 before Sun got serious about pushing Solaris on that platform.
Second, the x86 vendors, IBM and HP, are probably a lot more inclined to push a vendor neutral platform like RH than an OS from a competitor that also competes in other areas. In fact our RH support comes from IBM rather than RH directly.
Third, Sun's financial position has been fairly precarious for the last decade or so, and no one wanted to get stuck with an obsolete platform if Sun had gone under. It remains to be seen if Oracle will do anything to make Solaris x86 more competitive.
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
I don't know if people who write with this style on Slashdot are trying to sound cool by speaking/writing in some sort of British style or what.
And if the poster were British? The "were" is in the subjunctive mood.
I know a lot of people who use Linux in production environments and the majority of them buy support contracts from RedHat. There are a few Novell and Oracle shops, and some that apparently buy through IBM also.
Usual reason for Linux over Solaris is open source software that barely compiles on Linux, let alone anything else. But someone's developed something that uses libcrufthaxx0r.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
No. The real reason for Linux over Solaris on x86 is that some of us still remember when Sun treated it like an ugly redheaded stepchild and the 3rd party vendors did the same.
Even now, Solaris x86 is still inferior in this respect.
Free Software is actually in a much better position on Solaris x86 and always has been.
It's like you just landed from Bizzaro World.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I hope you were being sarcastic, because Red Hat gives a huge amount back.
I doubt that most RH users are FOSS developers.
And if the bosses are so smug and too stupid to understand CentOS, they probably wouldn't notice if you went ahead and ported to it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A lot of companies don't want to pay for kernel devs. While getting in consultants from companies may appear to be expensive, you don't have to provide them with healthcare, pensions, etc and most importantly you can get rid of them pretty much the second you feel like it which is not the case with full-time employees.
I've been in a company that has had consultants from the publisher of the software they're using for years. To the point, imo, they could have just hired people full-time and when they do switch software those people would still be of some use but the company does not see it that way.
As proactive as you may be as an admin you don't know about every bug in the system, nor does the developer (otherwise it likely wouldn't be there) and not every company will pay for someone in-house to fix it.
He said he used Suse, not OSX.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm quite sure that Redhat's "support" model is designed to frustrate and confuse.
You pay per server per year. That's not exactly confusing. Frustrating only in the sense that... you have to pay for it.
Customer: "I'm a FOSS DEVELOPER! YOU'RE SELLING ME MY OWN CODE!"
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/5Server/en/os/SRPMS/
No they're not. They're selling you binary packages and the ability to call them up at 2:30 AM to get your issues fixed. If you want your code, it is right there for you to download without issue.
They can smugly tell me "see, software isn't free?" and feel much more comfortable signing cheques for $1500/year.
The software is free. If they don't understand what they're purchasing, that's their problem, and only yours if you decide to make it your problem.
Having worked as a Solaris-with-a-bit-of-Linux admin for the past decade, I will happily accept the description of Solaris-land as Bizarro World.
My last job had a mix of Solaris 10 and CentOS. Mostly running on Sun x86 kit, which is now quite price-competitive with Dell. (We had Dells running Solaris 10 as well, as and when it made sense.)
Current job is Sun on mostly SPARC. Lots of fat Niagara web servers. HOLY SHIT THOSE THINGS ARE POWERFUL. Hopefully taking delivery of new 32-thread Niagara build server shortly to replace single-core V210. We'd actually rather Solaris on x86 than SPARC, but of course there's Just This One Bit of Proprietary Stuff we keep it for. And we're basically a Java shop anyway.
I do get to run Ubuntu on my work machine, though.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Maybe you missed the whole not-getting-laid bit
Unless of course you're insinuating a whole lot of slashdotters have kids that look suspiciously similar to the postman.
The truth shall always be free: Boris Floricic is Tron.
"Can someone point out an example showing me that I'm wrong?"
You won't get any examples. The standard groupthink on here, especially coming from student, recent grads and lecturers, none of which have had any exposure to the real world, is that your business model should go something such as:
1) come up with idea you think might work in the market
2) spend lots of time and effort developing idea
3) once your product looks like it might be competitive on the market, then some behemoth such as IBM will take notice and start offering support to large corporates
4) if you are really lucky then you might get offered a job! OMGZ a JOB!!!
4) is considered to be some really great reward. You see, many on here constantly whinge and whine about the man keeping them down, how the PHB's get all the $ while they work away, how the marketdroids (insert whatever derogatory term) get to go on alcohol fuelled lunches while nobody wants anything to do with them. Yet suggest something such as they should start their own business and you will be mocked "how can you possibly compete with the IBMs etc?". Well - if your business model is to give the IBMs your software for free and hope they offer you a job then no, you won't make much money from it. You will keep making your small developer salary still whinging about how the business types make all the $ with your idea. If these same people had bothered to put some thought into it rather than blindly going "omgz i want to offer teh open source!!!" then they might have made some decent $.
Actually the release every 6 months 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4. However, these release are designed to maintain compatibility.
No, you can't use it all for free. You don't get RHN
Well, you can use the software for free, right? But not the RHN servers, so you are paying for that service along with the support contract? I never really understood what RHN was for when I used RH9 and I've never used a real RHEL box, so it's still a bit mysterious to me. But I'd be surprised if you couldn't get the RHN client software for free, even if you don't get access to the servers at the other end.
, you don't get ZFS,
Do you mean XFS? ZFS is the Solaris FS. AFAIK you can use XFS under CentOS, at least if you enable the extras repo: http://www.pantz.org/software/xfsfilesystem/centos5xfskernelmodule.html You can also use XFS with most other Linux distros, using the same free software.
you don't get RedHat trademarks,
Not really part of the software though ... it shouldn't make a functional difference to what you can do? The trademarks seem to be the main stick that prevents people simply putting RHEL up for free download.
and you don't get built-in compatibility with VMWare and various commercial installers.
If you want / need that couldn't you use CentOS, which is binary compatible with RHEL?
You *can* run more than 4 VM's, supported, with the "server" licenses, not the desktop licenses.
You can use CentOS for many purposes quite effectively, and switch to RHEL when needed. I've done that, and used CentOS for testing setups on non-standard hardware. That's difficult to do with Windows, you need the registered licenses.
The point the RH guy was making to me was that even if you have an unsupported configuration they'll just make you shut down your surplus VMs, rather than just saying "Sorry, not our problem" or crippling the software to limit how many VMs you can start. I think that's an improvement over a number of enterprise suppliers out there! *cough* MS *cough*
On the topic of switching between RHEL and CentOS, I did once read that (for the perverse) it is possible to use yum to crossgrade from one to the other. I wouldn't want to try it, put it like that ;-)
As an Australian I understand both British English and post-Reagan American so can translate the above sentence for you. It should read:
"Red Hat employs doubleplusgood mofos yawl"
Next: my Viagra prescription ran out, so I can't get laid.
My SIG is a P226
Considering that I've been at my current company for over 2 1/2 years, and haven't called Redhat or Oracle for Linux support, I'm not too worried about the quality of support.
In fact, like a lot of people, the only real reason we even pay for support is so that management feels good.
Haha, this is so true! I mean, not for me of course. Except for the being married bit. And errr... hmmm.... Hey! Look! A grue!
On a more serious note, feelings on: did we all become older as a block, and younger nerds hang out somewhere else? Or, it's more a case of the breadth of ages has broadened? If it's the former, where do younger nerds hang out these days? I mean, apart from on my lawn :-P
Or, "I was a Windows admin in a previous life and now can't get laid."
True, but honestly I think my company expenses their payroll as marketing (Look we pay for devs!) more than engineering...
Doesn't mean they aren't engineers, just that, well, I think they're PR show ponies too.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
You have a clue, you can use CentOS or any other distribution you want. Your company can't tell the difference between CentOS and something off TPB, and they're paying 1500$/year for it. And you blame Red Hat? Sorry but I'd be doing the same thing and ask if your company would need some extended warranty or monster cables with that. As usual, ignorance costs money.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They can smugly tell me "see, software isn't free?" and feel much more comfortable signing cheques for $1500/year.
... sadly, explaining CentOS to them is like telling them that I sourced Oracle from TPB.
You may not always be there.
But the Red Hat support team is a phone call away.
Your boss doesn't like being wholly dependent on his resident geek.
The support contract and the bog standard enterprise distribution are his insurance policy. His recovery plan.
>The guy you quoted is British, that would explain the "British style"... idiot. That does indeed make you a Troll.
Where in that person's post do you see that the person is British? Is it in his username, "Lemming Mark"? Is it his UID? What part of his post tells me his country of origin? I think you are the idiot.
I stand by my original comment posted above: Leave the "British-isms" like "torch", "bonnet", "boot" and "petrol" (and the annoying use of plural verbs with singular nouns) on your own side of the ocean. It's not cool, cute or hip. It's just annoying.
I think you don't understand how large businesses operate. They minimize risk whenever possible, sometimes even at the expense of profits. Running servers without some kind of safety net (read as: someone outside the company to blame) is a huge risk. Even if they have talented admin(s) on their staff, employees get sick, quit, or just don't feel like fixing some things. This is how large business operates. It's amazing they make any profit at all.
checking for libvirus... no
ERROR, libvirus.so not found, terminating
Solaris SPARC was always well supported by both Sun and 3rd parties.
It's intel that was in the doghouse. This led to the obvious situation that
you were better off running your own stuff or GNU on Solaris Intel. Although
GNU tools and other free software were also very handy on Solaris SPARC.
Free Software, despite any tendency to code to Linux quirks, is still FAR more
likely to be egaltarian when it comes to secondary platforms.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You don't get it on how to make loot with this FLOSS business model stuff. I'm not even a dev and I get it. I will try and 'splain this.
Here is the example I have used before: Remember hard wired telephones? Once a year way back then you get a free book from the phone company called a telephone directory. Inside the directory are different colored pages, white is residential, blue is government, and yellow is commercial business. Notice they have the full alphabet covered in that "yellow pages" section, businesses A-Z, autos to ..whatever, zoologists. This is 2010, ALL those businesses ALL use computers/software to make money somehow.
That's how you make money with FLOSS, use it in one of those "other" A-Z businesses. Use it tweak it customize it, then go forth boldly with computer and code in hand and build and sell your widget and service.
Stand alone software as a business directly makes some people some money, for some people, in some areas, even a few large places, but the rest of the business done on the planet simply dwarfs that, just stomps it flat. There is no comparison.
example, the article: redhat makes x-dollars supplying clients. Those clients are in OTHER business that makes 1000x. Which looks to be where to head to make the rent and food budget?
They make so much money, they can afford to pay for software and service and still make a lot of other loot, tons more than what redhat makes. I bet most of their big clients are giants and make billions, compared to what redhat makes, which is low millions.
Home depot makes money selling tools. The people who buy those tools and materials makes thousands of times more money than home depot building houses and commercial buildings and being plumbers and electricians and landscapers etc.
Not everyone will work at home depot, but a whole lot of people can work someplace else and just use home depot just as an easy way to stay up with the tools and materials they need to go make some REAL money.
Now, cooperating on code in general terms, all the floss dudes all over, lets all those guys who are in other businesses stay focused on their real business, and "make money". By sharing code, they all get spiffier tools, for free or real cheap. They then use those tools to go to work doing something useful and make money.
Given Sun's position right now, it's an excellent time to be reevaluating your relationship with Solaris.
The first step to defeating corporate personhood is convincing people to think of corporations as plural entities. Despite being British I usually write in American English, but this is a notable exception.
Ah, hate to break it to you but the Slashdot audience is getting older
Perhaps in your case (4 digit UID), but there is more than one generation of us after all.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
I Love RH for all there contribution to Open Source community. I am typing this text from one of there project called "Fedora". ;)
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
At least in my world, our banks and trading partners like to make sure we have outside support, in case one (or all) of us gets hit by a bus. That's only being responsible. Our best-supported (and most important) systems are RHEL systems. Then again, we are probably what you would consider a medium-to-large US company.
Unless your scope is kept very shallow and/or very focused, you will never be doing anything more than tweaking applications or simple debugging. The codebase for most apps is too large and if it's not your primary job / hobby then you won't have time to learn it, let alone keep up with its development.
It's wise for each company to know where they stand when making any IT expenditures, whether the goal is to have a large Help Desk for instance or outsource everything beyond a certain scope. I don't run cabling anymore, and although I could if needed, we pay contractors for that stuff. Just like I implement systems using MySQL, but I don't tweak its source or try to perform bugfixes myself (beyond Googling for answers to questions) because I have other things to do. I support other databases and systems, and I have other apps to code. My time is most valuable to my employer for these tasks, and I'm a lot more expensive than spending a few thousand a year per server for support.
Need an example? OK. We successfully implemented a fiber card in 2 of our blades (RHEL 5.4 with kernels from 5.1) and this week brought up a third blade (same model, same base OS) only this time using RHEL 5.4 with KVM for virtualization. The kernel is 5.4 and the HP drivers won't install. The issue appears that one of the RPM's (lpfc IIRC) won't install because 5.3 and higher is not supported. The support grid at HP says that 5.4 is supported. Now I need to implement the entire tested solution by the end of next week.
Do I want to play around with this? No. I have one of our network admins contact HP and work it out, and when they're finished, give me a written set of instructions which I will add to my documentation. That's how larger businesses handle this stuff.
Doesn't this create a perverse incentive to create software that is complicated and requires lots of expensive support?
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
For RHN, you don't get the service and the upstream package management and system integration tools. You get access to updates whenever CentOS gets around to them, which is actually quite fast. I have no issue with a RedHat tech being helpful for you, and helping you steer around their licensing. It's just the claim that you automatically get all RHEL software. Things like VMWare cooperation and XFS (you were right, that's what I meant) are reliant on tools that are not in the RHEL published SRPM's.
And switching between RHEL and CentOS is a bit trickier than you may realize. There are some conflicting packages, such as the "redhat-release" versus "centos-release", and various oddities that RHEL did to yum. Ideally, you also need to replace every single RPM with the RHEL version, even if the "release" number is identical or slightly older from the RHEL version. That takes a local repository of all the RedHat packages, or of CentOS, and keeping track of which ones have been successfully replaced. It's bothersome, especially if you've been using tools from the centosplus repository such as kernels (which enable NTFS, RHEL does not).
I'm not so sure about that. The creator and basically sole developer of MaraDNS has lamented how little his project has helped him finding work. In fact he's a somewhat regular /. reader, so he might chime-in about now.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Who actually WANTS a "major" release? If RH can keep everything compatible, they should, and continue to have each release being only a minor update from the last. 5.5, here I come!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You haven't got a Premium contract with Red hat or you'd know differently. First of all, Red Hat has a reciprocal support policy with HP; Red Hat has support matrices and if the HP equipment is in the matrix it's supported.
In this case the HP Fibre driver requires recompiling the kernel (or at least it did in the RHEL 5.1-compatible release). The Red Hat multipath driver used for KVM supposedly conflicts with the HP multipath driver... at least that's as far as my research got before handing it off to someone else.
We can conference Red Hat into the call as needed to get questions answered. It's like a 2-minute wait to get Red Hat on the phone. HP is another matter entirely; they often act like you're talking to a bunch of totally disorganized outsourced "techs" who are both unfamiliar with their products and our language (English).
Open Source software, unlike proprietary software, can be supported in-house better, more easily, and more cheaply than via outside support. Large "enterprises", at least those that take proper advantage of scale and hire competent engineers, have less of a need to pay for outside Linux support than your small "consulting gigs" do.
This is pretty much completely backwards. Medium to big business is where you're going to find the highest proportion of commercial software. It's only the huge players like Google (for whom extensive in-depth in-house expertise and customisation is cost-effective) and the tiny players (where even hundreds of dollars matter) who are not going to be a good fit.
Big companies use software like Oracle. Oracle support will not even speak to you if you are running their software on an unsupported OS. In the context of the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars even a medium sized business will be paying for software like Oracle, and the millions to tens of millions they will be paying in salaries and related expenses, the few tens of - maybe a hundred - thousands it might cost for RHEL licenses is barely a rounding error.
I'm working for a company selling financial software. One of the platform supported by our software is Redhat AS. Most of our customers just starting to migrate from AS4 to AS5.
In fact, if RH released AS6 right now, it would take a year for us to qualify our software on it, and it will be years before our customers would event think about moving to AS6.
I tell the powers that be that one can get support from various places, for example, Red Hat, CentOS, Mandriva, Novel or Oracle, for what is essentially the exact same system. Low cost or free support is similar to Microsoft support and comes in the form of regular updates and web site self-help troubleshooting forums. If you need phone support or on-site support, then it costs more. Then I add that since he already hired me with 25 years UNIX experience, the free support is good enough, so we can use CentOS. If I get run over by a bus, then he may have to change to paid support until he hired another old guy. I never had a problem following the above explanation.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Microsoft
employees 93,000
revenue 58.4 billion = 627 956.989 per employee
net income 14.5 billion = 155 913.978 per employee
apple
employees 35,000
revenue 32.5 = 922 857.143 per employee
net income 4.9 = 140,000 per employee
oracle
employees 73,000
revenue 23.2 billion = 317 808.219 per employee
net income 5.6 billion = 76 712.3288 per employee
red hat
employees 2,800
revenue 0.65 billion = 232 142.857 per employee
net income 0.078 billion = 27 857.1429 per employee
Even when I divide by employee's to account for the size differences, the closed source shops are making way more money then Red Hat
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
Ahem... Perhaps a glorious year to *become* a Red Hat stockholder. 2008 and 2001, on the other hand, were horrible.
What I can't figure out is why it dropped a buck and a half today, unless one of the corporate bigwigs dumped a ton of it.
You forgot to recompile anything that depends on what you just upgraded, rookie mistake.
Binary packages are a huge pain when you try to upgrade something on an otherwise stable system, and the only binary packages of the new app you want also require you to upgrade a whole stack of libs... Source lets me compile a new app onto an old system, and from a distro standpoint its a lot easier to maintain a port/ebuild than it is to rebuild packages for every distro release on every architecture.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
"I'm still not entirely convinced that the free code + support business model works as well as the traditional licensing version .."
...
That's three companies out of how many that are making real money out of 'traditional licensing'. How many venture capitalists would be foolish to get into the Microsoft, Apple or Oracle market right now. As for 'traditional licensing', that was never the case. Software was originally given away with the hardware. I see the future of this business and the way for anyone else to make real money is a return to making money off of selling the hardware. If the OEMs only realized this, it is they who really control the market, not some software licenser
You don't have to use RedHat... All your FOSS code is still available, as is lots of code RedHat wrote and released under open licenses and you are free to download that source and compile it on another distro.
RedHat is offered as a choice, and large corporations take that choice because they prefer to buy from another large company. They made the choice to spend rather than save, they could have got the exact same software for free with no support or from other sources with varying support terms. Better that they gave their money to RH than MS.
I see RH as more of a robin hood figure, highly beneficial to the OSS community... They provide legitimacy to those corporates who think that software needs to be paid for and should come with complicated licensing terms, and invest a lot of money in OSS development. Those of us who aren't blinkered by the aforementioned corporate mentality get to benefit from all of their development work for free.
And no, your not paying, the company you work for is paying... Seeing as you're a developer i'd assume you are technically competent enough that you wouldn't need any of RH's services on your own.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Only they usually screw this up through incompetence or ignorance...
One of the most important factors of having a safety net is to make sure everything you depend on has multiple sources....
Linux - RedHat, Novell, Ubuntu - check
Servers - Dell, HP, Sun, IBM - check
Routers - Cisco, Juniper - check
Windows - Microsoft ??? - FAIL
And the same for most other proprietary software... no second source, no fallback if the single supplier has problems.
If RedHat go bust, i'm sure Novell, Oracle, Canonical or anyone else will be more than happy to support your current RH installations while you gradually migrate to their distro... And seeing as how their distro will be very similar, based on the same kernel and same basic libs that migration will be fairly painless.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Medium to big business is where you're going to find the highest proportion of commercial software.
I don't consider RedHat equivalent to "commercial" software, so that isn't really a consideration. In fact that's the reason I used the word "proprietary" instead of "commercial". I'm just talking about externally versus internally supported, open source software.
It's only the huge players like Google (for whom extensive in-depth in-house expertise and customisation is cost-effective) and the tiny players (where even hundreds of dollars matter) who are not going to be a good fit.
The exceptions prove the rule. There are plenty of medium to big businesses with in-house Linux support. But you're right, for most of them, the additional cost of outside support *in addition* is a minor consideration.
Big companies use software like Oracle. Oracle support will not even speak to you if you are running their software on an unsupported OS.
The vast majority of large "enterprises" that outsource Linux support only do so due to the structural flaws of an IT support system designed around inherent limitations of proprietary software.
Thanks for making my point.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
"Red Hat" is a singular noun. It is *one* company.
Look at the meaning of the word company itself, surely an indication that you are thinking about a plurality rather than a singular. If you'd used corporation you'd be on firmer ground.
I do think its healthier to think of these commercial entities as the groups of people they are, rather than the singular legal entities the law recognises.
PS: I'm British and have every intention of continuing to use my natural language on slashdot. Annoying ACs is merely a happy side effect.
You forgot to recompile anything that depends on what you just upgraded, rookie mistake.
Binary packages are a huge pain when you try to upgrade something on an otherwise stable system, and the only binary packages of the new app you want also require you to upgrade a whole stack of libs...
Agreed, but how often does that happen? Havent happened yet to me on Ubuntu och Debian.
And you think that the intermediate RH releases (5.x) does exactly what?
There are lot of posts I see here about how the closed source model makes more money than Red Hats biz modal. I think people are missing the point (the one that Wall Street will ultimately care about). The point always has been, and always will be, future revenue growth.
I believe it is the small companies that in the last 5 years or so have started with CentOS or even other Linux distros, that will be the measure of the success of Red Hat in the years to come.
How many Small to Medium size businesses out there will be future clients of Red Hat?
By contrast, how many small to medium size biz are starting out with windows servers sitting in the corner of their office?
That is where the revenue growth for Red Hat is coming in the next say 5, 10, 20 years.
For example, I run two CentOS servers plus an all linux shop of desktops. Right now I handle all my support myself, but as we grow and I have better things to do with my time, I can very much see buying support in the future from Red Hat. In fact, I have discussed it with my partner (that has limited computer knowledge), in the event I get hit by bus or whatever as an option to keep things going.
Living in Chile
Redhat is one of the few (maybe only but I doubt that) Linux distributions accredited to be deployed on classified DOD networks.
Opinions aside, this alone is a huge revenue stream.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
All the time if you try to install something not supported on the current version..
I tried to install nagios 3.x on ubuntu 8.04 (lts), i ended up having to roll my own packages because the only binary packages available required a newer version of ubuntu.
Had it happen a few years ago with debian stable and tetex 3.0 too
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
One way to save money is to use paid versions of RHEL where you need them - production and possibly one other machine than can serve as reserve prod and/or QA - but use free clones (probably CentOS) where a bit of downtime wouldn't be a dsiaster (Dev, test, training).
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hi! I'm Rob, nice to meet you. Now you've met somebody who pays RedHat for support!
Now, I don't personally pay for support, but my employer sure does. Although in the several years I've been administrating our Oracle ERP clusters, I have not once had to call RedHat for support, but I download updates from RedHat every couple months. Can't do that without a contract unless you want to compile it all by hand.
Think of it as an insurance policy: you hope to never have to use it, but it's there for everyone's protection.
Sys admins and especially application developers generally do not like frequent major releases for their OS.
The only company to successfully pull off a rapid release cycle is Apple with OS X, and even then they had a roadmap for eventually stabilizing the platform at 10.4 and slowing down the releases after 10.5. So they had about 5 rapid releases on a 12-month cycle.
Compare that to Ubuntu, which has had many more releases than that in a shorter period of time, and with no roadmap pointing to a stabilization of the platform (in fact, with little concept of a platform at all).
"The software is free. If they don't understand what they're purchasing, that's their problem, and only yours if you decide to make it your problem."
I and people like me fought corporate policies to allow Linux as a target platform and in the datacenter. Management saw the value and supported it. They standardized on Redhat.
Linux support is community based. We have members of Redhat in our LUG which I freely share information with. Should I start charging them? Should our LUG charge a Redhat-employee membership fee? $350/year to join our mailing list. 2-day response time. $1500 for IRC, $13k/year to have access to developers who are members of the LUG?
Where do you think the Redhat employees get their information?
http://xkcd.com/670/
I guess you're saying "Be the smart engineer"?
So with the FLOSS business model, you only make money if it's successful. As opposed to closed source. Sheesh.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I think the breadth of age has grown. When Slashdot was young, there weren't as many older nerds on the Internet.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You got modded 'informative,' lol.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Really? Well that sucks. AFAIK, Mara is a very good, small footprint, secure DNS, and Sam writes good software.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I know plenty of people who pay for support from Red Hat, Novell, etc., but no one who uses that support.
Dinomite.net
If Microsoft really where to do under, the category would be "Desktop OS" and "Server OS", none of those have just Microsoft. And there's no "crisis" except on Wall Street until Microsoft starts losing money, which they are extremely far away from doing. All it means is that you're paying them far too much, they'll be pushing out new versions like EA as long as someone's willing to pay for it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I didn't know Windows admins had genitals.
My SIG is a P226
There are no other desktop or server os platforms which provide compatibility with microsoft's (largely by design)... The migration path would be extremely painful. Contrast that with a migration from RedHat to SuSE which would be relatively easy.
Migrating the OS would also in many cases require you to change applications, as a lot of proprietary applications are in the same boat. On the other hand, most applications which run on RedHat would also run on other Linux distributions.
Plenty of companies make money or appear to be making money, and yet due to various factors go under, or take their products in directions which are unfavourable to their customers.
The idea of guaranteeing multiple sources for anything you depend on is extremely basic, and yet MS seem to be granted an exception.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Our company standardized on Red Hat because it was out there in year 2000. We dont change OS'es lightly because it costs several hundred thousand dollars to test and release under a new OS, even if everything compiles right away. All the customers have to switch to the new version software and hardware platform too. Plus we a legally obliged to back support 3-5 years per standard contract in our industry (energy). Adding and subtracting a platform are major decisions then. At any given time we support approximately three platforms.
Hell yes. I've spent 3 years at my company, a windows shop, as "the Linux guy" - not that we used Linux, I came over to the company in an acquisition from a company that did use Linux. I've set up a couple of boxes, mostly Debian, for a few boring housekeeping tasks; team-specific wiki's (people *love* it compared to the fustercluck sharepoint that was previously used), SVN for version control of config files and firewall rules, caching DNS servers for bits of our DMZ. All fine and dandy, and meanwhile I learned the hell out of every windows problem I faced as well as becoming the de facto VMware guy.
Fast forward to now and we're migrating a load of old Oracle databases from AIX to RHEL; advanced in hardware now allow us to get the same performance from a cluster of x86 hardware and 24 SSD's as we do out of some POWER5's and 36U full of 15k fibre channel discs at a tenth of the hardware and support costs. 60% and rising of the rest of our wintel boxes are now happy running off a SAN on an ESX cluster.
RHEL hasn't made any significant inroads into the desktops of any company I know of, but it's cleaning up on the heavy lifting backend. Note we're not even a big company, 2000-ish people, and we've classically been quite Linux-hostile... mainly due to it being too cheap :)
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
His home page.
...
People do not need to travel to the US to post on slashdot. They use "the Internet".
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
I've used Red Hat Linux since 1997. It's never let me down. Today, I continue using Fedora which is still very well done. It is however cutting edge so it is released every 6 months, so it does have quirks. However that's where Red Hat Enterprise steps in. It's rock solid and has been for years. Red Hat is leading the way with enterprise Linux. It's no wonder that many are making the move from Windows. There are a huge list of reasons why, but I think the bad economy has really pushed companies and individuals to start looking at less expensive alternatives like Linux. How can we forget that just a few years ago, Microsoft actively published reports stating the cost benefit of using Windows. Now that people have a reason to cut costs, the real everyday truth comes out. Microsoft will say anything to make the sale, just like a salesman at your front door. I think more and more are waking up and realizing this. http://members.apex-internet.com/sa/windowslinux
Though they don't make it as clear as they could, here are some selected quotes from Sam on the Maradns mailing list:
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant