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First Billion Dollar Open Source Software Vendor
head_dunce writes "Red Hat is doing very well in this economy. Total revenue and subscription revenue for this quarter is up 28% year-over-year. Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat said, 'Based on the strong first half results, we believe Red Hat remains well positioned to finish fiscal 2012 as the first billion dollar open source software vendor.'"
They should go back to a freely downloadable, but unsupported version. Compared to enterprise level support from other vendors(Unix, Windows, etc) I don't think their pricing is that bad, but an easily accessible free version with no support would alleviate the headaches of waiting for CentOS and others to keep up. Fedora is nice, but it's too far removed from the main Red Hat release and can be unstable.
They should go back to a freely downloadable, but unsupported version.
It's called Fedora.... Also known as the upstream source for RHEL.
And... that's the whole point of Fedora vs RHEL. This has been discussed everywhere for years.
Users want something free - thats Fedora. OEMs and Vendors want something with long term support and accountability - which costs money. Thats RHEL, which you pay for.
All the companies that switch to CentOS, fine with me - but play nice, and buy at least 1 support contract/license from Red Hat. It's a nice way of saying thanks to the main company doing all the hard work.
I'd really like to see a breakdown of their subscription revenue. I heard a couple of years ago that their JBoss offerings were growing faster than the OS subscriptions, and they seem to be putting a lot of resources into that line. I think it offers a more compelling value proposition for businesses. I mean, their Linux OS isn't really anything special, compared to other distros or even [gasp!] Windows server, when you consider the subscription / support costs. On the other hand, when you compare the JBoss stuff to similar platforms from IBM, Oracle and the others, it's a hell of a bargain.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Have to agree.
And the support fees are mandatory- no way to download a copy of RHEL from them without signing up to pay.
You can download a 60-day trial of RHEL here, just make a free RHN account first.
https://www.redhat.com/wapps/eval/index.html?evaluation_id=1008
It doesn't time out and you can use it forever you just won't receive updates after 60 days. You can also compile your own updates from the freely available SRC rpms like all the other RHEL clones do should you choose.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Of course it'd be good for you, the question Red Hat will ask is "What's in it for us?" That it doesn't have support isn't going to stop people from blaming "the red hat server" when things go to hell, maybe they'll get a few incident support fees but very little else. On the other hand they're likely to lose a lot of basic support agreements from companies who bought it because some PHB has heard of Red Hat, but never CentOS. There's a reason Fedora has its own name and brand and it's not Red Hat Linux anymore, because they don't want reports of Fedora problems to sound like RHEL problems.
I mean, like some other person commented there are plenty products that are very similar, if you just need a free server there's Debian or Ubuntu LTS, I don't know if SLES has a free version but if you absolutely want to run RHEL it's because you want their QA on it. Maybe that should be worth a little, otherwise you're free to help do the work of creating CentOS yourself and not just wait for others to help you. No payment, no contribution, yes it's easy to lean back and say please give me everything for free but the work doesn't do itself.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
At the risk of feeding a troll, it is most definitely open source because you can download the entire source code (from RedHat), modify it if you want, and roll your own distribution with it. Which is exactly what Scientific Linux and CentOS does.
The support fees only appear "ridiculous" when considered out of context. Red Hat is in the market of providing premium support solutions for enterprise. How much do you think similar companies charge for premium enterprise support? IBM? Oracle? Microsoft? Red Hat has a high value support proposition in the Linux industry: they have skilled engineers with expertise across the entire Linux stack. If you have a support contract query that requires escalating, then they are able to do it. If you have a problem with a low-level kernel issue, then Red Hat can provide kernel engineers. If you have an issue with the GCC toolchain, they have some of the people who maintain GCC who can work on it. You have a Java or JBoss problem? They have people who can do that.
And here's the big deal - if you have an interaction issue, where, say, JBoss performs badly on a particular series of kernel builds, then they have people who can work on that from both ends. How many other Linux distributions can say that they can offer support services across the entire Linux software stack, from compiler to kernel to Java Enterprise server, supported by the engineers who actually wrote and maintained the upstream projects? That is why enterprises are happy to pay Red Hat so much for a premium support package.