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Red Hat CEO: Bring On the Clones
An anonymous reader writes "Best Buy and Barnes and Noble have a problem with showrooming — shoppers checking out the merchandise in their stores and then proceeding to order the goods at a discounted prices online. And Red Hat might have a similar problem with people (not just college kids and software professionals boning up on their skills at home, either) using the free-as-in-beer CentOS rather than licensing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and paying support fees. But according to CEO Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's competitive position may actually be helped by CentOS in the same way that counterfeit Windows products sold on the streets in the Far East may have helped Microsoft — by cementing their position as the technology standard, in a marketplace that also includes entrants from SuSE, Debian, Oracle, and Ubuntu, just among Linux-based entrants. Who does Whitehurst consider to be Red Hat's most direct threat? VMWare."
Downloading CentOS isn't at all like pirating a copy of Windows--Red Hat consists almost entirely of open source code. People pay for Red Hat for the support. I've actually worked on a cluster where we paid for one copy of Red Hat for the head node, then loaded 15 copies of CentOS onto the remaining nodes. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Which packages would that be? Since CentOS is a clone of RHEL you would get the same packages as in RHEL by doing that.
something comes up, you don't know how to solve it off the top of your head. quick research yields nothing. your company is losing revenue. you don't have time to post a question on a forum and wait a day or so for a solution. for that system you pay the 4 hour or less support costs so that if you need it, you call the vendor and get someone on the phone NOW.
where i work we pay Cisco and other vendors for support for this reason and the fact that with a lot of vendors you need to pay to get patches and updates
Why do you assume Microsoft represents the industry?
From my understanding Redhat Support buys you direct access to not only kernel programmers but the distribution people. I've heard of situations where high dollar customers got Redhat to troubleshoot a problem and provide them a custom kernel to fix the problem and then rolled the changes into the main kernel.
Microsoft's business is selling licenses. RedHats business is selling support.