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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."
The only way I can get by using my IT mandated RedHat box is by installing CentOS packages on it. RedHat simply doesn't keep the packages I need up to date. If CentOS didn't exist, I wouldn't use RedHat at all, which would entail a huge fight with IT. Thanks CentOS!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The virtualization itself is awesome - to my knowledge nothing proprietary beats the stability and performance of KVM. The weakness is the fancy tools around managing your virtual infrastructure. But Red Hat, OpenSUSE, and others are working very hard to make the tools built around KVM, VirtualBox, Xen, etc... better so they can compete with the best VMWare has to offer head-on.
I can't say I enjoy working with RHEL (or its derivatives); I'm known for making a sour face whenever RHEL or CentOS are even mentioned. I can see why it's so popular (extensively validated rock-stable code), but these very same attributes make it very poorly suited for our needs (scientific computing - often using bleeding-edge software features and needing to squeeze the last bit of power out of bleeding-edge hardware).
But ask me about the company Red Hat? I'm a big fan of them. They have a relatively pure Open Source business model, and are showing the world that good money can be made out of it too. Not to mention their attitude. "Wanna clone our operating system? Be our guest, you'll only make us stronger."
On a more serious note, they're probably right about CentOS cementing their position. See also this very insightful post.
KVM and VirtualBox on Linux both run Windows VMs flawlessly. KVM was originally created by engineers at Qumranet for the specific purpose of running Windows guests in virtualization on Linux hosts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qumranet