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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."
Red Hat's business model depends on them being the go-to people to support Linux installations. So they are happy about other Linux distros making better Linux admins who won't need their services?
VMware for some of its major products like vCloud only support Redhat and not the clones as the installed OS for the cell, so they're putting Money in your pocket not taking it. Silly CEOs always running around being threatened by people paying them.
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.
How many of these "Linux geeks" can support an entire OS stack for the same money?
Because it is not geeks that pay for Red Hat but their bosses.
This is highly debateable. Why not use Photoshop as an example.
A lot. I've seen enough "enterprise-grade" services contracts from RedHat to know it.
Other than blu rays, most things seem to be the same price at best buy and amazon or newegg
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!
CentOS, which is COMPLETELY legal and above board, has absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with counterfeit Windows products.
CentOS:
1) Violates NO copyrights
2) Is not passing itself off as something else
3) Has never been treated by Redhat as anything but completely welcome.
4) Is produced by completely building from (libre!) source, not disk copying the install media.
5) Is careful to remove Redhat branding where trademarks are involved.
Jim Whitehurst never uttered the silly parallel as far as I can see, nor implied it. He just made the obvious point that CentOS does not hurt Redhat but may well help it.
It's hard to go wrong with RedHat. From a management perspective, it's a lower risk to just shell out for RHEL vice even thinking about something like CentOS. It's the "no one ever got fired for..." thing at work.
And as far as a company to give money too, you could do a lot worse than RedHat. They contribute a lot of stuff we don't think about.
Also support is one of those things that's undervalued by the technically minded. Yes, there is a great community around linux, and yes, a technical guy can probably find enough resources for free to solve just about any problem.. but there is something to be said about having a phone number you can call and someone is literally being paid to give you an answer.
best buy high presser sales made it to showrooming place
If I had dozens or hundreds of servers and every minute of downtime could cost the company thousands or millions of dollars, I would want support professionals I trusted available at a moment's notice to fix things when they break.
My first inclination would just be to hire competent people on my own - if I'm the one paying their paycheck directly, and I treat them with respect, I would hope that a sense of loyalty and a desire to keep from collapsing the company that issues their paycheck.
But if I truly believed Red Hat, Microsoft, Canonical, HP, Dell, Oracle, or anybody else had genuinely first class support staff, I would consider having a smaller number of my own staff and relying upon the vendor as needed. My own inclination is to support Red Hat, because just about everything they do is open source. Canonical would come second, with the rest following behind and Oracle last. But that's my personal favoritism towards open source, if I was running a business it would just be a cost-benefit analysis including heavy research into the support experiences other companies have had with each vendor.
I guess there is not enough Linux geeks for every company, I guess even experts do not know everything, and as long as you can do everything, we just ask you to do more for the same price.
Why a company outsource security (watchmen) to a 3rd party, or office cleaning services?. Because they don't want the overhead of having to schedule people times, vacations, salary payments, hardware they need, training. Instead of tha,t they contract some service that do that for them. You take care of the people you need for your core service or product, let the rest to others
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.
Geeks are very hard for non-geeks to hire and manage. They don't really understand us.
Companies often hire incompetents. Usually it goes something along the lines of: 'I'll hire just 1 HR drone, to handle only paperwork etc. I'll stay in charge of all hiring decisions'. 2 years later...air thieves are everywhere and dice has a new, regular customer.
For almost all cases getting you to hire an incompetent is a double win for HR/staffing companies. They get paid and you'll be back...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
No. Not unless you like locking up everything in every office, every night.
You hire a competent office manager, he manages all the cleaning and support staff.
The cleaning services are _all_ bottom feeders. At what they pay and who they hire, supplementing income with anything not tied down is 100% expected and tolerated. Once the cops arrest the cleaner, the service might accept they _had_ a problem. Not having thieves in your offices nightly is part of taking care of your people. It sucks to have personal things stolen from your office/cube.
Security is tougher to bring in house, unless you're big enough to fill a whole building. Network security is another question completely.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
With all the Linux geeks running around, why does anyone pay for RedHat's service?
Because Red Hat keeps a stable of well equipped Linux Geeks on staff to answer the questions from Linux Newbies (and geeks) might ask. They also have SLA's so you have assurances that an answer will come in a known time. It is also WAY cheaper to pay Red Hat for a year's worth of support for those 10 servers than to have a 24x7x365 staff of Linux Geeks of your own.
Cheaper, plus the added benefit of having somebody else to blame when the CTO comes gunning for blood because the CEO is on his case for the server being down... There are reasons to pay Red Hat. Personally, I don't, but I can see reasons.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
not just favouritism towards open source. If you, as a company, made your money doing nothing except support... your support will be damn good.
Microsoft, Oracle etc, might (do) have some great 3rd line support engineers... but you have to get past the army of call centre drones and basically beg for help.
So it shouldn't be just because you like the idea. RH, Canonical will just be significantly better.
The suits wanted to buy licenses for RHEL to upgrade the nodes, the IT staff wanted to use CentOS
so the IT staff didn't want to use RHEL, they wanted something identical to RHEL instead.... stupid.
If it was just down to some anti-corporate kind of dumb thinking, then surely said IT staff should be handing back their salaries..
Or.... It could be that the IT budget was fixed, so they had to make a choice between spending on line-of-business issues vs. (what is in effect) an expensive support contract so the FEA guy can run his simulations faster. Frankly, we just don't know all the facts to second guess their decision.
Place nail here >+
RedHat's success is based on knowing who their real customers are: enterprise and government. Enterprise users can't take the risk of using an unsupported solution, so they are ALWAYS willing to pay the relatively reasonable subscription fees. Same applies to government. CentOS plays well with the rest of the world - those willing to risk running an unsupported operating system. RedHat don't care: those guys are not their customer. CentOS and Fedora both are great training grounds and test beds, but it will be cold day in hell before a Fortune 500 CIO bets the farm on either.
Linux dudes,
With all the Linux geeks running around, why does anyone pay for RedHat's service?
Aren't there plenty of Linux folks around the World where you can get anything RedHat provides cheaper?
With that attitude, it's no wonder that plenty of people would be disincentivized to write Linux applications, or package Linux distros. Why do it, when the bulk of the people interested in it are freeloaders not willing to finance their work? And please don't give us the service aspect - not every developer wants a career in supporting services - they'd rather either market or build product.
The reason Linux is seriously considered at all in business is Red Hat - if a company wants to base either its products or IT infrastructure on Linux, the only reason for them to seriously do it is Red Hat. Do you seriously think anybody would build their IT infrastructure on Knoppix, Fedora, Sabayon, Manjaro, Salix, gNewSense or the hundreds of other distros out there? While some might consider things like Debian or Gentoo or the BSDs, the only other distros that businesses would seriously consider are those that have corporate backing out there - Red Hat, OEL, SUSE, Mandriva, FreeBSD (iXsystems) and so on.
There is also the reason that the bulk of the reason that Linux is where it is today is b'cos of Red Hat. Oracle never got into maintaining their own fork - they just take every RHEL version, rebrand it and then tweak it to work w/ their software. CentOS wouldn't exist w/o Red Hat. Also, applications that previously used to run on Sun or HP workstations - the CAD packages, for instance - have all migrated to Lintel, and they're not there on all distros like Firefox is. They are supported on only one - Red Hat. I wonder whether they'd even entertain people wanting support on a variant such as CentOS, OEL, Scientific Linux or Mageia.
What you want as a software vendor:
1. Paying customer (gives you marketshare)
2. Non-paying users (gives you mindshare)
3. Users using competitor's products for free (loss of mindshare)
4. Users paging for competitor's product (loss of marketshare)
The above is only true in a market that has meaningful competition.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
I've never had anything go missing overnight at the office - and that includes wallets with cash and cell phones. Personally, I trust cleaning staff more than the typical office drone...
If you buy an enterprise support package from Microsoft, which costs - of course - quite a bit of money on top of what you're already paying for your software licenses, I understand that their support teams are excellent.
But I agree with your point - Red Hat and Canonical make almost all of their revenue from support, so if they get that wrong they're screwed. They have a bigger interest than Microsoft in getting it right.
You leave your wallet in your office overnight? I'm going to call bullshit on you. You're just a class warrior, trying to make some point.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Not on purpose but I've been forgetful a number of times in the past.
If someone offers you a "free beer", that's getting something most people expect to pay for, but for free. That's what "free as in beer" is alluding to. You shouldn't call other people idiots just because you don't understand what they are saying.
My Galaxy SIII is sitting on my desk at the office right now. I forgot it when I left early for the Elder Scrolls Online beta stress test that started at 3pm my local time. I cincerely hope that the alarm clock does not go off before I get in tomorrow.
CentOS is still largely dependent on a small group of individual contributors. I have do not qualms about its stability or performance, but if I need 100% reliable updates and bug fixes and my revenue generated by these servers is in the 7+ digits, then I'll pay the $150 for RHEL. I don't need the phone somebody support, just an OS with the backing of a company that has billions on the line since I am not entirely comfortable trusting my millions to 6 guys who are largely volunteers.
I'll certainly trust development and testing to CentOS though.
Go back and read the centos-devel list from the CentOS 6 build period if you don't believe me, but EL6 was not self-building. The CentOS 6 guys (much kudos) spent vast amounts of time fiddling with building this library with this compiler on this host with this version of this build library, to find the exact build combinations that would make CentOS6 a binary-compatible EL6. Hence, it was over a year behind. It was thought that this was done to frustrate Oracle, like the giant-kernel-patch-blob issue, but really, Oracle can hire a dozen guys to get it done in a month while CentOS is harmed for over a year.
Maybe the CEO has changed his thinking, or perhaps the same ethos does not pervade the company. I guess we'll see when EL7 rolls around.
P.S. - he's right, many customers upgrade from CentOS to RHEL for deployment-time support. Others stay with 3rd-party support which can be more comprehensive.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)