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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.
Admins never needed vendor support, managers do. That means that CentOS trains the admins on Red Hat and then managers pay for the supported thingie.
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!
When you have servers labeled production, that generate revenue and downtime means lost revenue, then you pay for support since its cheaper than losing revenue and customers
Also, if people (not managers, but hobbyists, students, and bored IT folks on their own time) learn RHEL-like distros, then that means there are more people who are familiar with the environment. That in turn means more software targeting that environment, a bigger talent pool for companies to hire from, and greater mindshare.
Better for RedHat to 50% of enterprise Linux and 40% of those users paying than 100% of the users of a distro with only 10% of the enterprise Linux market. More marketshare is pretty much always good.
One can easily imagine a scenario where some startup hires a bunch of guys who "know RedHat" and set up servers using Cent. As they grow and start needing additional support and enterprise-targeted features, though, who are they going to turn to? Switching to RHEL is going to be less disruptive than pretty much any other option at that point, right?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You are focusing on the differences but ignoring the similarities which Whitehurst was concerned about.
CentOS doesn't put money in Red Hat's pocket directly, but it helps cement Red Hat as a standard for enterprise Linux distributions.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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.
I always thought almighty god was zeroth level support. As in "You turn this sucker on and I'll pray to god that it works this time!"
From there, it's not good. You pick up the phone and descend to to the first circle of limbo, reserved for call center operators doomed to read from scripts. Next is the second level, where the phones are answered by system support groups, pummeled eternally by threats full of hot air to call their managers. The third level is a noisy, cold, icy machine room where system administrators are berated every time they take a call. The fourth level is where engineers are forced to joust with managers to keep their jobs while their phones ring endlessly. The fifth circle is where the VPs are tormented by joyless CEOs, members of the board, and majority stockholders in status meetings. The sixth circle is reserved for the salesmen who lied about their company's products, where they are surrounded by stacks of flaming four color glossy brochures touting features their systems never supported. The seventh circle is where the CFO sits in a rain of fiery charts of accounts and charges of embezzlement. The eighth circle of callbacks is where the company lawyer sits in a tarpit, where judges and prosecuters jab him with pitchforks full of product liability lawsuits. And the ninth circle is where the CEO is strangled and choked by a rack full of ethernet cables and fiber optic pipes, never understanding why none of them can ever hook up his iPhone to his PC no matter how hard he tries, and is bludgeoned by passing stockholders throwing dead batteries at him.
At least that's how we do support.
John