Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Unveils Linux E-Commerce Server
Wonko42 writes "The subject pretty much says it all; Red Hat is now selling its new E-Commerce server for $149.99. The server is packaged with several other programs, including the Netscape Roaming Module, Squid proxy, and Webalyzer web server log analyzer. And of course, it's built to run on Red Hat 6.0. "
I'll bet mySQL would come down on its $200 license fee if it could get a nice cut of this package's sales.
If I were them, I'd cut a deal, because this product is bound to sell. Yes, it's an agglomoration of things you could get for free -- but if you've bought a Linux distribution, you've already bought a similar product.
D
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Actually, I would bet that it does.
One of the most common real-world consulting assignments is to take existing tools and put them together to make a system work. Whether they are free or not matters little - in fact, you can charge a higher fee if your client doesn't have to pay $ 5,000 for the basic system.
Remember, most software is written as a VAR/consultant for clients, not as packaged stuff.
D
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If the PHBs of this world need a trendy fad to be hyped for Linux before they'll switch, all the better for Red Hat. Let RH hype their products with marketese, and let's not rain on their parade. Most slashdot readers will spend their $150 on caffeine and gadgets (Lego!) and happily make their own e-commerce server for free.
Wah!
Lst's look at what really makes sense in the e-commerce world. Complete interactivity with the corporate data == 95% of the time you need M$ SiteServer 3.0. Best platform for secure reasons == NetBSD & Stonghold. In the real world these solutions work. RedHat is just adding fodder to the E-Commerce fray. No self respecting web store (of good size) will use this technology with products out there from IBM, and M$ that offer management tools for the store and native database connectivity built in that is secure by default.
No, no, you've got this Slashdot posting thing all wrong: the first question is always
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
With a $150 price tag, who do you think they are targetting?
They are targetting the "home user with ADSL that wants to sell a few things online". Anyone a little bigger would use some web-hosting/co-location setup. Anyone bigger than that would spend the $$$ to plan for the future.
Hmmm... I guess they could also be targetting the "new developer wants to learn about E-commerce" people too.
Edu. sig-line: Choose rhymes with lose. Chose rhymes with goes. Loose rhymes with goose.
Comparing? THEN use THAN.
Disclaimer: My employer is in the e-commerce backend business. While we run Red Hat on our site, we are in no other business relationships with Red Hat. None of our products/services are currently in Red Hat's E-Commerce kit.
How about:
hype + forms + hype + ssl + hype + CGI + hype + credit card processing + hype + tracking orders?
People sell these great "e-commerce" solutions that set up a beautiful storefront. They forget about accepting payment.
There's a lot of e-marketing software out there. Tease your eye, get you to buy. The rest of e-commerce is how to get your money, how to get the customer their product, how to track complaints...all the non-sexy stuff.
The packages that the RH kit ships with at least claim to work the backend, from payment processing and credit card authorization to order databases. As to how well the packages actually work, I have no personal experience.
As to whether it's worth the extra C-note, it's the same RH gambit: save you the trouble of getting it off the FTP site, likely bundled in with some installation support. When "trouble" can be measured in engineer-hours, that $149 is chicken feed.
--The basis of all love is respect
Question isn't entirely appropriate. The product isn't an integrated solution, rather a bundle of some open source/GPL'ed tools with the usual Red Hat offering of "TryWare" commercial stuff.
I wasn't going to ask anyone for input for a while, but I've started working on an open source Site System to try and tie in some of the things websites (both small and enterprise) need today, like user membership/personalization, indexing, logfile analysis, knowledge management etc.
I'm working on user stuff right now using PHP and Apache. If anyone is interested in something like this please contact me!
--
b) To use RSA (required for SSL) for
commercial usage you need to license it from
RSA Data Security Inc. - which is worth $100.
I talked to RSA about a licence. The price starts about $50,000.00 and goes up from there. What you are buying is the RSA LICENCE (and support).
Christopher McCrory
Lead Bithead, Netus Inc.
chrismcc@netus.com
admin@netus.com
"Linux: Because rebooting is for adding new hardware"
Christopher McCrory "The guy that keeps the servers running" chrismcc@gmail.com http://www.pricegrabber.com
: What about RedHat's "package" is worth the remaining $100 ?
Have you ever deployed squid? Have you ever deployed SSL+mod_perl? It's not rocket science, but it takes more than just installing some packages. For people who can't or don't want to employ a hacker for that integration, they can buy a package like this one.
There will always be a need for integrating existing softwares in new ways and it takes a certain amount of skill. Therefore, there will always be a market for "integrated" packages which fill a trendy niche. They're selling convenience - just like ready-made cookie dough. (mmmm...)
That's incredibly short-sighted. The real big question should be "Does it work?"
Open source is nice. Fully funtional is better.
Ok, we all know we're talking about a low-end E-commerce site here, so here's what's missing from the package:
-Easy to use database
-Graphical database tools
-Simple, graphical server/e-store configuration tools
-Web authoring tools
They can't sell a package that centers on MySQL, because that would incur their weird licensing costs (Although they can include it as an option), but maybe a PostgreSQL/MySQL option would be allright. KMySQL is a great, free database frontend that has plugins to work with other DBs (no Postgres yet, though) and could be great if RH would invest in it a little.
Templates are easy and/or freely available.
Hmm... what does that leave undone? Easy tools for building e-commerce apps. Something easier than, say, Zope or another real app server. People just want a "Yahoo Store" or the like.
--JZ
MiniVend is an excellent piece of software. This is a big market for Linux and related open-source packages. It makes perfect sense for RedHat to bundle and package this. It makes my job easier, too, because when people ask me what it runs on, I can say "RedHat E-Commerce Server" instead of getting down in the mire of having to explain and defend the open-source mentality. People want to pay for this stuff. This is a good thing.
Let's look at what really makes sense in the e-commerce world. Complete interactivity with the corporate data == 95% of the time you need M$ SiteServer 3.0.
Luckily, this is not true. After running Siteserver on a fast-growing e-commerce site for a year, we finally broke down and ripped it out and put a custom solution in its place. Siteserver compatibility generally means only that the product uses the default db table names that Siteserver creates. This can be configured or the tables can be emulated. However, Siteserver itself is little more than a bunch of poorly written Visual Basic Script scripts and some extremely inefficient objects (out-of-the-box, anyway) for storing and manipulating the shopping cart data, bundled with some site analysis tools that we didn't even use. The overhead and inefficiency of the product outweighed any benefits we got, so much that even management suggested we get rid of it.
My advice is, though, don't even start using it, because it _is_ very easy to get stuck with it when you start buying 3rd party software that runs with it, etc. The lock-in effect is harsh. But, as I was saying, luckily nearly 100% of the big-name e-commerce players offer a (usually better and more mature) UNIX version of their software in addition to a Siteserver version. This includes the credit card processors (Cybercash, Clear Commerce), etc. Note that Siteserver does not come with credit card processing software.
This has been my experience. There is no way that RedHat's package could be worse.
bob