Just to add some other points....
1) RedHat is clearly targetting the mid to large enterprise customer who
values stability more than 'leading edge'. ie, if I have 400 servers, I
don't want to upgrade then very often (if at all). The isv's
(Oracle, WebLogic, IBM, etal) often have 4-6 month certification cycles.
They can not and will not support rapid releases. They need fine
grained, closely controlled patches which are trackable and able to be
backed out easily. This is what RedHat is providing in the 'Advanced'
series. For instance, the Advanced Server kernel is 2.4.9-e10. The e10
is critical. It is the stable 2.4.9 release with 10 discreet patch sets applied
to it. It includes the O(1) scheduler and async io, but it is presented
to the isv's and enterprise customers in a much more fine grained (and
'traditional') way than 2.4.10-1, followed by 2.4.11 etc, etc.
2) RedHat employs a large number of the top kernel and gcc coders
(starting with Alan Cox on the one hand and the maintainer of gcc on the
other). The money they are collecting from the large enterprises is
being put to good use :-).
3) RedHat also seems to have put pencil to paper and figured out where
their profit points lay. They figured out that supporting 'consumer'
releases for long periods of time is not a loss leader, it is just a
losing proposition. They've figured out that there is a clientele who
is _overjoyed_ to spend $1500-2500 per server per year for a solid, open
source based distribution with certain characteristics, and they are
developing a set of products for that clientele. They are already
getting of reputation for only bending so far on price, and have
demonstrated that they will walk away from deals which are losers.
4) While the money lies in the enterprise, they are also aware that the
future sys admin base and user base lays in the consumer market. They
have done alot to make Linux more attractive to casual users (with
BlueCurve), while at the same time preparing the way for Advanced
Workstation.
5) Russ is absolutely correct that with a little elbow grease and
thought he can build as good (or better) of an Advanced Server than
RedHat does. But most people are not Russ :-). Advanced
Server/Workstation is still 100% Open Source. You just have to want it
enough to figure out how to put the pieces together. The GPL does not
guarantee a free ride: it guarantees that you are free to ride.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE jim@rossberry.com
http://www.rossberry.com
On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Ronald KA4INM Youvan wrote:
> > While researching the problems I am having with RHN, I came across this
> > interesting article about ReHat's push to get its customers to pay for
> > their premium products...
>
> > Any thoughts?
>
>
> Yea, while Slackware remains, as always, FREE!
>
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