Comments on: Red Hat: Economic crisis to boost open source

CEO Jim Whitehurst says companies consolidating their tech infrastructure and reducing spending will consider open-source software. But will it help enterprise-level providers?

[Kwasiowusu]

Jim Whithurst is living in dreamland if he thinks the meltdown on Wall Street is going to lead to firms switching to Red Hat, when Red Hat as some of the highest TCO in the business,
Why should any company go through the huge expence of switching software to an inferior product,only to end up with higher overall costs, in staff training costs, technical support costs etc?

[boloIT]

Red Hat is reminiscing over the pop of the internet bubble, when they could walk through Sun's installed base replacing SPARC hardware. But now Solaris is open source, runs on more hardware platforms than Red Hat, costs less, has ZFS, DTrace (and even their SPARC hardware's pretty rockin') - and Red Hat's the high priced, low quality product. Jim ought'a worry about folks like me just consolidating back to Solaris...

[goodspeed8701]

Switching to Red Hat is like starting all over again, I so why should any company do that? On the short run switching will cost a company alot so it is a stupid idea. And more over the platform is not a easy to use platform, Staff training will cost alot.

[rklrkl]

One thing not mentioned in the article is that the credit crunch might make people think twice about the high cost of RHEL licenses and there's a ready-made free solution to replace them: CentOS. I suspect the only way we'll see an upsurge of RHEL license purchases in these tight times is if Red Hat actually lowered their prices (another idea not mentioned in the article), but I doubt that'll happen...

[Penguinisto]

Damn, y'all obviously have never run an RHEL shop...

Conceptually (and yes, legally), you only need one RHEL subscription - you turn that machine into a YUM server which all the other servers in turn patch off of. In practicality, you have extra licenses for different server types (e.g. CA servers), and one per mission-critical server, with all the not-so-critical machines patching fof the aforementioned home-brew YUM server. This of course assumes that you have a competent sysadmin.

So, err, no kids - RHEL licensing is certainly NOT expensive. Even if you ran the subs/server ratio at 1:1, you still pay way less than the monster cadre of CALs and other licenses required to run an all-Windows shop (in which case you have zero choice, and the BSA comes around to back up MSFT's demands that you pay every penny they think you owe them).

And yep - there's CentOS as well. :)