Comments on: On the record with Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's new CEO: 'I must have a mission'

Matt Asay interviews Red Hat's newly minted CEO, Jim Whitehurst, and finds Red Hat has another believer at the helm.

[11eleven11]

Red Hat could start by reducing the barriers to trying their software.

I recently attempted to do a RHEL/SugarCRM eval, hoping I could just plug-in the license for RHEL and Sugar at the end of the eval. The RHEL/RHN eval registration process was so convoluted that I had to get my RHEL sales rep on the phone to attempt to resolve the issue. After about an hour on the phone with the call getting escalated to 2 levels of sales, I was told that the next step would be to bring support on the line, but since I'm doing an eval, I would have to pay to get support (mind you this is to get support having RHN talk to my RHEL box on fully RHEL compliant HP hardware, which in all other ways was communicating fine with the world). I'd say I wasted about 8 ours trying to get RHEL installed only to eventually fall back to CentOS. 30 minutes later I had the entire thing (CentOS and SugarCRM) installed. I will not be evaluating RHEL for any other products, we'll either go with CentOS or some other (not suse, possibly ubuntu ) distro. My organization just spent $200k on a DataCenter. We have recently implemented Zimbra, Alfresco, VMware ESX HA Cluster, Compellent SAN, and a half dozen other sizable IT projects. We're a perfect fit for RHEL, but they lost this piece of business because they positioned the eval as if we were looking to steal it.

It almost reminded me of an experience trying to get a plugin registered for ProTools which, after hours of attempting to get the plugin working legitimately, we determined that it would be easier to just go download a pirated version (it was easier).

The old model of attempting to wall the gardens and keep out unwanted users is the wrong way. It may be too late for Microsoft, but for companies like Redhat that supposedly make up the "new guard", I have no tolerance for wasted time and missed opportunities like this. Those of us that are out there building the new IT infrastructures want to kick the tires, but we're quite happy paying for the peace-of-mind that good support brings once we've made our decisions.

-jb

[odubtaig]

There's an irony and a half. I know CentOS have been told to stop referring to Red Hat (the upstream vendor) by name, but for all intents it's identical. Must be something in the water up in Redmond.

[PatrickHxxxxxxx]

I was recently in a position to possibly bring RHEL into our company and wanted to evaluate RHEL 5.1. After spending a little time trying to see if it was possible to download RHEL 5.1 for evaluation I ended up installing Fedora 7.