Linux ecosystem spins around Red Hat By Silicon Valley standards, Red Hat is a loser. It doesn't have an app store (though it once tried to create one). Its chief executive isn't a fresh-faced kid (though Jim Whitehurst doesn't look much older than 20). And its headquarters isn't in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, but rather in the comparative backwoods of North …
We use CentOS. We use it because we trust RedHat but can't afford them. In a few years, we should be in a position to / have a need to start working more closely with them. At that point the transition to RedHat from CentOS should be easier than transitioning from Debian. Or Windows.
Love CentOS. I never needed to make a support call in all the time I've been creating and running services on Linux.
Problem, with all jobs looking shaky, if you look at jobs out there they want RedHat with experience in the enterprise tools that are part of RedHat and not CentOS.
I love RedHat and can't hold it against them so it is something for the workforce to think about rather than the organisation.
CentOS for the organisation, RedHat for your CV.
Linux for everyone.
If you want to keep CentOS alive and free, buy more Red Hat.
Without Red Hat, CentOS is dead. CentOS can't do what Red Hat does, not many people can, which is why there are only 2 viable commercial Linux distros. The reason you don't need to call support on CentOS is a result of Red Hat's hard work on top of the community. The amount of times I would have had to 'call support' on my Fedora systems has stopped me from putting anything but a commercial distro into a production environment.
CentOS for your non-mission critical orgs, Red Hat for everything else, including keeping CentOS afloat.
Web site was a jscript infested misdesigned murky crock of management-speak (you know they're trying to be enterprise when the website is so full of pompous crap you fight to find sod all useful), but the killer was their virtualisation - it costs quite a bit, but VMware are giving theirs away for free.
Spent 2hrs on web trying to work out what they were trying to sell re virt-wise, 1/2 hour on phone trying to get a straight answer from sales bod (who also got lost on the site trying to help) with no clarification.
....finally found it prices again, only took me 20 mins just now <https://www.redhat.com/wapps/store/allProducts.html>:
2-sockets with 1 virtual guest - $349
2-sockets with up to 4 virtual guests - $1,199
My windows license + VMWare? Free. How does that business case stack up.
Hey, Redhat, I want to support you, I really do, and I *need* multiple virt (up to 3 at times) but it looks like centos, doesn't it? What are my options here, then, if I want to help you?
Never works for me either.
I always get the feeling that the Red Hat Way would be that big-ticket customers have elegantly dressed salesdroid(esse)s explain pricing & packaging to them while they sip espressos, then get heavy discounts at the end of the presentation after some light haggling.
I managed a Redhat webserver for 10 years. In that time I have come to dislike Redhat. Their repositories are small, which means anything I install outside of their repo, I have to watch for and manage security updates myself.
I don't like their rpm software manager at all. I much prefer apt-get of the Debian world.
At work we use Gentoo and Ubuntu Linux. My greatest fear is that a no-nothing manager will standardize us on Redhat.
- Greg S.
thanks for the info. I had heard about yum when it first came out. I didn't know if it was official Redhat, or just some side project.
what repository size? How does Redhat compare to Debian.
I remember having to go to http://rpmfind.net/ to find packages I needed because they weren't in the official repository.
IMHO, I think one of RH's smart moves has been the idea of keeping close to the key vendors, it meant that those vendors effectively also acted as a salesforce for RH. As an example, when we were looking at replacing some our Solaris with RHEL, we had a team of two RH peeps PLUS a team of seven hp bods, the latter being in contact with a team in hp's European presales centre and the labs in the US. End result was hp worked hard to make sure RHEL worked for us, picking up the hardware sale and gifting RH the software support. We had a similar experience with IBM and RHEL, and the Dell salesgrunt is always eager to emphasise how loved-up they are with RH.
Compare this to Novell and the difference is stark. Sure, Novell was on all the app and hardware vendors' lists, but nobody fell over themselves to push Novell. SLES was on the hp supported lists the same time as we were looking at RHEL, but we hardly heard anything about it compared to the very visible support for RHEL.
And that's why "enterprise Linux" means awful RPM distributions with screwed libraries and stupid distribution-specific changes to things like gcc: Because there are companies whose purpose is to go around telling every PHB they can find that /this/ Linux is "ready for the enterprise", which makes it automatically better than whatever OS it's going to replace (that actually worked fine and didn't need replacing).
It's the same way stuff like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and the use of Java as a teaching language in CS departments got popular: A swarm of suits pitched it to clueless administrators with degrees in business administration, who then were so awed by the Powerpoint slides as to push the decision down onto their subordinates.
there are many struggling software companies. Why pay a tax for an OS and tools? Who are you trying to make money for, your own company or a company with $50 billion in the bank?
I cannot figure out why people keep defending a 50 billion dollar company, as if they were a struggling underdog.
".....Why pay a tax for an OS and tools? Who are you trying to make money for, your own company or a company with $50 billion in the bank?...." And that's EXACTLY what annoys me about the FOSS communities whining about RH. They like to imply that RH did nothing to get where they are now and do nothing for what they charge now. All I can say is these people need to go take a look at RH as it was their ability to DELIVER that got them in the front door in the first place, and their continued good delivery since that has cemented them in our business. Especially when you consider I used them as a crowbar to remove large chunks of Solaris, a product from a company that used to be loved for their ability to deliver.
I've said it many times, try listening - enterprise companies are not charities, we don't buy on whim and we don't buy without taking a very hard look at the options. If we are still buying M$ then the reason is M$ is still doing something better than the other options. If we're buying RH rather than Ubuntu or SuSE or any other Linux distribution it's because RH have done a better job and continue to do a better job than the other disties. Simple as that.
Red Hat was the distro that brought me into the Linux world, back in the RHL 5.0 days when getting Linux to install, or even boot up into the graphical interface was an adventure. I remember griping when they killed the official Red Hat Linux distro, but not on grounds of RH "pimping" Linux, but because they killed the cheap alternative of the supported Red Hat Linux option vs. RHEL. Many said that nobody would ever use SuSE or Fedora ever again; however RHEL is now pretty well established in the enterprise market, as well as SuSE though the latter one has been losing market.
But it is nice to see RedHat sailing on, it was the first one to prove that you could actually make money out of Linux and Open Source stuff in general.
I've been managing redhat setups for a number of years and like others I've come to dislike them - limited distros and customised tweaks which mean that trying to bring in generic 3rd party stuff (or even an updated kernel!) can be a complete nightmare scenario.
And that's QUITE apart from them selling stuff which ISN'T enterprise ready (such as GFS) as an enterprise product...
Matt, we were happy for Canonical when you joined them, that hopefully you'd be able to help Ubuntu in some way or another to move ahead. But you've been such a disappointment. You blogged big time about your entry into Canonical. Then within a couple of months, you left Canonical. OK that's fine, but damn, I don't think you should be referring to yourself as previous COO of Canonical, WTF did you do there? You don't deserve it. You left before the seat of your chair got warm.
Stop irritating us by referring yourself as ex-COO of Canonical, you are not worthy of it. Shame on you to ride on the coattails of Canonical by trying to associating your name with them. Please remove any reference to Canonical in your byline. Many of us think you are an asshole for doing this.
Aaaah, that feels better now that it's off my chest.
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