MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-03-24 |
| FROM | From: "Inker, Evan"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Programmers bypass Red Hat Linux fees
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Programmers bypass Red Hat Linux fees
By Stephen Shankland
http://news.com.com/Programmers+bypass+Red+Hat+Linux+fees/2100-7344_3-563243
4.html
Story last modified Thu Mar 24 04:00:00 PST 2005
It took Red Hat 16 months to produce the newest version of its premium Linux
product, which went on sale in February for as much as $2,499 per computer
per year.
It took a group of programmers less than two weeks to release a free clone.
But the move could help Red Hat as much as it appears to hurt it.
The clone is from a project called CentOS--Community Enterprise Operating
System--one of several "Red Hat rebuilders" that have partially nullified
Red Hat's business decision in 2003 to stop giving away its supported and
certified product for free. CentOS and others--Lineox, White Box Linux, Tao
Linux, X/OS Linux and Scientific Linux--all rebuild a copy of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux from the source code components Red Hat releases.
What's new:
Free clones of Red Hat's premium Linux product are readily available.
Bottom line:
Though that might seem like a threat to Red Hat's business, the company says
the clones--unsupported as they are--could actually help, by getting people
hooked on the OS and getting them to think about the benefits of a support
package. Still, some say support is unnecessary.
The clones are both a boon and a bane for Red Hat, which used an aggressive
pricing plan to profit from its status as the top seller of the open-source
operating system.
On the one hand, the rebuilders draft off Red Hat's labors while depriving
the company of potential customers for its software and the support that
goes along with it. On the other, though, they help cement the dominance of
Red Hat's software and spread it to those who might eventually decide Red
Hat's services and reliability are worth the price.
It's clear, however, that many Red Hat clone users aren't likely to embrace
the original anytime soon.
"I don't pay for Linux, and I have absolutely no need for a Red Hat-style
subscription (for) support," said Collins Richey, a Denver Linux enthusiast
who uses CentOS on his personal computers to keep them compatible with work
machines. "I'm considering recommending CentOS for limited use as a trial
project...at work."
Red Hat chooses to see the glass as half full, with spokeswoman Leigh Day
calling the clones "good news" because they could attract new customers.
"If they try versions that are not supported or supported inadequately, they
will get a hint of the value propositions that are available for Linux and
ultimately turn to a company that can support their businesses," Day said.
Red Hat did clamp down partway on CentOS in February. Its lawyers demanded
the rebuilder strip out trademarked Red Hat names and logos.
However, if Red Hat truly wanted to hamper the rebuilders, it could stop its
current practice of releasing its product's source code in the convenient
packages called source RPM files.
"Red Hat should be thanked for making this so easy for all of the rebuild
efforts," said Greg Kurtzer, who founded the Caos Foundation that runs the
CentOS project. "I am not going to fault them for trying to make money."
Red Hat will continue releasing the source RPM files. "What we're doing now
we'll continue to do for the long term," Day said.
Despite the availability of alternatives, Red Hat subscription sales
increased from 33,000 in the quarter ended November 2003 to 132,000 a year
later. That's solid growth, but it's not as high as the peak of 144,000 in
the quarter ended August 2004. Red Hat is expected to release sales figures
for its most recent quarter on March 31.
Some see an upper limit to how much the Linux seller can charge. "The real
reason Linux is our choice is cost," said Brian Trudeau of Eastek
International in Buffalo, N.Y., a CentOS user. "Why pay for Red Hat when it
costs as much as Windows?"
Send in the clones
There are several prominent RHEL rebuild projects besides CentOS:
* Finnish Lineox, which released its clone of RHEL 4 on Feb. 25, charges
between 5 euros and 15 euros ($7 to $20) per server for its software update
service.
* White Box Enterprise Linux was born when Red Hat dropped its freely
available commercial product, Red Hat Linux, said project founder John
Morris, who runs dozens of servers and personal computers using Linux at
Beauregard Parish Public Library in DeRidder, La. "We have workstation
hardware that costs less than a RHEL contract, so something had to give when
Red Hat dumped Red Hat Linux in favor of RHEL, and thus WBEL was born," he
said.
* Tao Linux is a "community supported" version not intended for
mission-critical computers; users are expected to solve problems on their
own or with help from mailing lists.
* Scientific Linux is maintained by programmers at Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory and other labs. It's geared for technical tasks at
labs and universities.
* X/OS Linux, for which X/OS, a computing company in Amsterdam, sells
support.
CentOS in the limelight
CentOS was an offshoot of a separate Linux project called Caos Linux, said
Kurtzer, who is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory administrator and a
programmer as well. But it turned out the Caos Foundation's more popular
project was a rebuild of RHEL.
"For a new distribution to be widely used, it must demonstrate to the
community that the project and the product are both stable, reliable
solutions," Kurtzer said. "But because CentOS is based on a known codebase,
it was able to short-circuit the typical path and become an almost instant
success."
Kurtzer doesn't have firm numbers, but he estimates there are thousands,
perhaps tens of thousands, of CentOS users. The first version was announced
in December 2003.
CentOS doesn't veer from the Red Hat course. "The point...is to be as
legally identical as possible," Kurtzer said. CentOS tries, for example, to
build security updates as quickly as possible, with an informal guarantee of
a 24-hour turnaround after Red Hat releases the original.
CentOS isn't exactly free. The Caos Foundation asks for a $12 per server per
year donation to defray download costs, though few beyond some companies
pay, Kurtzer said.
The support question
After Red Hat launched RHEL, it also began a project called Fedora. That
version of Linux is available for free, but it's a fast-changing and
unsupported product geared for hobbyists and programmers who can help work
the kinks out of the latest software packages.
RHEL, in contrast, changes slowly, with updates released roughly every 18
months so hardware and software companies have time to certify that their
products work with the operating system. Support of a particular Red Hat
version lasts for seven years for those who pay an annual support
subscription.
"Enterprises may have been disabused of the notion that Linux is free, but
that doesn't mean they want to pay through the nose for it just because it
has (software partner) support," said RedMonk analyst James Governor.
There are risks to leaving the official Red Hat fold, though. A customer
isn't going to get much hand-holding, for example.
"We support three forms of Linux: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell's Suse
Linux Enterprise Server and Asianux," said Anne Pace, a spokeswoman for
storage specialist EMC. "We chose those three because when we scan our
customers, those seem to be the versions of Linux that our customers seem to
be going with."
EMC will try to help customers using other versions, Pace said. But if
they're using a Linux version EMC doesn't support, "we can only go so far,
so they'll probably need to be diverted back to the Linux company to try to
figure it," she said.
Oracle, a major software power and Linux backer, supports the same three
Linux versions as EMC, but it has a stricter policy because it wants to keep
the number of varying Linux versions to a minimum.
"Oracle wants to prevent fragmentation in the Linux distribution space,"
Monica Kumar, senior manager of Oracle's Linux product marketing, said in a
statement. "Because of the indeterminate number of possible distributions
and Oracle's desire to see customers succeed, it is necessary to confine
enterprise-class support to those distributions that Oracle believes can be
successfully deployed and supported in enterprise-class environments."
Do it yourself
Many who opt for Red Hat rebuilds are confident of their own expertise,
though.
"I've had years' worth of support from Red Hat and have never called them
once," said Jacob Leaver, a senior systems administrator who uses CentOS at
his employer, a Washington-based Internet service provider. "I find that I
can usually provide the answer to a technical problem using a Google
search."
That's also enough support for Claire Connelly, a systems administrator who
helps run 66 Linux servers at Harvey Mudd College's Mathematics Department.
"Convincing me to run RHEL on more of our systems would require Red Hat to
add some significant value over community rebuilds or other distributions,"
Connolly said. "I don't have a problem with giving Red Hat some money, as
they do a great job contributing code and support to the community. The
problem is that their current pay-for-support structure doesn't work very
well for our situation. As an academic institution, we don't have tons of
money to throw around for 'enterprise-level support.'"
A year and a half after Red Hat introduced the first version of RHEL, it
announced deep discounts to education customers that had been alienated by
the pricing choice.
But those educational discounts haven't been steep enough for some others,
either. The University of Manchester uses Linux on a "couple hundred"
workstations and servers, said Niels Walet, a professor with the
university's School of Physics and Astronomy. His main concerns with Red Hat
are support and fees, he said. He's moving several CentOS systems under his
purview to Scientific Linux to maintain compatibility among university
groups.
Some clone users could be drawn into the Red Hat fold, though. One is
Maciej Zenczykowski, a CentOS user and student in Poland who runs Linux on
three university servers and four Internet servers for his own and three
other apartment buildings. He'd be willing to pay $50 to $100 per year for
software support, and he needs the RHEL compatibility to ensure that
software from Hewlett-Packard works properly.
"Frankly, I wanted to go with RHEL 4 on (an) enterprise-level server at the
university. I even had the $50 ready for an academic license," he said. But
Red Hat's Polish reseller was charging about $120, and trying to coax
longer-term support payments out of the university's financial department
was frustrating, so CentOS won out.
Freedom from bureaucracy is one of the reasons Dave Parsley, an
administrator at Alfred University in New York, founded Tao Linux.
"It's always easier to pop a DVD into the drive to install it and not
register and not do any paperwork," Parsley said. "It's like the old days of
Linux--just install and go."
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