The assumption here...
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn Jun 18, 2009 5:12 AM EDT |
The assumption here is that commercial support doesn't buy you anything. That just isn't always true. I saw first hand the level of support Red Hat gives their large enterprise clients when I worked for them. Guaranteed response times, access to engineers, even a dedicated consultant in cases where problems couldn't be solved in a timely manner. I'm all about free community support but sometimes having that level of access to the developers and engineers really does buy a high quality, timely response. I've also run into situations where the community simply couldn't answer a question that I asked. If I don't have the paid suport and can't figure it out for myself I'm S.O.L. That doesn't happen often but the advantage of the paid support is the ability for a company to go beyond the normally available resources. Sorry, this attempt at humor falls flat. The derision aimed at commercial Linux company and paid support is unwarranted and inaccurate. |
| jdixon Jun 18, 2009 7:20 AM EDT |
> The derision aimed at commercial Linux company and paid support is unwarranted and inaccurate. When your business depends on the software running, a paid support plan is essential. For anything else, it's optional. For normal home use, there's not much reason to even consider it. |
| rijelkentaurus Jun 18, 2009 10:31 AM EDT |
Red Hat's support is also very cheap, all things considered. For the advanced server, it's $2400 per server, that's unlimited 24x7 phone support and web support, from people who know what they're doing. It's cheaper on the regular version, I think you get unlimited for about $800 a year, that's 24x7 phone support. 12x5 is cheaper than that. Those are cheap prices for situations where you need the support. For home use or when you don't need the support, you can run a Red Hat clone, or install Red Hat proper and keep it updated from the source RPMs on their FTP site. Red Hat makes it very easy to build a clone or to keep up their version without support. |
| caitlyn Jun 18, 2009 12:22 PM EDT |
I'll also point out another common trick used by cost conscious smaller businesses. They pick one or perhaps two critical machines to have support on. They then install RHEL across a wide number of unsupported machines. This does NOT violate any license agreement. RHEL is still GPL software and nothing stops you from installing as many copies as you want. |
| Sander_Marechal Jun 18, 2009 12:44 PM EDT |
Cairlyn: You're right that doesn't violate any license, but IIRC Red Hat won't give you support if you do that. It's the main difference between Red Hat and Canonical. Red Hat is cheaper but you need to buy support for all machines. Canonical allows you to buy support for just a few, but costs more per machine. |
| bigg Jun 18, 2009 12:55 PM EDT |
> nothing stops you from installing as many copies as you want Provided they are all your own machines. My recollection is that Red Hat's trademarks prevent you from sharing. |
| caitlyn Jun 18, 2009 1:08 PM EDT |
@bigg: I bleieve you are right about that. I am talking within one company ororganization. @Sander: When I worked for RH there were numerous customers who bought support for their production systems but not the QA, testing, or development boxes. We cheerfully ignored the non-production systems and did do whatever was needed for the others. Please note that I mainly dealt with large clients. I don't know how a small customer would be treated. OTOH, a small customer likely wouldn't have a RH consultant come on site. |
| dowdle Jun 18, 2009 1:28 PM EDT |
I really don't understand the "point" of this jesting article. Does the person want a free beer community distro with free beer support? All of the distros (community or pricey) are going to be free speech. I supposed he'd like a free beer distro which offers optional pay support services. If so, there are plenty of distros to choose from. Since Red Hat is the leader, I'll use them as an example. Red Hat used to offer a free beer distro with optional pay support. It was called Red Hat Linux. That model didn't work very well... so they split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and (eventually) Fedora. And you have the current situation where you have a fee beer distro without support or a pay support distro. RHEL is supported for 7 years and Fedora offers updates for N+2. People have often looked for something in-between and for many that something is any of the RHEL clones... with the most popular seeming to be CentOS. There is also Oracle who offers paid support services for RHEL or their own RHEL clone... and I'm sure others do the same... independent consultants. And you can find people who will offer paid support services for CentOS... and some of the RHEL clones also offer paid support services. As a user of Fedora, CentOS and RHEL, I can tell you that there is a huge, Huge, HUGE difference between Fedora and CentOS/RHEL... and with only a tiny bit of research those differences should be obvious... so it *IS NOT* just a matter of... well you can have the community distro for free beer but if you need paid support services you have to get RHEL. It seems to be that Ken Hess is complaining about the only commercial Linux distro business model that has been successful and seems to be the one that everyone is emulating. The good news is that while everything isn't free beer everything is free speech. If you aren't happy with the way things are... that is an opportunity for you (or others) to change them and make them the way you like them. More power to you and good luck. |
| Steven_Rosenber Jun 18, 2009 6:07 PM EDT |
If you're running the actual branded RHEL (and not CentOS), don't they "turn off" your ability to update the system if you're not paid up? And I wonder if anybody offers support for Fedora, say a 3rd-party company? |
| caitlyn Jun 18, 2009 6:12 PM EDT |
Quoting:If you're running the actual branded RHEL (and not CentOS), don't they "turn off" your ability to update the system if you're not paid up? Through Red Hat Networy, yes. IRL most places I supported maintained their own in house repository rather than allowing every server access through the firewall using RHN. They either used Red Hat Satellite Server or else rolled their own yum repository. yum packages from RHEL are available through Dag Wiers (sp?) excellent third party repo. It's not officially supported by RH but it is commonly used. So long as at least one system is still under support there isn't going to be any problem downloading the updates and populating the in house repo. |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!