Free vs. pay versions (Re: Oracle Sues Google Over Android)

[matt-urrlRJtNKRMsHrnhXWJB8w at public.gmane.org (Matt Shields)]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Rich Braun <richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Jerry Feldman noted:
> > In general, if a company wants a stable system, they either use one of
> > the Enterprise class Linux systems or they use systems like CentOS.
> > Certainly Fedora might be used in some commercial environments, but I
> > would not see it as a competitor to RHEL.
>
> Well, I think Novell's strategy bears some scrutiny here.  (I envisioned
> Novell back in the '90s as one of those uber-proprietary companies packed
> with
> more lawyers than software developers, but now there's a big difference.)
>
> Ever since OpenSuSE 11.2 came out last November, I've been running a
> production bake-off between RHEL 5.4/5.5 and OpenSuSE 11.2/11.3.
>
> OpenSuSE is coming out the TCO winner by leaps & bounds. (TCO = total cost
> of
> ownership.)
>
> It's proving out one of my theories:  that as a technology becomes
> sufficiently mature, stability improves to the point that the free version
> provides reliability on par with the pay versions.
>
> Companies like Novell and RHEL will now have to turn to a new selling point
> besides "this is more stable" or "upgrades are required less often" or the
> like to get folks like me to shell out the $$$ for pay versions.
>
> The bandwagon these days seems to have trundled down the path of
> virtualization.  For those of us with our own tools to manage hundreds of
> machines, and applications which demand whole clusters of multi-core
> machines
> that don't fit into the "put all your nodes onto one physical box" sales
> pitch, those virtualization tools won't get me to buy.  But that's what I'm
> guessing RH and Novell want to sell me in 2011.
>
> -rich
>
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I'm a huge supporter of using CentOS over RHEL.  They are almost identicle
and I can get the same value from using CentOS as I do from RHEL, without
paying the huge cost.  The one big problem I've had with not using RHEL is
that when I need to get support from EMC and Qlogic for my SAN connectivity
they will not help me if I'm not running RHEL.  So I'm on my own to figure
out the problem.

-matt