MESSAGE
| DATE | 2013-08-23 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Linux Business
|
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2013/08/21/why-did-red-hat-ultimately-win-the-battle-for-monetizing-linux-support/
Why Did Red Hat Ultimately Win The Battle For Monetizing Linux Support?
Paul Reiber, UNIX/Linux Customer Service
Red Hat has dominated in
providing ?/corporate production Linux/? because it not only understands
/Linux/, it understands /corporate/, and it understands /production/.
What does it mean to understand /corporate/?
They provide certification training and tests ? RHCSA/RHCE/RHCA ? and
they?re not just guessing when they say that if you learn the material
and pass those tests, you?re qualified to work in a particular capacity
with RHEL.
Certification is exactly what?s needed to differentiate between ?some
smart guy who manages our servers? and ?our Red Hat Linux expert, who
manages our servers.? Certification means respect, and authority, and
the ability to make decisions, not just recommendations.
They provide corporation-friendly licensing. No surprises. Red Hat | Red
Hat subscription model: How it works
? they have a
very good customer portal, available consulting, and outstanding support.
Additionally, from the perspective of understanding /corporate,/ they
communicate quite well about their strategies for the future, helping
their customers to feel comfortable counting on them.
What does it mean to understand /production/?
Mainly, it means ensuring that what they do doesn?t break anything.
Red Hat provide carefully-crafted package updates for all packages in
all versions of Linux that they currently support. The change sets made
to Red Hat?s repos are extremely carefully vetted to ensure they?re safe
to apply. This ensures that large corporations (such as hosting
companies) can safely allow unattended automatic updates of thousands of
production servers /en masse./
It also means they don?t put their needs in front of their customers
needs, from an operational perspective. You won?t find Red Hat servers
failing to boot or work properly because they?re unable to verify their
licenses are valid, for example. Licensing is a finance issue, not a
production issue.
Lastly, from the perspective of understanding /production,/ they?re not
frivolous. You won?t find arbitrary cruft in Red Hat Linux.
What does it mean to understand /Linux/?
Red Hat is highly dedicated to Open Source. They GET IT. They
understand, and they contribute, in a BIG way.
Red Hat isn?t bleeding edge ? it?s far from that, it?s goal is to be the
most stable release it can be. However, they do lead the way, via the
?Fedora? distro, to which they contribute very heavily. If you want to
see where Red Hat will be in a few years, check out Fedora.
Fedora users are developers and experimenters. They understand that
Fedora is chock full of new things that might, and do, break. And they
understand that in helping to fix those new things, they?ll be that much
more familiar with them when they?re eventually introduced into Red Hat
Linux.
Strategically, Red Hat is investing in Open Stack. With that, it?s
ensuring its future as the computing world moves to embrace the cloud.
/This question originally appeared
on Quora . More questions on Linux
:/
* /What are the major changes that Android made to the Linux kernel?
/
* /How do programming languages implement ?sleep? functions?
/
* /I am shifting from Windows to Linux. Can you please completely
explain Linux, as I am new to it?
/
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