[mdlug] It's here!

[Wojtak, Greg]

The experience I've had with paying for Red Hat subscriptions has been
thus:

We migrated from Gentoo over to RHEL a while back because of the support.
All we had with Gentoo was forums and mailing lists, not to mention that
3rd party vendors would most likely support their software on Red Hat.  We
went ahead and migrated everything and paid thousands for dollars for
subscriptions and built a Red Hat Cluster which was another reason we
thought it would be a good idea to drop the money on it.

Two years later, after opening several tickets with Red Hat support and
either resolving them ourselves in the time it took to get anywhere or not
getting them resolved at all (I think the exact ratio of tickets that were
resolved by Red Hat support was about 20%), we scrapped our cluster and
migrated all but the most high profile production systems to CentOS.  Why
pay for support if 8 times out of 10 we end up solving the issue our
selves?

We've since let our local sales rep know of our issues so that steps may
be taken to correct this.  Unfortunately, his position was created too
little too late -- after we had already migrated those systems we wanted
to migrate to Cent.  We still use RHEL on our prod corporate servers (in
my opinion the RHEL-based distributions are without a doubt the best), but
when the subscription prices are based on support and that's thrown out
the window, it really makes a tough sell.

- Greg

On 2011-02-22 2:32 AM, "thomas at redhat.com" <thomas at redhat.com> wrote:

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>On 02/19/2011 03:46 PM, Carl T. Miller wrote:
>> Finally there's a freebie version of RHEL 6 available,
>> and it's not from CentOS.  It's Oracle Linux (which used
>> to be named Unbreakable Linux) and the license says it's
>> free to use.  You just have to register to get to the
>> download page.  http://linux.oracle.com
>> 
>> I can't wait to install it so I can see what's new in
>> version 6.
>
>Wow, I appreciate that you see so much value in RHEL!  It's an honor to
>know you feel that way?  I'm curious...  Why don't you actually get RHEL
>from Red Hat?
>
>You know, the folks who spend almost $200 million a year on R&D and
>engineering?  The folks who contribute more upstream to to the Linux
>kernel, X.org, GCC, GLIBC, GNOME, etc. than any other commercial entity
>out there?
>
>You know how we do all that?  We sell subscriptions to RHEL and other
>F/OSS technologies.  That subscription covers not the bits and bytes,
>but the hardening, those contributions upstream, hardware and software
>certification, support, etc.
>
>So since you obviously see value in RHEL, why don't you contribute to
>what we do by buying a subscription?
>
>You can get into RHEL for $49 for desktop.  You can run your company on
>RHEL server for $349.  Is that *really* too much to support all the good
>Red Hat does?
>- -- 
>Thomas Cameron, RHCA, RHCDS, RHCX, RHCVA, CNE, MCSE, MCT
>Managing Solutions Architect
>512-241-0774 office 512-585-5631 cell 512-857-1345 fax
>http://people.redhat.com/tcameron
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