On Tue, 11 Jun 2013, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au> wrote:
But companies which pay for Red Hat "support" end up paying for all systems they run even though they usually don't have Red Hat people doing anything to the majority of systems.
Yes, every system you install RHEL on, you pay for a license -- even if you have 10 virtual machines on one host server, you pay up to 11 times.
That's an issue of license terms which isn't really what this discussion was about. As an aside a RHEL license allows you to use any supported version of RHEL on that system. So if you want to upgrade or downgrade it's no extra cost to you - even though it's probably going to increase Red Hat's support burden. Compare with Windows where so many people are buying systems with Windows 8 and then buying an older version.
Oracle OTOH, on such a system, would cost you ONE Oracle Linux license. If you want to run ALL Oracle product on that box, it is far cheaper than using RHEL. Oracle want ALL your business and make it expensive if you choose different parts for your setup .... all due to licensing consideration.
Sure, that's a nice license feature. I believe that Red Hat has offered similar deals at various times, but I'm not an expert on such things. Also if you are buying sufficient quantities then I'm sure that you can phone your Red Hat sales person and give them the Oracle price that they have to beat.
Those wanting RHEL type /assurance/ can probably settle for CentOS as a binary equivalent alternative (on the whole), but even then there are some proprietory parts that Oracle and RHEL only make available under license with a cost.
CentOS isn't going to be exactly the same. The exact binaries are determined by the versions of all headers etc that were installed at the time and also often include things like the user-name of the account doing the build and the build time stamp. One would hope that the strings in binaries which have build times etc don't affect the operation of the program but such hope is sometimes in vain.
All systems are vulnerable at times to one issue or another (including the costly RHEL option), I prefer to stick with Debian stable wherever possible and update it regularly.
I personally prefer Debian too. But the only relevance of Debian to this discussion is as a fairly significant data point disproving any claims about Linux being inherently capitalist.
Every company which has multiple RHEL systems with paid licenses is proof that they aren't just paying for "support".
Too true. I like RHEL as an idea, but not with their pricing. And I like Oracle too for some reasons, but not for their lock in.
RHEL is cheaper than lots of other options. The support that they give is really good. If you ever find yourself running a mixture of different Linux systems and have a problem that's not distribution specific then reproducing it on RHEL and calling the Red Hat support line is a good strategy. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/