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Okay, but CentOS offers the same thing, sans contract. Why bother paying when you can get the same thing, with no support, for free?

froh 7y ago
RedHat (or Ubuntu let's or SUSE Linux enterprise) have reactive support: call them if something goes wrong, and the, have proactive collaboration with paying customers. If you think you don't need that: use free riding flavours i.e. centos/ SUSE leap/... Tech support can tell by looking at the system if you are a paying customer or a free rider. And sales can look at the download numbers and management servers if your installed base is what you claim it is.
freedomben 7y ago
RHEL (CentOS) is only a small piece of what Red Hat offers. If all you want is a base RHEL system (that can be a week or two behind on non-security patches but is otherwise the same), and you don't need any support, then yeah I'd do that (and I do in fact. I use CentOS for personal stuff all time). Since all of Red Hat's stuff is open source, you could install them all individually just fine. I think of Red Hat as more of a competitor to cloud companies than to Linux companies. A lot of what we do is help people build their own private clouds on the hardware they own. RHEL is at the foundation of course, but RHEL is very rarely the end goal of the customer. If you are doing this at scale, you're going to end up paying way more in salary to employ people to do it than you would if you just went with Red Hat support. And since early in an effort you need more people, you would either have to lay people off or find new jobs for them. I often swoop in and knock out tasks in hours that would take the company's infrastructure/SRE teams days or weeks to do, because I've done it a lot and I know what I'm doing. Its also less likely that I'll make a configuration error that exposes itself in prod, simply because I've already made those errors in the past and learned from that mistake. And when I do screw it up (which is a very, very, rare occurrence ;-) ), the company isn't scrambling to fix it. They call up support and we get it fixed ASAP. Again it's not for everyone, but it is for some people. I usually find that buying Red Hat saves a lot of money rather than costing money, which is why so many big companies do buy us.

froh 7y ago

RedHat (or Ubuntu let's or SUSE Linux enterprise) have reactive support: call them if something goes wrong, and the, have proactive collaboration with paying customers. If you think you don't need that: use free riding flavours i.e. centos/ SUSE leap/... Tech support can tell by looking at the system if you are a paying customer or a free rider. And sales can look at the download numbers and management servers if your installed base is what you claim it is.

freedomben 7y ago

RHEL (CentOS) is only a small piece of what Red Hat offers. If all you want is a base RHEL system (that can be a week or two behind on non-security patches but is otherwise the same), and you don't need any support, then yeah I'd do that (and I do in fact. I use CentOS for personal stuff all time). Since all of Red Hat's stuff is open source, you could install them all individually just fine. I think of Red Hat as more of a competitor to cloud companies than to Linux companies. A lot of what we do is help people build their own private clouds on the hardware they own. RHEL is at the foundation of course, but RHEL is very rarely the end goal of the customer. If you are doing this at scale, you're going to end up paying way more in salary to employ people to do it than you would if you just went with Red Hat support. And since early in an effort you need more people, you would either have to lay people off or find new jobs for them. I often swoop in and knock out tasks in hours that would take the company's infrastructure/SRE teams days or weeks to do, because I've done it a lot and I know what I'm doing. Its also less likely that I'll make a configuration error that exposes itself in prod, simply because I've already made those errors in the past and learned from that mistake. And when I do screw it up (which is a very, very, rare occurrence ;-) ), the company isn't scrambling to fix it. They call up support and we get it fixed ASAP. Again it's not for everyone, but it is for some people. I usually find that buying Red Hat saves a lot of money rather than costing money, which is why so many big companies do buy us.