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

[Jarod Wilson]

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.)

RHEL5 is very long in the tooth now, way too many things that require
updating to get an even remotely modern toolchain on it, for one. So
I'm not at all surprised by this. Trying to get work done, or even
serve up a web site requiring recent php means a world of pain on
RHEL5 -- I've got a RHEL5 box or two with at least 30+ packages
updated from local rebuilds of much newer Fedora packages of the same
name just to get the thing usable (newer git, newer subversion, newer
apache, newer php, etc).

> 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.

Well, picking nits here, the free version of RHEL is Fedora, not
OpenSUSE. Fedora is rather bleeding-edge (where most of the new tech
lands first and gets major bugs shaken out), while RHEL is
ultra-conservative. There's a middle ground in between there,
currently being filled by other distros, like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE (who
both, imo, benefit greatly from Fedora and Red Hat developers, often
more than Fedora itself does).

> Companies like Novell and RHEL

Hey, RHEL isn't a company, we're Red Hat (with a space)... ;)

> 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.

Vastly improved virt performance is definitely shaping up to be one of
the big features, but so is bare-metal performance, particularly in
systems with higher cpu counts, larger quantities of RAM and new and
improved high-performance file systems. However, at least in the RHEL
case, these are all being pushed upstream as well, so yeah, in the
coming months, you'll be able to get similar out of a free distro as
well.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org