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Long-term support and backport riskLong-term support and backport riskPosted Jun 22, 2007 2:24 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: Long-term support and backport risk by drag Parent article: Long-term support and backport risk
How, in the eyes of end users, is it really different? No difference. The situation to which you responded, and the one that HenrikH described have the same effect on a user. I brought it up only because your comment was not responsive to the comment to which you attached it, indicating you probably misread it.
Whether or not people have access to the source code is less and less relevant to whether or not people pay for per-seat licensing I don't think access to source code is relevant at all to this thread; you'll notice I didn't mention it. What is relevant is that all sellers of Linux kernels permit their customers (because they have to) to make as many copies as they want and pass them on to as many people as they want, for the same price as one copy. Microsoft does not do that. Neither does Sun. And that's why Microsoft and Sun can spend millions of dollars testing and Red Hat cannot.
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Long-term support and backport risk Posted Jun 23, 2007 15:05 UTC (Sat) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link] >And that's why Microsoft and Sun can spend millions of dollars testing and Red Hat cannot.
Err... I'm not an expert on this here enterprise-y stuff, but it sure looks to me like Red Hat, you know, charges a per-seat license fee just like Microsoft and Sun?
(Obviously you can use it without paying that licensing fee, but in practice you can use Windows or Solaris without paying that fee too; big businesses tend not to in both cases.)
Long-term support and backport risk Posted Jun 23, 2007 17:14 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] it sure looks to me like Red Hat, you know, charges a per-seat license fee just like Microsoft and Sun? Red Hat does not charge for a copyright license for the Linux kernel. Its license, GPL, is free as required as a condition of the copyright license to Red Hat by various authors of the Linux kernel (also GPL). The per-seat charge you're thinking of is for maintenance service, and it is way less than Sun or Microsoft charge for their copyright licenses. That's why many people believe that Linux is much cheaper to use than Solaris or Windows.
Obviously you can use it without paying that licensing fee, but in practice you can use Windows or Solaris without paying that fee too; big businesses tend not to in both cases I think if Red Hat asked a maintenance fee large enough to cover a Microsoft-sized test department, lots of customers would decline, and hire someone else to do the maintenance. Or get SUSE, because Novell would, legally, just take the fruits of Red Hat's testing without paying anything and continue selling SUSE at Linux prices.
Long-term support and backport risk Posted Jun 23, 2007 17:20 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] have you looked at the redhat prices?
I'll admit that I haven't looked at them recently, but the last time I did they were chaging ~$1500/machine, which is about the same price that sun and others charge for the propriatary Unix, and above many of the microsoft license costs.
if you use the 'enterprise' pricing from linux vendors then it's fairly easy to cook the books to show that linux has a higher TCO then windows (you need to choose hardware and models that minimize the fact that linux is more efficant and find manpower costs that show that windows admins get paid less then unix admins, but you are close enough to make it work)
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