Long-term support and backport risk [LWN.net]

Long-term support and backport risk

Posted Jun 23, 2007 17:14 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Long-term support and backport risk by njs
Parent article: Long-term support and backport risk

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.

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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)