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Supporting CentOSSupporting CentOSPosted Mar 28, 2011 23:56 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: Supporting CentOS by smoogen Parent article: Supporting CentOS
at the prices of RHEL it doesn't take that many servers before you start to get to the salary of one person, any hosting provider that is running a thousand servers can better afford to pay one person to work on the distro than they could afford to switch to RHEL. All of these hosting providers are running _far_ more than a mere thousand servers.
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Supporting CentOS Posted Mar 29, 2011 1:21 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
I haven't examined Red Hat's licensing deals very closely but I wouldn't be surprised if they could work out some kind of bulk license deal for a web hosting or virtual cloud server company.
It would seem insane to charge the full yearly support price for each virtual instance.
RHEL support levels? Posted Mar 29, 2011 2:03 UTC (Tue) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
Red Hat has few different products and subscriptions. See:
http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/compare/
Basically they have "Server" where it provides for support for 4 VMs... and "Advanced Platform" where it provides support for unlimited VMs. If hosting providers are running mostly VMs, then I'm sure they'd be more interested in the unlimited option... where the number of VMs doesn't change the price... so no sort of licensing deal really needs to be worked out.
RHEL support levels? Posted Mar 29, 2011 3:52 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you still have to pay the license fee for each physical server.
even if they drop the price per server by 90%, the price per server would be >$100, at 1000 servers that easily pays for a developer. And I doubt that they get that steep a discount, or have that few physical servers.
RHEL support levels? Posted Mar 29, 2011 6:09 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
It kinda sucks.
It would be nice if Redhat lowered it's pricing. But it would then undercut their enterprise sales. It all really depends on what will provide them the most profit. I wouldn't hazard a guess on what is best for them.
I've always thought that CentOS benefited Redhat because not everybody can afford to run Redhat supported versions on all their servers.
Say you ran into a situation were you ran a good sized IT department. Say in that IT department you had 'critical' systems that had special regulatory and/or tight turn around times. That is if they had a problem business requirements have you with 24/7 support and 2 hour turn around requirement for a fix. But you had a whole mess of systems that were not nearly so critical.
With the combination of CentOS + Redhat that can provide a cost effective solution were you maintain a more-or-less common platform across all your systems. You had your ass covered in case you got over your head on the critical systems, but did not have to blow your entire budget on all your systems.
If you had to do a mixture of Debian + Redhat systems, for example, then your not just dealing with licensing costs you have the additional overhead of now being forced to support multiple platforms. This raises your documentation costs, training costs, support costs, hardware aquisition costs... everything your IT department does all of a sudden gets more expensive.
If you cannot afford to go all-Redhat then your quite possibly going to be forced to abandon Redhat altogether and go with a third party support channel for Debian.
And, believe me, the costs associated with dealing with multiple platforms often pales in comparison to the cost of dealing with a specific platform's idiosyncrasies uniformly across all your systems. All systems have their issues.
I think that there are a significant number of organizations that run into situations like this. Where the option using CentOS potentially offers a very significant value added to Redhat licensing.
RHEL support levels? Posted Mar 29, 2011 19:48 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
RedHat has a right to price RHEL however they want, I'm not arguing anything there.
I'm just pointing out that if you have lots of computers (like a large hosting company would), you can very quickly get to the point where what you are paying in license fees dwarfs the cost of hiring people.
RedHat works to maximize their profits by pricing it as high as they can, without making it so high that people decide to hire experts to participate in the community directly instead.
Supporting CentOS Posted Mar 29, 2011 10:17 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
On the other hand the CentOS-using hosting companies are competing with each other - maybe the money spent on an an extra engineer can be better spent on marketing (i.e. would return more sales)...
Supporting CentOS Posted Mar 30, 2011 7:38 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Perhaps the solution is for hosting companies to donate money to a fund that is specifically to pay for an independent CentOS developer or tester. That way, no single hosting company has to cover the complete cost of the developer, and more of them can use a "we support CentOS" logo in their marketing, and most importantly CentOS gets more timely releases.
One of the key applications driving CentOS use in hosting is cPanel, which is by far the most popular control panel and doesn't support Debian/Ubuntu. Plesk and DirectAdmin, which seem the next most popular, do support Debian/Ubuntu and others.
Supporting CentOS Posted Mar 30, 2011 8:27 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Yes, and perhaps they could incorporate a body to manage that fund, maybe invest in R&D for CentOS. Hell, it could even turn a profit and make some money for its employees and investors.
Why has no one tried this already?
Supporting CentOS Posted Mar 30, 2011 16:32 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Because it is not as easy as it sounds due to a standard chicken/egg problem.
1) You have to create a vehicle that businesses could 'donate' to. That has all kinds of legal/tax issues involved. Is it a service they are subscribing to (operating expenses), is it a product they are buying (capital expenses), is it a donation that they can write off, or does it become an extra expense that they can't.
2) You have to have a product they can see (ok in this case it is developers they are buying into).. Have they done anything yet to show its not a flim-flam job
3) You have to have a sales force that they can trust. Because you are going to have to sell this crazy idea to people who think that the only way they are "winning/surviving" is by not paying for something in the first place.
Supporting CentOS Posted Mar 30, 2011 20:43 UTC (Wed) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]
I think paulj was suggesting that it has already been done by a certain Red Hat, Inc. :)
Supporting CentOS Posted Mar 31, 2011 10:43 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
I'm just talking about a legal entity to receive the funds, or even a shared bank account with multiple signatories, and a Paypal account. There's no need to make this more complex than is needed.
Supporting CentOS Posted Mar 29, 2011 12:28 UTC (Tue) by Escubar (guest, #39034) [Link]
RHEL is indeed quite expensive, but you should check out SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Easy to handle virtualization policy and yes there are volume discounts which make it affordable to hosters and others.
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