Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore
Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore
Posted Oct 20, 2010 11:30 UTC (Wed) by ewan (guest, #5533)In reply to: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore by ITAnalyst
Parent article: Gould: Oracle to Red Hat: It's Not Your Father's Linux Market Anymore
Its interesting that this whole debate is not about the facts. We agree on those and thanks to all (well, most) of you for taking the time to educate a humble scribe like me. What rankles is really just that one word proprietaryI think that's probably the key to it, but not quite the whole problem. If you take that word away it seems that all you're left with is the argument that Red Hat tries to compete in the market by offering a better product than others do. Which is obvious, completely uncontroversial, and not at all insightful.
While you're clearly aware of CentOS you do seem to be missing its significance. One of the advantages of free licensing is to reduce or eliminate vendor lock-in, and the existence of CentOS reduces lock-in to RHEL essentially to zero - anyone using RHEL can trivially switch to CentOS if they choose not to use Red Hat for support any longer. The differentiation of RHEL is absolutely not in its code, since exactly the same code is available in CentOS. The 'Red Hat difference', and what customers pay for, is purely the support. But we knew that already, as did anyone else that's been paying attention.
And finally we're back to this:
But the success of Linux is not due to its open source purity, just to an ordinary profit-driven corporate strategy that uses open source as a (very fruitful) business model. Thats all. This we are not proprietary stuff is just propaganda for the fanboys.That's simply a false dichotomy - 'open source purity' and 'profit driven' are not opposing ideas, and a a profit driven strategy does not make the software any less 'open source' or any more 'proprietary'.