(Read: boring.) CentOS, by cloning RHEL's slow-and-steady approach to Linux development, is ill-suited to attracting developers. While developers want the latest and greatest technology, Red Hat's bread-and-butter audience over the years has been operations departments, which want stable and predictable software. So, in a micro sense we lose some revenue, but in a broader sense, CentOS plays a very valuable role in helping to make Red Hat the de facto Linux.īut couldn't another Linux vendor like SuSE or Canonical, the primary backer of Ubuntu, undercut Red Hat with an equally free OS? If $0 is the magic price point, other Linux vendors can easily match that, right?Īrguably one critical area that CentOS hasn't helped Red Hat is with developers. It helps to give us an ubiquity that RHEL might otherwise not have if we forced everyone to pay to use Linux. While some like Microsoft have threatened Red Hat with the specter of even greater competition from CentOS, Whitehurst argues that CentOS "plays a very valuable role in our ecosystem." How? By ensuring that Red Hat remains the Linux default: CentOS is one of the reasons that the RHEL ecosystem is the default. It's the imitator that dare not speak its name, but everyone knows CentOS is a like-for-like Red Hat clone. How can this possibly be good for Red Hat? Embracing The Parasite a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" which "aims to be 100% binary compatible" with that Linux vendor. This paves the way for an organization like CentOS to develop a "a Linux distribution derived from. (Instead of charging for a software license per se, Red Hat has customers pay for a subscription that covers services and support.) But because Linux is a community-developed OS, Red Hat must release all of its Linux code to others. In the case of Red Hat, it develops the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system. While open source is increasingly established within the technology world, few understand its implications for an open-source software business. How open? So open that not only is Red Hat fighting VMware with its own open-source products, but it's also embracing clones like CentOS. As Whitehurst emphasizes, "When you start thinking about where the future of the data center is going, VMware has a similar view to ours, but they're doing it with a proprietary innovation model and we're open." The reason is simple: No other company more closely matches Red Hat's ambitions, albeit with a very different approach. Today data-center software maker VMware is Red Hat's Enemy Number One. Sun Microsystems, in its day the leading Unix vendor but now swallowed up by Oracle, once provided Red Hat with a handy villain to target. As such, Whitehurst doesn't "worry about Microsoft long-term, because it's Red Hat and VMware that are defining future data center strategy."Īh, yes, VMware. "Going forward with new workloads, they are heavily Linux-based," notes Whitehurst. The reality, however, is somewhat different.Īs Whitehurst tells it, Red Hat "certainly competes" with Microsoft, but "generally those IT decisions are made at the architecture level before you get into a specific Linux versus Windows bake-off." Today enterprise architecture tends to be Linux-based, while 10 years ago it was Windows, which means that more often than not, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is baked into enterprise IT decisions. With Unix cowering in a corner, one would think that the battle would shift to Linux versus Windows. The key to victory? Both Windows and Linux offered low-cost, high-value alternatives to Unix's sky-high pricing. Over time, both Windows and Linux chewed into Unix's market share, with Red Hat winning the bulk of the Linux spoils. For years the enterprise data center was defined by expensive hardware running varieties of the Unix operating system.
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