Yet again, I’m going to post about something related to my employer. Yet again, I’m going to reiterate that this is not an official Red Hat position. In fact, I more than half expect I’ll get in trouble for saying it, but it just had to be said. You see, there’s a discussion on Slashdot about How Can I Justify Using Red Hat When CentOS Exists? The poster wants the functionality of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but the CIO doesn’t want to pay for it and demands that they use CentOS instead. A lot of people have tried to explain the various aspects of what a RHEL subscription gets you. I’m not going to expand or correct those comments, because that will definitely get me in trouble and partly because I just don’t care. Here’s the reason that apparently carries no weight at all with CIOs and never even occurs to Slashdotters.
Because it’s the fucking right thing to do, you assholes.
Yeah, I used profanity on what has almost always been a family-friendly blog. I did that because it’s so utterly infuriating that such an obvious and important principle has totally escaped notice elsewhere. If you value something, you pay for it. Even the worst free-market zealots claim to believe that. They often use the same rationale to justify eliminating regulations (especially environmental ones) or replacing public aid with private charity. Red Hat folks do more work than anyone to improve the Linux kernel, GNOME, and dozens of other projects. They write the code, do the testing, fix the bugs, write the documentation, and provide all kinds of logistical support. The beneficiaries include not just obvious derivatives like CentOS and Scientific but even commercial competitors from Oracle and Amazon’s obvious clones to completely separate distributions like Ubuntu which also package that code and fixes. This work isn’t done by volunteers. It costs a lot of money. The fact that we allow the code to be distributed for free should have nothing to do with the principle that you pay for what you value. When you violate that principle you ensure that there will be less of what you value. The result will be a net loss for everyone, as less innovation occurs and more energy is wasted making sure everyone’s “intellectual property” remains under lock and key. Even the thieves lose.
I’d really like to hear from someone who can offer a better moral justification than “we can so we should” for using CentOS on thousands of machines without paying for even one RHEL subscription, because nothing I’ve heard so far is even close. “Duty to maximize profits” arguments will be deleted, because I’ve already turned that one into swiss cheese enough times in my life. Does anybody seriously believe that freeloading should be on the “good” side of our collective moral map?
“The fact that we allow the code to be distributed for free”
Actually, in most cases you’re required.
There’s a part that you forget here. What CentOS “does” to you, you guys are “doing” to many other projects. (I’m not objecting, but pointing something out). Does RedHat *pay* for all of the software it bundles? You must value them, so you pay for them, right? A nice large donation to each and every project that makes up a RHEL release? Clearly you must be doing this, based on your logic.
Anyway, the real point of the matter is that in your mind you view it at CentOS vs RedHat, when really it’s going to be CentOS vs Debian/Ubuntu for these people. Paying for RHEL isn’t even an option for a lot of people, so if they can’t use CentOS then they’re not even going to use any part of your release. That would lose you millions of possible future customers who would learn about and entrench themselves in the Debian way instead of the RHEL one.
Great article. It would surely be painful for all if RHEL decided open source was no longer viable. Thanks for standing up for not freeloading.
RHEL provides significant value that the community receives, by and large, for free. I’ve seen shall go unnamed billion dollar shops deploy thousands of CentOS nodes. They guilty know whom they are. :) Even so, it goes mention too infrequently the cost and time associated with integration validation on major tier-1 hardware.
Another matter, Canonical’s Ubuntu LTS business model has an advantage for us lowly customers of not requiring a rip-replace as CentOS -> RHEL would by making easier to convert from a free to a paid license (or vice versa). Ultimately, I think a mix of activation of enterprise features with a single community = enterprise distribution is the way to go, and reduces confusion about which version to select. (Recall that in large environments, small changes can mean expensive revalidation/auditing.)
Finally, there are important considerations regarding the relative quality of support, depth of partnerships, package freshness and so on, however most environments tend to stick with RHEL for high-end enterprise and scientific uses (e.g., where individual servers have more lose by being down) while Ubuntu is standard for a supermajority startups.
And in fact Red Hat does make significant contributions to upstream projects. They contribute full-time developers to many, paid internships for others, cash grants to quite a few, patches and logistical support to more than I can count. Then there are intangibles such as access and exposure that those projects wouldn’t otherwise get, the costly legal efforts Red Hat makes to preserve open source as a viable business strategy generally, general education/evangelism, etc. Are there gaps, or people who feel Red Hat is taking advantage of them? I’m sure there are. OTOH, the value that Red Hat provides to upstream projects and communities is worth millions upon millions of dollars. That is quite different than the zero that we get for our efforts when someone goes all-CentOS. I’m not suggesting that Red Hat should be paid for others’ efforts, only that they should be paid for the efforts they themselves make. Contrast that with those who bundle Red Hat’s contributions along with everyone else’s, and then make a substantial profit while “giving back” to the community in none of the ways I’ve just described. Red Hat might have a non-zero margin, but those guys have million-percent margins and I don’t think that’s right.
That’s fine, and that’s why I believe it’s fine for CentOS and the others to be out there. We don’t put this stuff out there – including stuff like my own code which could be licensed any way we want BTW – only to say people are evil for taking us up on the offer. If people can’t afford to use RHEL and use CentOS instead then I’m totally fine with that. In fact, I’ve been in that boat myself. What’s less OK is very rich companies that most definitely can afford to pay, running that code on thousands of machines while giving zero back either to us or to the community more generally. Even if they think RHEL subscription prices are too high, you’d think they could at least decide what they think is a fair price and purchase that many subscriptions. That would still be better than zero. There’s a lot of room for argument about what constitutes a fair or free-market or morally supportable price, but zero is definitely not it.
We see this all the time at companies using free versions of commercial software, think ESXi, XenServer, etc (whether there is an open source element to it or not). If you have paid for something, you have some chance of influencing it’s future, some obligation from the vendor to listen to your requests, and when the sh!t hits the fan and you are “bleeding from the neck” you have some hope that support@vendor.com will get back to you. Yes there are user forums, they are great, but when your specific problem, on your specific hardware build, on your specific network isn’t addressed in the user community, and you are all going to die in the next 4 hours… you’ll will wish you had a support contract.
Now dont get me wrong, there is a great business in “single incident” support, or “International Rescue” as we like to call it. We charge $5K per day for that kind of work, but would much, much rather spend our time in important but not life-or-death projects.
It is great to save money on IT, right up to the point where something snaps and the whole company grinds to a halt until it is fixed, then you will find yourself wishing you had at least some kind of support contract. Save costs elsewhere, get rid of your dead wood, be more efficient, automate more, drive down your other costs, but dont drive support costs down to zero. If you are running mission critical systems with no support, then the day it all goes sideways give me a call. Make sure you have a purchase order number handy.
One pays for RHEL because it has awesome support and updates; not because of the millions of lines of codes they write.
You put bad name for your own company!
Just to be clear, I don’t think anyone should buy RHEL – or any other product – only because it’s the right thing to do. As I just said in an internal email on the topic, of course we should make the business case based on support, updates, education, etc. All I’m saying is that the moral and long-term practical effects of freeloading shouldn’t be completely ignored. Those of us who value the commons should not pass up opportunities to defend the principles on which it is based. If we don’t, who will? The argument might carry no weight as part of a business decision, but it’s revolting to see it so completely bypassed in a discussion among the “nerds” who supposedly make up the Slashdot commentariat.
Where I work we pay for Redhat subscriptions.
I could see a CIO trying to drive down the number of total software subscriptions. Wasn’t that part of the original slashdot posting? Anyways, subscription based software is a pain in the butt, I think, though I’m no CIO. I was recently talking to one vendor and they had one time pricing which I thought was great, and works a lot better in project based work. A one time fee, vs. never ending fees. :) That said, we still pay for RedHat. Though I’ve only email support twice, once to ask why RedHat only supports 100TB xfs and once to ask about some CVEs.
i just cant agree with such a poor argument….
the reason you pay for a red hat subscription is that you think there s really a value in buying it, basically the support and the access to the RHN for patches and updates.
when you state that “This work isn’t done by volunteers. It costs a lot of money”, i believe that red hat folks know what they re doing and as in most companies, they pay people to do things because they get ROI at some point…..Debian guys dont get a single dime for all their commitment and they re not wining about it like you did.
Dont get me wrong, i like redhat and if my clients want to pay for subscriptions instead of using Centos, its fine by me just because IT-managers always need someone to blame until a real solution is found to a problem, but until now, red hat support experts didnt solve any of my basic problems (red hat cluster related design issues , some annoying SAN+multipath+LVM locks )
hopefully if we had a premium contract , they would put more effort to solve issues but i just cant understand how a client with 8 ESX and illimited rhel guests isnt treated as a decent client…..
So do you believe that doing the right thing (i.e. honoring the principle of paying for what you value) should get *no* mention even in an abstract context? Sure, as a matter of business decision-making it’s the value that matters, but we’re more than just corporate automata. It’s actually kind of inconsistent that you cite anti-corporate Debian at the same time that you tacitly accept the corporate “money uber alles” mindset. BTW, there don’t seem to be many Debian *developers*. The vast majority of the effort in most distros (including Fedora) is packaging, not development. I’ll bet there’s more *development* in RHEL than in the next five distros combined, so they’re not really comparable. Also, when you accuse someone of “wining” it only makes you look illiterate, as does the rest of your uncapitalized ungrammatical screed. It doesn’t really give the impression that you understand the value of having a professional-grade product.
Sorry for the “uncapitalized ungrammatical screed”, i’ try to sum up this time
Still, “paying for what you value” doesnt seem to be a principle at all, because according to your definition, it means that if someone doesnt charge you for a work he realized, it s because it has no value at all…
I think serious CIO’s and businesses would always go for RHEL and have a support subscription. Cheap businesses will always buy cheap stuff ranging from cheap hardware, software and usually they don’t last long anyways, have personally seen this with many companies which struggle after wrong investment.
Many of these CIO’s go by the logic of saving 1$ where they would end up loosing 1000$, they forget the long term profit margin which a subscription gets to you.
On a side note I for one certainly and vehemently condemn Amazon and Oracle for making the community look like fools, i would go as far as calling them pure Evil.
>What’s less OK is very rich companies that most definitely can afford to pay, running that code on thousands of machines while giving zero back either to us or to the >community more generally
The worst thing is,they pickup an oss project and modify it and sell to customer with slight code change or modify & label a it as YZXphp,YZXmysql and use them for its own internal purpose (which never gets back to community version) — IMO,Open source shouldn’t be free for large companies,unless they give something back, either in the form of money or code.