I’d heard in passing that Larry Ellison announced Oracle was going to start selling Red Hat Linux support, and that Red Hat stock and dropped like 43% in a day because of it, but the gravity of the situation never sank in. Then I checked out their FAQ and things became more clear. In my opinion, Red Hat is really going to have to pony up or risk losing a lot of business. Why? Pricing! Oracle is going to give out free binary downloads (why oh why didn’t Red Hat do that?) and their basic ‘just updates’ service is $99/year for unlimited cpu’s. They’re also discounting their Basic Support to $199 per year for up to 2 cpu’s, which appears to entail 24×7 phone support. I’m not sure exactly what premier support is, and what ‘back ports of fixes to earlier releases’ entails, so I’ll refrain from comment on that but suffice it to say that given Red Hat doesn’t return my calls when I try to purchase their product, let alone actually get support, I’m pretty interested in an alternative.
In any case, $100 bucks a year and the base platform for free is pretty compelling pricing. Giving out the binaries is a huge step. Regardless of how great you think open source is, nobody can use it without binaries. Refusing to give out ‘real’ binaries without a support contract is assinine business in my opinion. How do you expect to get people hooked on your product if they can’t even try it out for free? And we wonder why Ubuntu is taking over the linux hobbyist space?
