Comparing Strategies: Novell and Red HatComparing Strategies: Novell and Red Hat

To remain accountable to its customers in the long term--the goal of every commercial open-source vendor--the company has dropped support for the free Red Hat Linux. From now on, Red Hat will support only RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The operating system comes with one year of free support and what amounts to a compilation copyright that prevents users from duplicating the ISO (the exact image of the Linux distribution CD-ROM).

Still, any open-source vendor has to keep close ties to the community. To do so, Red Hat simultaneously launched the Fedora Project as a community service. Fedora is essentially Red Hat's experimental Linux that comes without commercial support. This is a good thing, as it lets Red Hat more clearly delineate which activities are profit-making and which are community and/or marketing activities. Fedora isn't likely to cannibalize Red Hat's commercial sales; commercial customers need support and Fedora has none (for more on Red Hat's Fedora, see "Red Hat Linux Morphs Into Fedora Core," in our review of RHEL 3.0).

The open-source model is what makes Linux so pervasive, Tiemann observes.

"Universities and schools are increasingly making Linux a part of their learning environment and infrastructure," he says. "More and more people are graduating with a positive experience with the platform."

Red Hat has engaged in aggressive academic pricing for RHEL ($2,500 for an unlimited student site license, with the $1,500 administrative server product priced at $50). Such pricing is definitely a good idea if Tiemann's academic-propagation model is going to work.

When we challenged Tiemann about the availability of staff to run RHEL at large IT organizations, he related a story about a meeting he had with IT executives at the military. "The people who supply Microsoft training run Linux at home," he said.

IT shops wishing to run Linux have great reason to choose Red Hat: The company's certification programs are among the most highly regarded in the business. The RHCE is considered more than just a paper certification--if we had to place it in geek-respect ranks, it's probably just below the vaunted Cisco CCIE. Even in 2002, the RHCE was getting kudos from the likes of Certification magazine. Clearly, Red Hat has done something right with its Global Learning Services.

Unlike Novell, Red Hat doesn't offer litigation indemnity from SCO. But it does provide "Open Source Assurance," which warrants that Red Hat will replace system components shown to have intellectual-property problems. While SCO has called this "wiping the fingerprints off the gun," most observers have scoffed at the analogy--if there's a breach and Linux vendors offer a timely remedy, no foul. Users worried about legal action from SCO can look to the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) for a legal defense fund to protect Linux customers; both IBM and Intel have contributed.

Jonathan Feldman, a NETWORK COMPUTING contributing editor, is director of professional services for Entre Solutions, an infrastructure consulting company in Savannah, Ga. He has worked with and managed technology in the health-care, financial services, government and law-enforcement industries, and is the author of Teach Yourself Network Troubleshooting. Write to him at [email protected].