Attack of the clones
Published: 24 Mar 2005 18:35 GMT
The support question
After Red Hat launched RHEL, it also began a project called Fedora. That version of Linux is available for free, but it's a fast-changing and unsupported product geared for hobbyists and programmers who can help work the kinks out of the latest software packages.
RHEL, in contrast, changes slowly, with updates released roughly every 18 months so hardware and software companies have time to certify that their products work with the operating system. Support of a particular Red Hat version lasts for seven years for those who pay an annual support subscription.
"Enterprises may have been disabused of the notion that Linux is free, but that doesn't mean they want to pay through the nose for it just because it has [software partner] support," said RedMonk analyst James Governor.
There are risks to leaving the official Red Hat fold, though. A customer isn't going to get much hand-holding, for example.
"We support three forms of Linux: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and Asianux," said Anne Pace, a spokeswoman for storage specialist EMC. "We chose those three because when we scan our customers, those seem to be the versions of Linux that our customers seem to be going with."
EMC will try to help customers using other versions, Pace said. But if they're using a Linux version EMC doesn't support, "we can only go so far, so they'll probably need to be diverted back to the Linux company to try to figure it," she said.
Oracle, a major software power and Linux backer, supports the same three Linux versions as EMC, but it has a stricter policy because it wants to keep the number of varying Linux versions to a minimum.
"Oracle wants to prevent fragmentation in the Linux distribution space," Monica Kumar, senior manager of Oracle's Linux product marketing, said in a statement. "Because of the indeterminate number of possible distributions and Oracle's desire to see customers succeed, it is necessary to confine enterprise-class support to those distributions that Oracle believes can be successfully deployed and supported in enterprise-class environments."
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