IBM is buying RedHat. Does this affect your hosting business?

[bigredseo]

Announced over the weekend, IBM is looking to purchase RedHat for $33 Billion - one of their largest aquisitions.

When we ran our servers years ago, our servers used Redhat - until their pricing went insane and we moved everything to CentOS.

I believe we went from paying something like $20/server to $200. This was a yearly purchase, but with over 100 servers at that time, it was a big chunk of funds, for self-supported management.

Do any of the hosting companies here still use RedHat for their OS or has everyone moved to CentOS and other flavors?

 

[JonathanG]

I don't use a RedHat or Fedora, so not directly. This could affect Systemd and other projects maintained by Redhat, for better or worse.

 

[Artashes]

Heard the news as well, a pretty shocking price tag.

Question to all you tech experts: what does Redhat do better than CentOS?

 

[bigredseo]

From an Enterprise level, when we work on it, it's not so much something better, but rather someone to blame. The big reason Government and Schools loved the Microsoft ASP and .NET platforms is that it's a paid service, which means when something goes wrong, you can point the finger and say "your fault".

With CentOS, since it's community supported, there's no finger to point, and as a result, many enterprise companies don't use it.

That's been my perception over the years, and was actually instructions I was provided back in 2000 when working with a large corporation. "Don't use anything free - EVER"

 

[Artashes]

Interesting perception.

 

[easyhostmedia]

From an Enterprise level, when we work on it, it's not so much something better, but rather someone to blame. The big reason Government and Schools loved the Microsoft ASP and .NET platforms is that it's a paid service, which means when something goes wrong, you can point the finger and say "your fault".

With CentOS, since it's community supported, there's no finger to point, and as a result, many enterprise companies don't use it.

That's been my perception over the years, and was actually instructions I was provided back in 2000 when working with a large corporation. "Don't use anything free - EVER"

Trouble is now that some of the Windows OS are free

 

[ryandoc]

It is a good thing that IBM is buying RedHat. They will manage it better.

 

[stxhost]

It is a good thing that IBM is buying RedHat. They will manage it better.

We think RedHat was running ok tbh, I think IBM need to slow down here as it won't allow innovative competition.