Red Hat is the king of commercial Linux support, no doubt about it. Canonical has entered the market and with some refined support products could present a very compelling alternative. Is it enough to make the company profitable long term, though?
Two Different Approaches
Red Hat is a phenomenal open source company which is, deservedly, well respected. They don’t just talk free software, they live it. Their commercial operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is available for free (as in price) only in source code form (OK, so you can get a free 30 day trial). Unfortunately, this is where the free ride ends (and perhaps rightly so). Without paying for support, you won’t get any of the system updates in binary form from Red Hat. You could compile them yourself, of course. Red Hat does sponsor Fedora however, their free (in both senses) community based operating system. Unfortunately, they do not commercially support it. Despite this, their current model obviously works.
Canonical on the the hand is coming at it from a completely different angle. Their operating system Ubuntu, is free (as in price) and is community based. They have no separate commercial, purchase-only style version like RHEL. The great thing about this is that the same familiar version you might run at home or as a trial in the office, is the exact same version you can get commercial support for. This is in stark contrast to Red Hat’s model.
Ubuntu’s Long Term Support releases are generally more conservative than their regular releases, but they are still reasonably bleeding edge being based on Debian’s testing branch (non-LTS are based on Debian unstable). RHEL on the other hand seems to be more dated, even though they both share the same release period of two years. Ubuntu’s previous Long Term Support version 8.04 shipped with a 2.6.24 version of the Linux kernel, whereas RHEL 5 (which is still the current version) shipped with kernel 2.6.18 (although it shipped one year earlier than Ubuntu’s 8.04 LTS). Even so, Red Hat has been in this market for a long time and they are well experienced experts. Will that see them through?
During his keynote at Linux Conference Australia in 2009, Simon Phipps (formerly of Sun Microsystems) warned that Red Hat would one day have to offer commercial support for Fedora, rather than just selling support for their commercial operating system. Perhaps Simon is right. With Ubuntu, one can install the exact same operating system for free, with all the updates and trimmings, and only purchase support if they so choose. That’s huge. You simply can’t do that with RHEL.
Let me put this a different way. A company is starting to take a look into free software and wants a Linux based operating system. They could install Fedora, but they won’t get commercial support from the vendor. They could install RHEL and play around with a free trial for a month. Or, they could try Ubuntu, for as long as they want, without restriction, and at a later date purchase support only for those services it deems worthwhile. They might decide to pay for support for all their servers, but have hundreds of desktops running the same operating system for free. Which one sounds more enticing?
One of the other major differences between the two offerings is that Canonical’s support is based solely on services, not by the hardware which runs the operating system. This is something which never sat right with me about Red Hat’s offerings. The support you pay for will only be provided on a server with a specific level of hardware. For example, a support contract might be valid on a server with one CPU and 2 GB of RAM. However, if you wanted to upgrade that server to 4GB of RAM or add another CPU, then you would have to pay for a higher license. Come again? To me this just seems like Red Hat finding a way to milk more money from their clients. To their credit, some of these restrictions have been removed for servers, although the restrictions still remain for the desktop. You’re telling me that if I want more than 4GB of RAM in my desktop, I have to buy a new support license? Come on! It totally feels like Windows licensing. No doubt they have their reasons, but from the consumer’s perspective the service based approach from Canonical makes more sense.
So as you can see, this product from Canonical should not be underestimated. It has huge potential (if it can scale well and users get value for money). Could this cause Red Hat to change their tune about support for Fedora? Or is there still a big enough slice of the pie that it won’t matter? Red Hat’s model is thus far tried and true, but can both ideas succeed in the long run? It remains to be seen. Of course the other question is whether Ubuntu LTS can even compete with RHEL. Is it really enterprise quality?
Ready, aim, fire!
Whether warranted or not, the adoption of Linux has often been hampered over concerns of “lack of commercial support”. Now, with Advantage, system administrators can manage hundreds of desktops and servers within a single interface, get access to experts, and there’s IP protection thrown in (for better or worse).
The beauty of Canonical’s support offerings is that you don’t need to take them to use the product, unlike offerings from Red Hat. If you want to manage your own support or get support from a third party, you surely can. If you want a little bit of help from time to time, Canonical has that covered. If you need someone to hold your hand every single step of the way, well then they can do that too. Hopefully these services will help to push Linux to the forefront of the mind of businesses everywhere. At the very least, it should help to make Ubuntu more attractive.
As for Red Hat, no doubt they will continue to power ahead. Will they have to change their model at some point to offer at least some level of corporate support for Fedora? Maybe. Either way, competition is always good. Hopefully at the end of the day Canonical can become profitable through services such as these and continue to innovate and improve their products (it has to be better than striking a deal with Yahoo!, right?). In which case, everybody wins (well almost everybody).
Christopher Smart has been using Linux since 1999. In 2005 he created Kororaa Linux, which delivered the world's first Live CD showcasing 3D
desktop effects. He also founded the
MakeTheMove website, which introduces users to free software and encourages them to switch. In his spare time he enjoys writing articles on free software.
Comments on "The Ubuntu Advantage? Canonical Takes On Red Hat"
[Ubuntu] has quickly gained huge market share in the Linux desktop arena, but how has it faired in the commercial space?
You mean \”fared\” instead of\” faired\”. Simple grammatical errors can undermine an otherwise good article.
@buggin, thank you for that. How embarrassing.
-c
I\’m afraid there are a couple of inaccuracies in the section on patents and injunctions in the article. There are two kind of injunctions that can be granted in patent litigation. One is a \”permanent injunction\”. This is the kind of injunction that i4i got against Microsoft, for example. These are issued, if at all, AFTER the trial has completed and the plaintiff has won.
The other kind is a \”preliminary injunction\”. These are granted before the trial completes. It is preliminary injunctions your article is talking about. It is extremely rare to get a preliminary injunction in a patent case. Courts only grant them when all four of the following conditions hold.
1. The plaintiff has demonstrated a reasonable likelihood that they will prevail at trail.
2. The plaintiff will be *irreparably* harmed if the injunction is not granted.
3. The harm to the plaintiff outweighs the harm the injunction will inflict on the defendant.
4. The injunction serves the public interest.
There is no chance whatsoever Microsoft would have been able to get a preliminary injunction against TomTom, as any infringement from TomTom was not causing irreparable harm. All harm any infringement was causing was easily reparable by monetary damages.
The second inaccuracy is a failure to mention that TomTom was suing Microsoft over patents, too. We do not know which company was the aggressor in this case, since neither is talking. What is known is that they had been negotiating for something like a year over licensing each others patents, and the negotiations broke down. We don\’t know who first approached the other. After negotiations broke down, they both sued. Microsoft filed first, by about a month. A patent suit takes quite a bit longer than a month to prepare, so we can infer that TomTom was working on their filing before Microsoft filed, so we can\’t tell if Microsoft actually made the decision to sue first, or just had lawyers that got the paperwork together faster.
We do know that this is the first software patent lawsuit involving Microsoft as a plaintiff. (They\’ve been in the defendant\’s chair many times). We also know that TomTom\’s countersuit it is NOT the first time TomTom\’s been in court to enforce their patents. They\’ve sued Garmin and they\’ve sued some of Garmin\’s customers. Given that fact pattern, it is pretty hard to rule out the possibility that TomTom started the fight.
I feel obliged (for some strange reason) to point out that there are a number of community supported RHEL-based distros such as CentOS. Because of the work these communites do – it\’s possible to run a binary and community supported free operating system with \’all the updates and trimmings\’ for as long as you wish and then pay for support (with RHEL) later only on those systems where it\’s needed. It is analogous to what you can do with Ubuntu – and one might argue it warrants mentioning.
At any rate – more competition and exposure is most likely a good thing.
Thanks for those comments. I did think about CentOS but left it out because it didn\’t reflect the same situation. I\’ll considering working it in though.
Cheers,
-c
I have a friend with atrocious spelling. He claims he can\’t have errors because his spell checker is invoked each time he hits \”send.\” Yet his messages are filled with things like \”faired\” and \”port folio.\” I didn\’t realize he started to write for Linux Magazine….
One thing bothers me a bit.
Debian is the source for Ubuntu in many way but also a big marketshare feeding source for Ubuntu…
Im afraid that ubuntu maybe kill debian in the midterm and looses its base (debian) by its own success..
So since there still some verbal fight between ubtuntu and debian they shoudl be cleared and a long term solution for cooperation and coexistence or a takeover by ubuntu…
Otherwise i see troubles comming for ubuntu .. anyone withme with that prgnosis ?
@jdfulmer, there\’s no excuse for my grammatical mistakes. Since using a computer to do everything, I have certainly become more careless. I do think that my English is pretty good and after all, there are hundreds of spelling mistakes in my articles every time I have to write \”..ize\” instead of \”..ise\”!
@bofh999, I think this a problem too, but probably not as big as first thought. Generally speaking, Debian and Ubuntu users are very different people. Although Ubuntu stole many Debian developers (well in all fairness, gave them a paid job) their relations are OK. But really, it probably doesn\’t matter. Debian is open source and Ubuntu can take it and do whatever they like. It would be nice to have a close working relationship, but Debian isn\’t going anywhere (and even if it did, they would probably go to Ubuntu rather than say, Fedora).
-c
or simply abandon…
would not be the first huge opensource project which goes under without (proper) replacement.
since ubuntu still depends on debian i dont think its so easy..
ok developes might stay or change to ubuntu but a project this size not only depend on developers.
its a contruct between community/third party/integrators and so on and they interact on every level together.
the end (stable) product is a result of all these ……
so that developing\”ecosystem\” get disturb to much a change in the product will be the result (if its a bad or good change i cant judge here right now).
the issue is that ubuntu depend much on the result and here comes the danger i think..
dont get me wrong, im not hoping for such thing. since i complete dissagree with redhat in everything (beginning with the technical and ending with licenses) and debian is getting less and less an option (even if still use it on my important productive servers)
(btw i dont understand debian either. one one hand try to be ultra stable and thin but on the other hand so slow with real criticial updates on major packeges like, Xsql, apache, php, perl which make it vunurable and unstable/buggy sometimes)
so for my point of view ubuntu is in the moment the way to go.. but im afraid what happens if to many debians join this way too
PS: im not an native english speaker so if anyone find some gramatical errors you can keep them and invite them to dinner if you like :-)
PPS: About spelling… Its a temporaly set of Rules which changes every day a little bit. Since the Net is becomming that big more and more non native Speakers (like me) have to communication more and more often in english which will have an big Impact on this language sooner or later. So whats today wrong is maybe tomorow right :-)
So for my Point of view all those Spelling Rules are an Important Guide but at the End of the Day is much more important what is said and not how…
So the Point is dont be too much embarrased about small mistakes in the spelling itself as long your facts are without. And do not compare to real newspapers.. they have at least 2 more control stages bevore it goes to print and still you can find a lot of errors there too.
Humans cant be without errors,its not in our nature..
Yes, RedHat is the \’king\’ of servers, because people need to believe in servers, and the people need a king. :-)
Funny how my Ubuntu desktop is \’serving\’ just fine, I got apache, mysql, php, perl, the whole nut working as if it were on a \”server\”, all on Ubuntu desktop. And I do not just install these components, I actually use them. Ubuntu seems to be a little more ahead of the curve on desktops than anyone else.
As to affecting Debian, well, the horses are out of the barn, so really, Ubuntu is really on its own momentum now. Debian can do whatever it wants, same for Ubuntu. They\’re both good, but I have to say, Ubuntu rocks!
But yes, RedHat. I have admin\’d countless RHEL servers for the dot-com. Legions of servers out there, many uncounted. RedHat should just add another million or two to the number of installations that they -don\’t- support yet are out there, serving up the web from the biggest dot-coms and satellite systems. It\’s really out there.
Ubuntu server compared to RHEL, well, Ubuntu server has a ways to go. I haven\’t been impressed with the Ubuntu server product at all, but maybe it\’s just me. The install needs more work, but I\’m sure if they put the same attention to the server that they put into the desktop they\’d have a rockin server. I\’m going to install 10.04 server in a VM and see if there\’s any new stuff to pay attention to.
I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS desktop on a couple of laptops, and I think this is \’the one\’ that will tip the distro in to the green light of \”acceptable enough to replace Windows\” for the desktop. The finished product is even better than the beta was. It\’s good enough to be a server no question, which is why I challenge the notion of desktop vs server.
Ubuntu 10.04 gets the checklist:
– Wireless networks. . Wireless works painlessly and flawlessly.
– Flash. . Needed a manual install but installed the plugin into Firefox painlessly and perfectly.
– Bluetoof. . Works flawlessly.
In order to beat Windows these three needed to work out of the box, and they did it! Windows days are numbered with this release.
Meanwhile…
I put RHEL 5.5 on my Ubuntu desktop at work under VMWare Workstation just to have a copy and to have my own reference install. RHEL is a good nuts and bolts Linux server, always seeming to lag a little on the installation, but good enough. Now that they are going with more VM support it should get really interesting.
RHEL\’s package management has improved drastically, getting better with yum, and farther and farther away from its ugly 1995 style and limited admin tools, to getting better GUI interfaces for admin-ing components. I think it\’s time they did away with LVM, it was good to have early on, but now with SANs, LVM is a bit unnecessary.
Anyway, I think RHEL 5.5 is pretty darn good, and things seem to be improving for the better.
Sorry but replacing Windows with ubuntu 10.04 lts is only in special evioremnts an Option.
To be realistic the TCO is way to high (still) and there are many small anoying bugs which are no problem for adavanced user but they are for standard \”secretary\”.
also theres still way not enough \”end user suiteable\” software for the daly office work,.. not to mention the private users with a lot more wishes…
dont get me wrong its a start in a good direction but far far far not a replacement except for some small enviroemnts with a small range of needs and a close support.
for specialist on the other hand its way better but only additional not as an replacement – i couldnt drive with ubuntu only no way for that .. sadly but it is how it is
@boh999 I don\’t know how you can say that the TCO is high for a linux distro as ubuntu, and that there\’s problems for standard \”secretary\”.
I can tell you that at work we switched the secretary computer from Windows XP to Ubuntu 10.04, and solved a lot of problems. She isn\’t an expert user at all, but she already was used to Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice, and felt this change just as her computer was becoming more stable.
I know that she doesn\’t call me any more speaking about troubles with her computer. Before this switch, she had problems with viruses, slow system, and windows updates that sometimes leaved the machine in an bad state. Every week I had to go there and check that computer.
Now it just works, and everything else is OK for our needs.
Maybe it\’s just a matter of different needs and different people.
good luck
Not really meaning to pick nits, but the expression is “beck and call,” not “beckoned call.”
As a desktop user, I must say that Ubuntu has got support for wide varieties of hardware than the counterparts (say Fedora). I have been a Fedora fan but have not been able to install on my laptop (tried F12 and F14). I tried with Kubuntu and really works like a charm.