Split personality
For most of its history, Red Hat had only one version of its operating system. That software was available as a free download and was certified by various server and software companies. But in 2002, Red Hat embarked on a plan to split its line in two and create the slow-changing RHEL, which comes with certifications, long-term guarantees for support and bug fixes, and a mandatory per-computer price tag; and fast-changing Fedora, which is free, uncertified, relatively unsupported, and packed with the latest upgrades.
Selling annual subscriptions to RHEL helped push Red Hat into profitability. But it also alienated some, such as academic customers who were attracted to no-cost Linux.
One person unhappy with the split was Brian Gilman, president and founder of bioinformatics start-up Panther Informatics, which sells consulting services to pharmaceutical companies and others.
"I was taken aback that I had to pay $999 or something for what I could download as I chose. My first thought was, 'I'm done with Red Hat. That's too expensive,'" Gilman says in an interview. But eventually he bit the bullet. "My customers started telling me they needed to know I was running an enterprise-class system."
For internal use, though, Gilman is still happy with Fedora. "I run Fedora on boxes that are not critical to the business endeavours and critical to my customers," he says.
Red Hat: the corporate power
Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff believes Red Hat will continue to see competition from volunteer efforts such as Gentoo and one of the original versions of Linux, Debian.
"They [Red Hat] now are really viewed as the big commercial company," Haff says. "They can probably over time increase the user community involvement to some degree, but things like Gentoo and Debian are more natural places for the community to get involved."
But that's not such a bad thing, he added. For one thing, Red Hat still has plenty of interactions with open source programmers of individual packages. And for another, Fedora's relative quality will help ensure a strong user base and a healthy amount of feedback.
"Fedora is a more polished and easier-to-install package than those more community-oriented efforts today," he says.
