“In a sign that demand is growing for alternatives to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software, Red Hat Inc. will release a version of the Linux operating system and other programs tailored for desktop computers in corporations, universities and government agencies.” The AP story is here, Red Hat’s site here. It is available for purchase only in bulk volumes or as part of an RHEL “pack”. Also, Red Hat’s road map leads to SE Linux.
Red Hat Announces New Corporate Desktop OS
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but can we still buy it?
This eweek article has information about pricing:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1583814,00.asp
Red Hat is not affiliated with TCPA iniative…
And people still claim IBM is good… yah right.
Red Hat can’t make up their minds.
And I thought their workstation product was tailored for desktop computers in corporations, universities, and government agencies.
Seems Red Hat is trying to do a Sun JDS clone. But I don’t understand why RH would see a need to do this, Sun has never done anything right according to many. I wonder how enterprise workstation fits in. I thought that was the RH enterprise offering.
Does RH plan on using their proprietary server kernel, or will they do a new kernel. A kernel for every market keeps the competitors at bay.
Looks like we will need a ‘White Box’ version if mere users are to get a copy. So much for open source.
…they’re finally including proprietary plugs!
*clap clap* – big applause…!
but if it is not much different from fedora or rh9, they will have to do more than this compared to ximian, suse, mandrake etc. – but it seems a beginning…
now that the race for the linux (corporate) desktop has started and longhorn at the horizon, the next 1-2 years will be very interesting!
looking forward to it.
“Red Hat can’t make up their minds.
And I thought their workstation product was tailored for desktop computers in corporations, universities, and government agencies.”
yeah, whatever (the differences are – besides the plugs)…
not to speak that their “desktops” were so far relabelled servers…;-)
but it seems they’re finally beginning to understand – otherwise, with the competition heating up, they might getting teached a very hard lesson imo.
Did I read that correctly….$3500??!! And that’s for the lowest price option…
…actually $2500 for 10 seats.
10 Seats plus a server licence
“Pricing for the new desktop will take two forms: for $2,500 a year, customers will receive a Red Hat Network Proxy starter pack that contains a Red Hat Network Proxy server, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server Premium, and 10 kits each of desktops and desktop management modules.”
Finally a Redhat version which got Flash-plugin, Java, RealPlayer (?) and Adobe Acrobat Reader installed by default. Now people can surf the web after they have installed Redhat without seeing thier webbrowser throwing up on the first flash-site.
I think that Redhat Desktop is cool! It’s not a distro for the avarage OSnews-reader like me and you, but it’s a good step in the commercial Linux jungle where Redhat is one of the biggest and most important company around.
Myself is using Knoppix, OS X Panther and Win XP, but I have respect for Redhats buisness decisions! (sorry for my spelling, english isn’t my native language)
Explain to me please why you think that Red Hat has “forked”?
Yeah, it’s cool for the enterprise desktop, I agree…
Come on they must be smoking crack! I am going to pay $2500 for a server (1 server) license. And 10 desktops.
I don’t want to use Red Hat server I just want the desktop if it’s good. Hope they come up with a better pricing idea.
“Come on they must be smoking crack! I am going to pay $2500 for a server (1 server) license. And 10 desktops.”
That’s a trivial sum compared to the wages of a technician.
This is not meant for a regular joe user desktop. This is meant for cooperate enviorments for the whole stack, from server to client.
Ok, so people have to buy it with RedHat’s server for $2500. I think it’s an ok deal, if you need the server but it seems they are limiting themselves. I would guess though, they don’t want to end up doing samba support and the like. Which is understandable, but I think they are going to have to get their hands dirty and sell the desktop in a 10 pack by itself if they want to compete.
Or am I confused, and that server is actually not a physical server?
If so, $2,500 are they nuts?! $250 a license, I think not!
RedHat is absolutely right to stick to workstations and the corporate desktop. There is no money in the home user desktop market, and there won’t be any until there is significant penetration in the business market.
.oO Didn’t Willy boy make a statement that 640k was enough for the average computer user? Be careful of general statements. I use Fedora as my server, my home desktop, and business desktop . Go Linux. Oo.
I didn’t say that there will never be any money in home desktops. Indeed, I indicated that there will be, once there is significant corporate penetration. However, I assert that there is (as in present tense!) no money in the home user desktop for Linux.
Yea, I dont understand why there doing this
“RedHat is absolutely right to stick to workstations and the corporate desktop. There is no money in the home user desktop market, and there won’t be any until there is significant penetration in the business market.”
I respectfully disagree. The corporations buy what ever the user wants to use. So if they use it at home only then will it find it’s way to the corporate desktop. The days of an IT staff actually deciding what system gets used for the desktop is long over unfortunately. Your statement is the way it worked until a couple years ago, but no more I am afraid. My proof in that is the numbers of different machines I have to support.
What does it mean for the future of fedora. Any speculations?
“In a sign that demand is growing for alternatives to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software”
That’s nice, when RH pulled out of the desktop market where were all the headlins that read “In a move that shows desktop Linux claims were grossly overestimated…”
Just pointing out the double standard here, I remember back in 2000 when journalists were actually afraid to criticize Linux.
It is kind of an emporors new closths thing, but in 2000 Linux was said to be everything to everyone. Even though Linux has advanced since then, people now understand that those are unrealistic expectations.
Before Linux gains ground on the desktop it will have to be judged by the same standards as MS, this is something that still does not happen for the most part today.
“What does it mean for the future of fedora. Any speculations?”
Simple, the RH enterprise desktop will be found in Fedora with some additional multimedia stuff.
>>Finally a Redhat version which got Flash-plugin, Java, RealPlayer (?) and Adobe Acrobat Reader installed by default.”
Why is it that so many distributions can’t be bothered to include these and other common, expected, and free gizmos? This is just giving their users the “choice” to be annoyed.
There won’t be money in the home user Linux market until there’s money to be made selling shrinkwrapped Linux software to the home user.
Linux is approaching the point at which it becomes a viable alternative for corporate and enterprise use. But, it is a long way from offering home users something that will induce them to dump the OS that was already on their machine when they bought it. The presence in the market of Linux-only software that does something people want and can’t get from Windows or OSX will drive home user sales.
It seems like once every year Red Hat announces they’re “NOW” going after the desktop market. Hasn’t this really been the case for years now?
According to http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/desktop/:
Available in mid-May for download on two (2) platforms
and it’s based on kernel 2.6. So it looks like Fedora Core 2 with some proprietary stuff added on.
Here’s a better page with a price matrix (RH Desktop has its own matrix below the first): http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/purchase/index.html
If you look at the first matrix, RH WS is $179 per seat and AS is $1499 on x86. RH Desktop is $2500 for 10 seats and 1 Advanced Server.
This does two things for RH. It gets a 2.6 kernel in their enterprise line-up and puts their corporate desktop pricing more in line with Sun’s JDS at $100 per seat.
It looks like Red Hat has decided to have it’s enterprise desktop offering more closely track the Fedora Project, at least for now.
That’s not just trolling, but also uninformed. Red Hat never “pulled out of the desktop market”, that was entirely made up by the media and based on a misunderstanding.
They said that Linux wouldn’t be very viable as a commercial home desktop yet (still true) and they switched Red Hat Linux (sold in stores) to the Red Hat Project (not sold in stores but upgraded more often, later renamed to Fedora Project), but both events had nothing to do with each other.
In other words, Red Hat wasn’t in the desktop market before, now they are offering a specific product for the desktop, so there is hardly any bias in the news report. Of course the differences to RHEL Workstation probably won’t be that big and might have more to do with marketing than anything else, but they wouldn’t do it if there wouldn’t be a rising demand for a “Linux Desktop”.
Home Users do not want to pay for support, at least not in such price tags. 24/7/365 isn’t important either. It is wishable, but it isn’t important. The same counts for an Internet connection. You can share your ADSL line with multiple people on the other side, you can also have all the bandwidth for you alone. Or share the bandwidth only with ie. 2 or ie. 4 other persons. Ofcourse, you pay for that, and it is simply not worth it for most, if not almost all, home users. Because the source (thus the whole distribution) is already available it makes no sense to ask money for it when people can get it cheaper, hence White Box Linux and Fedora. With RedHat you pay for support; most Linux distributions compete on the level of support. Distributions like Lindows and Mandrake simply don’t have a name there…
“Matching” Sun JDS is a false goal, IMO. (JDS won’t be important until it proves itself as a market player.) But yes, they’re chasing the same customers, if that’s what you meant.
My read of the product placement is that the goal is to put out something that corporations could seriously consider using to replace a batch of Win2000 desktops, as an alternative to upgrading to WinXP.
That’s why it’s non-consumer, that’s why it’s bundled with the server.
Think of it as a marketing API that matches Linux to a particular Windows environment, rather than matching one Linux to another.
Anonymous (IP: —.dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net) said:
“Matching” Sun JDS is a false goal, IMO. (JDS won’t be important until it proves itself as a market player.) But yes, they’re chasing the same customers, if that’s what you meant.
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean to suggest that Red Hat wanted to model itself after Sun. I may be mistaken, but I think that Sun was the first to go after its customers Windows desktops with linux. Red Hat customers were probably looking at JDS vs RH WS ($100 vs $179) and asking for some relief.
The desktop linux market is still in it’s infancy and set to grow rapidly. I don’t think anyone is a proven market player yet. It’s wide open.
In difference of IBM and Novell
Red Hat is not affiliated with TCPA iniative…
And people still claim IBM is good… yah right.
What the hell are you going on about? What do any of these have to do with each other? Smoke crack often?
I cannot stand the company anymore. Linux was ready for the desktop and RedHat produced a desktop. Then Linux wasn’t ready for the desktop so they told end users to use Windows.
Now being they are about to get their rears whipped by Novell/Suse, they find a real need for a corporate desktop market.
I think RedHat needs to merge with Microsoft. Neither being my choice nor will they be in any future tense.
Corporate desktop needed? Try Slackware. RH is just repackaging what is already available. They package, they still don’t produce.
“They package, they still don’t produce.”
Number of coders employed by Slackware: 0
number of coders employed by Red Hat: 200
Time to find an argument that makes sense, eh?
-Erwos