My next question would be, for how long will they continue including RedHat's bundle? Let's say Linux boxes really become a hot item for DELL. How long will it be before the smart cookies there figure out that they can get Linux for free instead of paying RHAT $X a copy. I'm sure this is over-simplification, but any bright CS graduate could put together a Linux bundle for DELL and be happy to receive stock options in kind. What's the cost of that vs. paying RHAT or any other supplier, for that matter? I think IBM and DELL are including RHAT's Linux bundle for now as a quick test of the market for Linux machines.
I am currently a bright CS graduate student who left a $60k a year job to go back to school. Now, with a Master's degree almost in hand, and 8+ years of on-the-job engineering experience, I could easily make 100k+. This is significantly less than 10% of $5 billion, so what makes Red Hat worth dealing with?
I run two machines at home, a Gateway and a Dell Laptop. The Gateway has Windows NT 4.0 and Red Hat 4.2, dual booting, and the Dell has Windows 98 and Red Hat 5.2. I haven't booted either of the Microsoft operating systems in months, but then, maybe that's because I'm a geek.
I bought both of those official versions, and I just went out today and bought Red Hat 6.0 to put on both. I like to have the media so that if I find myself in the middle of nowhere without a T1, I can still install or fix things if need be. I could have downloaded the distributions and burned my own CDs. I could have pulled the softcopy of the manuals and printed them myself.
This, however, would have entailed HASSLE and, as George Clinton once said, "HASSLE is the enemy of the funk." So, I am willing to pay an hour's salary to avoid HASSLE. Now, another thing about installing 5.2 on my laptop was the need to download drivers for the 10/100 Mbit ethernet card and patches for the X server. This also entailed HASSLE. My new 6.0 media has all this stuff built in. And any other installation problems I have can be dealt with using the support I get when I buy the media.
One very important outcome of official ties between companies like Dell and Red Hat is that support for this sort of integration will happen MUCH, MUCH more quickly and seamlessly. ATI, who made the video hardware engine in my laptop, is stingy with specs for drivers, but they share them with companies if they think it will help them sell a lot of chips. That's why XFree86 didn't already have the drivers - people had to hack them to get them to work.
If Dell preloads Red Hat on machines, they will have to ensure that Red Hat supports all aspects of the hardware on the machines BEFORE they go on the market, which means that they will have to pay Red Hat to develop the software. All this stuff would end up back in the publicly available source tree pretty quickly, but not quite as fast as Dell could put it on their machines, and again, this saves people HASSLE. Why would people get Debian or Caldera (for free or whatever) if they could get Red Hat preloaded?
Dell could hire a small group of people like me and do it themselves, but again this involves HASSLE for Dell. They are not an OS development company. Plus, how long do you think that Dell would keep the goodwill of the Open Source Community? It's going to be difficult enough for Red Hat to do this, and Red Hat is run by people who GET IT.
It's a much better bet for Dell to go with a company that has name recognition and gives IT managers warm fuzzies than to try to go it alone. Not to mention that the OS itself blows NT bloatware out of the water in terms of reliability, scalability, and availability. Without anything else, it is already a fine web server. Put Oracle or Sybase on it, and you have a real database server. You don't like something, or need something new, then, yeah, you can hire someone like me to do it and then put it back in the baseline.
All of this is worth a reasonable fee per machine. Then, Red Hat support for Dell customers would generate income, too. Oh, you want something new, but you're a computer manufacturer, not a software company? Why not contract with your partner, Red Hat, to write the code? They understand what you need better than anyone else, anyway, right?
There are synergies here that the "but it's free software, man" people don't get. I was in at 43 (probably bought ynot's short) and sold 1/2 at 68 1/2 on the way up and 80 3/4 on the way back down. But I still have my shares at 14. The stock is overvalued right now, but it will settle down to a reasonable valuation.
And that value will exceed the low 20's. For all the reasons mentioned above.
imho.
Regards,
Doug |
