rhel

Red Hat's RHEL 6 beta drops Xen

Red Hat has released the first beta edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, with updates to virtualization, scalability, and power efficiency, among others.

The operating system was made available for download on Wednesday. It is the first to drop the Xen hypervisor in favor of the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) developed by Qumranet, which was purchased by Red Hat in 2008.

Red Hat added the KVM hypervisor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) alongside Xen with version 5.4, which was introduced in September. It has been testing virtualization products based on KVM since last June.

Read more of &… Read more

Thank heaven for Apple's (upward) pricing pressure

As the economy has stalled, prices have fallen to match the increasingly frugal moods of consumers and businesses. Only Apple seems largely impervious to gravity, consistently scoring solid earnings and rising market share, all while keeping prices high.

You don't have to be an Apple fanboy to be grateful for Apple luxury. We all benefit from it, even if we've never bought a single Apple product.

In economics, "anchoring" refers to a pricing strategy whereby a vendor sets a product's price high to create perceived value ("What a deal!") for other, lower-priced products, … Read more

Which open-source vendors can afford the cloud?

Cost and quality are two driving factors for open source's role as the bedrock for public cloud computing. Google, Amazon, and other public cloud providers simply can't compete with expensive, proprietary license-burdened infrastructure. They need open source.

As cloud computing matures and moves from public to private clouds, however, we may see enterprises flock to free (as in cost) and open (as in freedom) infrastructure, too.

What would this mean for subscription-based open-source vendors?

It might not be pretty. Tim O'Reilly pointed out nearly two years ago that

almost all of the software stacks running on cloud … Read more

What we'll pay for on the Web

Information doesn't want to be free. It wants to be managed.

We live in the midst of a digital cornucopia that our brains simply cannot manage without help. Whether it's our 150 Facebook-friend limit or our ability to find and store iTunes songs, we need help processing the sheer abundance of digital goods.

Importantly, we're generally willing to pay for this help.

Sure, most of us will take something for free if we can. Just ask the music industry, which has been battered by peer-to-peer piracy.

But not all of us. And not all of the time. … Read more

Novell slapped for impersonating Red Hat

It's no secret that Novell would dearly love to trade market share with Red Hat in the Linux market. Red Hat, however, isn't happy with at least one of Novell's chosen strategies for getting there:

Cloning.

As its white papers allege, Novell thinks it can offer high-quality support for SUSE Linux, the Linux distribution it owns and ships, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the Linux distribution that it...doesn't. The company has been offering a migration plan from RHEL to SUSE since at least November 2008, but it recently raised the ire of Red Hat … Read more

EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source

It takes time, leadership, and a fair amount of luck to successfully build an open-source community. It also takes money. Lots of it, if IBM's $1 billion commitment to Linux is any indication.

Unfortunately, the return on such open-source community investments may be permanently scuppered by the European Commission's misguided defense of MySQL from Oracle's intended acquisition. If the EC is going to punish successful open-source endeavors like MySQL, will investors still clamor to finance the rise of open source?

In many ways, MySQL is the quintessential commercial open-source success story. On the financial side, MySQL managed … Read more

Oracle and Novell Linux: Caught between a Red Hat and a CentOS

Novell has been positioning itself as the Avis of Linux, a distant but gaining Red Hat competitor that "tries harder." Like Oracle, Novell argues that it can give customers Red Hat value at a lower price.

There's just one problem with this marketing spin: the "low-cost alternative" to Red Hat isn't Novell. It's CentOS. And CentOS is free as in $0.00.

It's true that adoption of unpaid Linux like CentOS is booming, and that this no-cost alternative to more expensive solutions like Red Hat is a real threat to Red Hat. … Read more

Revenue up, but Red Hat needs more JBoss focus

At the recent Red Hat Summit, company CEO Jim Whitehurst quipped that "flat is the new up," but he clearly wasn't referring to Red Hat. On Wednesday Red Hat announced another strong quarter, with revenue of $183.6 million for the company's second fiscal quarter of 2010.

That's a rise of 12 percent compared with the same period last year. Despite the company's against-the-grain performance in a weak market, however, it may need to invest more in its middleware business to ensure future growth.

But first, the good news. Of Red Hat's total … Read more

Red Hat and Acquia thrive on complexity

Drupal is a fantastic Web publishing platform that derives much of its value from a disparate community of contributors, as Xconomy recently wrote. With more than 4,000 contributed modules from over 3,000 active contributors (741 of which contribute to Drupal Core), Drupal has something for everyone, which is both its greatest asset and biggest liability.

Choice is good. Too much choice, however, can be bad.

The same holds true for Red Hat, which charges a premium for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution to enterprises that want to tap into Linux but don't want the bother of … Read more