Red Hat begins education discounts
The company's discount program is meant to attract students and educational institutions, a strategically important customer set for technology companies.
As first reported by CNET News.com, the discount will mean students can buy a version of the company's desktop software for $25 per year, and schools can buy the server software for $50 per year. The options include software updates but no telephone support from Red Hat.
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Technology companies aggressively court customers in the education market as a way to create allegiance among future technology experts and purchasers. And in the open-source world of Linux, educational institutions are crucial partners in developing the software as well as using it.
Schools also are a sizable market, with $9.5 billion in computer spending expected in 2006, according to a study by research firm IDC.
Linux's open-source nature makes it a good foundation for software tinkering and experiments, so it has long been popular in the education market. Red Hat, however, encountered a backlash among education users when it stopped making its corporate product available for free.
Also as expected, Red Hat began selling a subscription plan under which schools may offer students and administrators an unlimited number of RHEL WS installations for $2,500 per year.
Red Hat Chief Executive Matthew Szulik has made impassioned exhortations to look at the educational environment not as a market opportunity to be exploited but as a place where corporate investments will produce future technology and economic growth.
Red Hat's chief Linux competitor, SuSE Linux, began an education discount program in November.