What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, the pricing is good; however, licensing is a bit confusing.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that pricing is heavy on this.The setup cost and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) involves a perpetual license.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that if you compare it with other operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is cheaper than them.

My experience with the pricing and the cost of licenses is that if you compare it to the different operating systems, it's a little bit cheaper. The support is also good as well.

I do not touch the pricing and the cost of the solution, but I think compared to some cloud costs, it is good because our team is relying on that. We just make sure that the service is up.

My experience with pricing, setup, and cost of the solution is that it's a service based on how many cores, not sockets.

The opinion on pricing and its cost-effectiveness for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that it is quite good for production on-premises.

My experience with pricing, including cost and licensing, is that I'm not sure.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that I strongly believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers a good relationship between value and price, and despite it being quite pricey, it's definitely worth it.

I cannot speak to licensing because we are using managed services from AWS. Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, all costs come from AWS on a pay-as-you-go basis. We get charged when the service is up; otherwise, there is no cost.

I haven't worked on the RHEL side regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, however, I have worked on the OpenShift side. The pricing is competitive, especially when compared to our last vendor, PCF, which became quite expensive after being acquired by Broadcom. That's another reason why we started moving to RHEL.

I wasn't too involved in those discussions. For the most part, our sourcing team carried the heavy burden of negotiating the licensing agreements and similar matters.

The pricing was good and did not affect much of the decision-making. It was appropriate, though I would suggest the team improve upon offering higher discounts on bulk purchases.

I can say about pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is maybe a two on a scale where ten is a high price.

My experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been largely positive, though there was a significant shift in their pricing structure last year. That change caused considerable discussion among customers. While I'm not familiar with all the specific details, this pricing change became a major talking point, particularly because it resulted in increased costs for many users. What's noteworthy is that customers' concerns were solely focused on the new pricing structure - never about the product's quality or performance. This pricing change led some customers to reevaluate their commitment to RHEL, purely for financial reasons rather than any technical considerations.

The licensing cost for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is comparable to SUSE for premium support. For approximately $2,000 per year, you can get premium support for one subscription which allows you to run two VMs.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) indicates that this was the main topic that made me step away from RHEL. Personally, I don't see good benefits from their support and paid licensing compared to completely free and well-documented Linux distributions, as I find RHEL excessively expensive. Normally, the customer asks for a three-year licensing agreement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The pricing is very simple. Compared to something like IBM, Red Hat is the cheapest.

It's expensive.

Pricing is sometimes an issue for our clients because it's not a cheap solution. The different licenses have a high cost, and perhaps they could improve by offering different kinds of discounts or lowering the price to make this solution more appealing compared to other cloud providers.

Though a bit expensive compared to competitors, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is still recommended because it works effectively and delivers value for its pricing.

I do not have specific knowledge about pricing as I am not a seller. The price varies depending on the customer and the project. Therefore, I cannot provide an exact evaluation of pricing.

The setup and licensing costs for RHEL are high, especially concerning support and associated applications. Red Hat charges high prices for support solutions like Ansible ( /products/red-hat-ansible-automation-platform-reviews ) Tower ( /products/tower-reviews ), which can deter companies from using their products.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more expensive compared to other operating systems. The license for cloud deployments is more affordable than the on-premises version.

Red Hat could gain a competitive advantage in the Asia Pacific region by adjusting its pricing strategy. Lowering the cost of enterprise-level offerings could attract organizations seeking operating systems or Kubernetes solutions, as these tools are essential for many businesses in the region. This adjustment would make Red Hat a more appealing choice compared to competitors with potentially higher pricing.

It is cost-efficient.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a compelling value proposition for corporations due to its robust support infrastructure, which is essential for maintaining enterprise-level systems. However, the pricing model may be less attractive to individuals or small businesses. Compared to cloud-based platforms like AWS or Azure, which offer flexible pay-as-you-go options, RHEL's subscription-based model can become cost-prohibitive for those with limited budgets or smaller-scale projects.

Pricing depends on the model used, costing about $3,000 per virtual host in the virtual environment. It varies depending on whether you get high availability. There are modules that are upsold such as kernel patching, which we do not use due to cost considerations. In the cloud, we use their licensing. For on-premise, we use the subscription, so we have two different licensing models.

I do not have any insights, but I know why the prices went up. At the time, it made sense. I do not know what the pricing is like now. Previously, the pricing model was advantageous as it allowed unlimited installations for a single price, focusing on support. The recent introduction of paywalls complicates the cost landscape.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a yearly subscription cost for the licensing that includes maintenance and support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a more cost-effective solution than Windows Servers. Windows Servers base their cost on the number of users and have high licensing fees, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers free versions alongside its paid, supported versions. This makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux a good option for startups and organizations with limited budgets. While the free versions may lack direct vendor support, the availability of paid support options and the robust Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem provides flexibility for growing businesses. Additionally, the presence of compatible open-source alternatives further enhances cost-effectiveness and choice. Overall, Red Hat Enterprise Linux presents a compelling advantage in terms of cost compared to other operating systems, especially for nascent organizations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive, but I'm not paying anything because it's the company's money. However, it's priced comparably to other enterprise Linux solutions. It costs a lot because you have a large staff working on the concept and improving everything. There is an open-source developer part that is free, so you can test everything before buying it.

I'm unsure what the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux license costs for one machine. We pay for premium support that guarantees a response in two hours.

The pricing and licensing, especially for options like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Ansible Automation Platform, are quite expensive.

I don't know the exact pricing. Red Hat's subscription model is cost-effective because you pay as you go, which is better than paying upfront high license costs.

The pricing is competitive. It is not cheap. That said, it provides value considering what it offers.

The pricing and licensing are reasonable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite expensive, yet the technical support, available roadmaps, and services justify the cost. We receive value for the price we pay, including technical support, which enables business continuity and compliance.

I have limited information regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux pricing and licensing, but our managers appear satisfied.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux licensing is expensive.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux automation platform subscriptions are quite expensive.

The licensing is a bit odd because we need to procure the licenses from a third party. We prefer a pay-as-you-go model with monthly increments instead of buying licenses in bulk that expire in a year.

The pricing is suitable for midsize to large companies, though small enterprises might struggle. It is comparable to Windows licensing.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be expensive, but its cost is not a deterrent for many organizations willing to invest in its stability, security, and support ecosystem.

The licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Peru is very expensive. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most expensive, I would rate the cost an eight. We leverage Red Hat's Hybrid Committed Spend program to procure and implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat is stable, and we always opt for the lower-tier subscription, which is affordable. It doesn't have unexpected issues that require a premium subscription.

While open-source solutions may seem free initially, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers support that reduces maintenance costs and provides security by having a vendor to handle risks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux licensing is not cheap, but it is worth it, especially considering the compliance and support it provides.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is suitably priced with various support tiers to match organizational needs and environments.

While the cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux may seem high, it's necessary to support Red Hat's extensive research and development, which includes maintaining long update cycles for the operating system. This cost, however, can create a barrier to entry for those new to the industry, making knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux more exclusive. Despite this drawback, the price is ultimately justified by the benefits of using a stable and well-supported operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a straightforward pricing and licensing model. The subscription manager provides clear visibility into license usage and facilitates tracking usage growth over time. Although the tool is still under development, Red Hat is actively collaborating with customers to improve its features and functionality. The subscription manager enhances transparency by enabling accurate tracking of license consumption and ensuring alignment with customer needs. Red Hat Insights, working with the satellite, further strengthens transparency by automatically calculating and reporting license usage. This comprehensive approach simplifies customer license management and promotes clarity in supplier relationships.

Companies considering open-source systems are often startups or those seeking platform flexibility. Switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to subscription costs can be a significant financial step.

I work closely with the licensing department in determining licensing costs and requirements. Pricing is something that needs to be worked out with the vendor. The more you have, the less you pay. That is the model nowadays in IT, but it is very cost-effective. You get what you pay for.

I did some research on pricing a long time ago, and at that time, it was much cheaper than Windows. I do not have current details about pricing, but it is affordable.

I am not involved in the budgetary aspect, but from what I understand, the pricing is competitive, similar to what we paid for SUSE.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite expensive, particularly its technical support, which can cost $500 per hour.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux licensing is quite costly, but I personally do not deal with pricing.

It is not fairly priced. If they can reduce the price, it would be nice. I understand that they do not have any big competition as of now. SUSE Linux is there, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux has overcome all the drawbacks that it had earlier. Initially, SUSE Linux was a quite comfortable platform for SAP applications, but Red Hat has improved in terms of development. Its kernel suits SAP applications very well. If they can also improve the pricing, it would be even better. They generally do not reduce the price, but they give add-ons. We can get licenses for the Satellite server, Ansible, etc.

One Red Hat license costs USD 131, which I find reasonable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is only affordable for large organizations.

It is very straightforward. We do not have to think much about having to get all the subscriptions related to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux fleet that we have because all the subscriptions came in pairs of CPUs or even for an entire bare-metal server. That way you can partition your bare-metal server into multiple virtual machines, and then you are covered. As long as your bare-metal server is covered, you can roll out any number of virtual machines on top of it. It is very easy to get subscriptions for your bare-metal server, and you can utilize whatever you want.

My experience with the setup cost and licensing was quite good.

I do not know the overall cost, but I know that Red Hat is cheaper than Windows.

We are a huge VMware shop. Our licensing cost works well with Red Hat. We license based on the data center. The way our license works is that we can run as many Red Hat VMs as we want and pay for a single license. On the VMware side, we gain a lot, and it makes much more sense.

I have had sales folks who have been transparent with the pricing, and then I have had other ones who were not as great. Most of those ones that were not as great are not working for Red Hat anymore. From a pricing perspective, there is supportability. What you get with that support is the ability to open a case before you do something. You can tell them that you are going to be upgrading your Satellite system or all Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and that you need a case open. They open a case, and then when the day comes, they are there. They are ready, and they know what is going on. The price point for that is phenomenal because you are paying for support. From a pricing perspective, it is on point. It is definitely a value-add, and it is extremely transparent from a customer standpoint.

I have very little experience with pricing and getting quotes. The whole VMware thing happened, and everybody is looking at different alternatives. At this point, any competitor is probably a good choice based on the cost.

We are good as of now. We do not have any concerns about licensing. Its price is still good for us.

It is expensive. Everything is. I was happy to get a three-year Red Hat Enterprise Linux contract for our initial rollout. It is less expensive than other solutions. It is a growing company.

We use open source. We only have a subscription for support.

My company has acquired five to ten licenses from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is reasonable.

The combined cost of implementing in hybrid and cloud environments to fulfill all our client's needs can be considerable.

We have to pay for the support and features. The distinguishing feature between open-source competitors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the comprehensive support that Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides. Red Hat Enterprise Linux no longer faces competition from HP and Digital in terms of support services, as these companies have ceased offering their solutions. IBM remains the sole competitor, but they recently acquired Red Hat, essentially consolidating the support landscape.

The pricing is competitive. It's not low, but it is in the market.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive. We have changed the cloud provider's subscription to a pay-as-you-go model.

It is cost-effective.

The cost is based on each organization's budget and infrastructure.

The product is on the expensive side.

Its pricing is good and competitive.

As a developer, I pay around 10,000 Yen, which is around $100 per annum for support. SUSE and Red Hat are typically the same without standard support. The pricing is not a big deal. Enterprise customers will pay for the support. Enterprises have the money for one or two products like this that are reliable and supported. As a consultant, I advise customers to go for support. You mitigate risks by having support. For your personal usage, you can manage without support, but when it comes to the enterprise level, you need to delegate things to people, and it should be through the proper channel. You need a proper point of contact.

As a provider, we must follow a different licensing model. We charge €2,000 per system for three years. Each month, we provide Red Hat with a number of new and old systems. Red Hat then invoices us based on the number of systems in use that month. This only applies to our cloud customers.

It's pretty expensive, but I'm not familiar with the pricing of other vendors for their operating systems. I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of pricing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux's main advantage is the support that you get by purchasing their subscriptions.

Its licensing is pretty confusing. There are a lot of subscriptions, and it isn't always clear which subscription is the best, but with their support, it's easy to find the right one. Our customers sometimes buy it directly from the cloud provider, but most of the time, they have a hybrid infrastructure, so they already have some kind of subscription, and they use that subscription on the cloud.

The solution can get pretty pricey depending on how many machines we're licensing but for a good reason.

The solution is a good value for money. They keep adding up essential features to the specific subscription plan. I am also not a big proponent of top-level open-source applications as they do not provide support services. Whereas, with Red Hat, I can call them for queries and get answers immediately. In comparison, open source doesn't have that facility. Even if you hire a support vendor, they just give their opinions and try to help but they don't own the project. At the end of the day, we have a 999.99% reliability of only 20 minutes a year of downtime with Red Hat. It is impossible to get that with open-source vendors as sometimes the applications might break if it doesn't notify about the changes on time. Conversely, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a ten-year life cycle assurance, so we don't have to worry much. Also, we are in a TAM program. Thus, we can call the support team immediately for any issue.

The solution's price is reasonable. If you have a license for the support, they provide excellent services. The support team is always available for help in case of errors or system downtime issues.

I don't know about the pricing because I am not responsible for taking decisions about products used in the enterprise. Our clients use this product, and we use this product with the clients. In my home office, I use a free operating system. There is no support, but I can use it to practice. Our clients need support because it's used in the production environment. I don't know the price of the product, but I understand that with the support that Red Hat offers, compared to other operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is cheap.

Their licensing is quite okay. It isn't expensive, and it's slightly cheaper than Microsoft. Taking into account its features, its price is okay. Support is something that serious enterprises would want to have. The advantage of running an open-source tool is that you do not have to pay for the tool in terms of licensing, but you don't have support. In certain situations, you might need support. For example, when one of your systems goes down, but you do not have the expertise internally to recover it. Depending on the industry you're working with, having downtime might not be optimal or might be costly. It might even be costlier than paying for the support or licensing of Red Hat. Apart from support, for organizations that have some of their services exposed to the public internet, security is very important. They would want the patches for the latest common vulnerability exposures found to be affecting the particular systems they are running. So, support and security are the key features why any serious organization should choose Red Hat as opposed to an open-source tool.

It is pretty expensive, but it is worth it. Generally, in an enterprise environment, there is no cheap solution. This is coming from someone who is working with a company that provides a lot of solutions a bit cheaper than the industry standard. In the enterprise environment, I believe no solution is inexpensive, but RHEL is still pretty expensive. Additional costs that I am aware of are usually for support and setup. A lot of banks use RHEL. I've seen the cost of the support and setup. Some of them complain about it, but they also talk about how well it works. I have not compared the overall costs of open-source competitors to the overall costs of RHEL when it comes to supporting business operations over time. The only other distribution for which I have seen the pricing is AIX, which was a bit more expensive than RHEL.

I don't have any issues with the licensing or pricing. In general, OpenShift is a little more expensive. It's a bit expensive to have the number of containers we need and for disaster recovery but it's been worth the money because it's helped us get to the cloud faster.

The solution is moving away from its open source roots and licensing is a little bit of an issue.

When you are running your infrastructure on this, you can always find some discounts with local support, etc. There are always some discounts to match your budget. It is definitely affordable. When it comes to virtualization, there are different factors. There is not only Red Hat. There is also IBM, VMware, etc. The third-party vendors always manage to come up with a good offer. Our company can't say no to that, and it works out fine. We also have IBM AIX, and when you compare these two, there's a huge difference because IBM AIX's support is quite higher than Red Hat's.

The pricing of RHEL is very similar to other offers. We like the model that Red Hat makes available for subscription and support. There are some free parts, subscriptions that facilitate solution development and implementation, and then, when the solution is well-defined, we move into the paid support license. That kind of subscription is a good approach. The overall cost of RHEL versus its competitors is comparable. It's more or less the same as SUSE. But the support from Red Hat is better than you get from the others.

RHEL is competitive on-premises, but it's too expensive in the cloud. There are many cheap solutions for the cloud. In terms of upfront costs, open-source is more affordable and, in many cases, free. The long-term cost of support, staffing, and maintenance make it untenable.

RHEL's price seems to be consistently changing, depending on what you're after. We might need a more extended license to lock in a price if it keeps changing. It would be nicer if it stayed steady within a specific range, but it's negotiable. We try to negotiate, and maybe a more extended contract would be better. When comparing to other solutions, you must consider the reporting and security features. It's an expense that we need to pay in terms of compliance. When you talk with your partner companies or potential customers, they need to know that we're on the ball and keeping up.

For the basic operating system, its price is fair. It is not cheap, and it is also not expensive. For the OpenShift or OpenStack implementation, the cost is a little higher than what I would expect, but it is doable. For a storage solution, it is almost impossible to pay. In comparison to open-source competitors, RHEL has the most cost-effective open-source subscription model. The way I pay for everything, such as Ubuntu or RHEL, is very similar. When you compare how much money I put in for a customer, in terms of licensing, or even support, my margins with RHEL are really good. If I compare it with VMware or Hyper-V, which are not open source, the difference is totally insane.

The cost could be lower. Red Hat is considered a costly solution. It can be expensive if you want all the features in the license. A cheaper license would make Red Hat more accessible to a broader range of users. It's reasonable given the features and performance, but a lower price would encourage more people to adopt it.

The pricing is fair. We do a bunch of dev work and there is some free dev licensing out there that's great for doing proof of concept work. When that was brought out a couple of years ago we heard about it, but it didn't seem to have been communicated to our Red Hat representative. We would ask him about it and it seemed that they were confused. But the cost has been pretty stable over the years for what you get. We figure out what we need for servers, make our purchase, and then manage it all in Satellite. We just make sure we're using what we pay for.

Operating in the cloud space, we typically point our customers to pay-as-you-go licensing, which comes through the various cloud providers repository services.

Because it's a very stable solution, if you have the knowledge in-house, go for a regular subscription. Otherwise, buy the Premium Support.

The licensing is a subscription model and the only product whose model I don't like is Ansible. At $100 per server, with 12,000 servers, it adds up.

This is not a cheap solution but it gets you the support if you ever need it. That said, it's nice to know that having Red Hat support is there but it's always stable so I hardly ever use it. The single subscription and install repository for all types of systems makes it simple to purchase and install Red Hat. We had Red Hat x86 before this, and when we wanted to purchase the newer version, their system made it easy to complete the purchasing and installation processes. There are a lot of other architectures available that we don't use, such as RSCT. They can be obtained from the repository but aren't applicable to us. In addition to the standard licensing fees, we pay for Smart Management. This gets the Satellite and Insights features, which I recommend. Overall, their subscription, process, and repository make for a streamlined purchase and installation process.

There are special academic offerings for academic institutes, which is pretty good. We need these offerings. In my personal opinion, the prices are okay. However, for educational purposes, they could be lower. For example, in Germany, the budget in the education sector for IT is lower compared to the huge universities in the US. When you are only using the RHEL subscription system, it is okay. It can get complicated very quickly when you need multiple different subscriptions with a lot of SKUs. When someone is going to look into RHEL, I suggest starting with an individual developer subscription, which everyone can get for free. With developer subscriptions, you won't be able to contact support, but you have almost all of the important applications and features of RHEL for free. You are not allowed to build your whole production on it, but you are able to develop applications, test configurations, test the platform, and try out almost everything.

The prices are comparable, and good for what is being provided.

If you don't buy the Red Hat subscription, you don't get technical support, and you don't have all the updates. To have everything working like a charm, the cost that you pay for it is worth it. In Bolivia, we don't have the best internet connection. Therefore, we have a local service with all the packages, repositories, etc. We manage them locally, and because we have a subscription, we can update them. So, we have local repositories with all the packages and other things to make it easy for us to update all the servers. Without the Red Hat subscription, we cannot update anything.

It is more expensive than other vendors in terms of pricing and licensing, but because of its stability, I have to go with it.

The price is something that can be improved, as they are still being undercut. We are an educational institution and as such, what we pay is less than the average company. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Red Hat's single subscription and install repository for all types of systems is something that we're quite interested in because it's simpler and easy to manage hundreds of virtual machines. However, from a pricing standpoint, it's part of the problem because it's what Red Hat utilizes to explain why they cost more. The Oracle licensing of support for the same Red Hat product is cheaper, and it's cheaper to the level of significance that it makes it worthwhile. We have spoken with the salespeople at Red Hat about it, and they have said that there was nothing they could do. It's starting to become a question mark over the patching with version eight. We might be changing, but we're unlikely to be changing from Red Hat. It's more a case of who's running our support, be it Oracle or Red Hat. However, we would need to look at the numbers next time we renew, which is not until next year.

Pricing is always a critical factor for all IT departments. The cost of doing business is part of the nature of the job. If you're going to buy a bunch of Dell servers, for example, you have to take into consideration not just the licensing, but the hardware support and other things. The licensing with Red Hat is on par with other organizations like Microsoft. We buy our licensing in bulk, meaning we buy perhaps 1,500 licenses at a time. They changed their licensing structure over the last couple of years. It used to be per system, whereas now, it's all or nothing. We don't have a subscription, as they used to offer, because they moved away from that. We have a site license, which gives us a certain number of servers, perhaps 25,000, for the type of license that we have. That works really well for us. The way our structure is set up is that we just buy it by the tier system that they have, so if you have so many servers then you buy that tier and then you get so many licenses as part of that tier or enterprise package. There are additional fees for using other Red Hat tools, such as Ansible Tower. We use Satellite, and it uses Ansible on the backend. However, we use the vanilla Ansible out of the box, rather than the official Red Hat Ansible Tower, simply because we can't afford the licensing for it. Satellite bundles everything together nicely in their suite of tools but we have moved away from that because of the additional cost. This is one of the downsides to any operating system, not just Red Hat. Windows, for example, is the same way. They try to bill every organization for every license that they can by adding on different suites of tools that they charge for. A lot of organizations, especially the smaller ones, simply can't afford it, so they create workarounds instead. In our case, Ansible is freely available and we can use it without having to pay the fees for Red Hat's Ansible. The nice thing though, is that they give you the choice. Red Hat doesn't force you to buy the entire product. They still have Ansible entwined with their Satellite product. The point is that if you want the additional features and functionality then you have to buy their Ansible Tower product, but you can still use the basic product regardless. The fact that RHEL is open-source was a factor in us implementing it. This is an interesting time for Red Hat. The great thing about Red Hat for us was that we could use Red Hat and then we could use their free, commercial version, which is CentOS. It stands for Community Enterprise OS. Unfortunately, they are no longer going to push out CentOS and I think that 8.4 is the latest version of their free Red Hat distribution. When we first went to Red Hat, in all the organizations I've ever worked at, being able to test things was one of the key factors. We could spin up a CentOS, implement a proof of concept and do some testing before we actually went to use the licensed Red Hat version of the same product. The real plus was that we could do testing and we could do all these things on the free version without having to eat up a license to do a proof of concept before we actually invested money moving in that direction, using that particular product or service. Now that this ability has gone away, we are going to see how that pans out. I think Rocky Linux, they're hoping that that's going to be the next CentOS or free Red Hat. We'll see if that pans out or not but right now, it's a scary time for people that are dependent on CentOS for their free development environments, where we can just spin that up and play around. Right now, we're looking at how we're going to resolve that. It may be that we have to eat up a license so that we can spin up a machine that we just want to do a proof of concept. This is something that we don't know yet. I don't have an answer because we simply don't have enough data to make an assessment on that. Everything considered, having a free commercial version available, in addition to the paid product, is a big lure for us. They worked really well in tandem.

We have a site license on a yearly basis. Generally, we're okay with its price, but everything could be cheaper.

RHEL is a great place to go. They have a great thing that is not very well-known, which is called the Learning Subscription, which is a one-year all-you-can-drink access to all of their online self-paced courses as well as their certifications. While it is a premium to have the certifications as well, it is very cool to have that because you end up as a Red Hat certified engineer in a hurry. It is good to have the training because then you are fully versed in doing the Red Hat approach to the equation, which is a no-nonsense approach. Because it is a subscription, you can go elastic. This means you can buy a year, then you can skip a year. It is not like when you buy something. You don't buy it. You are paying for the support on something, and if you don't pay for the support on something, there is no shame because there are no upfront costs. It changes the equation. However, we have such growth right now on the Linux platform that we are reusing and scavenging these licenses. From a business standpoint, not having to buy, but just having to pay for maintenance, changes a lot of the calculations.

RHEL is expensive. The servers or cloud images are quite expensive. But I guess the client groups they target can afford that kind of a license. If you're a small business owner or a student and want to shift to RHEL, you must spend a lot of dollars. The developer version of RHEL has minimal functionality, but it's given away for free.

Red Hat Linux is inexpensive. Linux solutions are generally inexpensive.

In terms of the solution’s single subscription and install repository for all types of systems, we can have as many RHEL installations as we want because we have a specific subscription that entitles us to have as many RHEL services as we want. We pay for a subscription and with that we get RHEL and Satellite as well. The best thing to do is to go to developers.redhat.com and get free subscriptions for RHEL products, so you can try them out and see how they work before you go ahead and purchase or subscribe. As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.