Red Hat ends support on Linux 9

Red Hat India has discontinued its support for Red Hat Linux 9 and the
earlier versions of Linux, as April 30 was set as its deadline worldwide and
also in India.

Now users and channel partners have been directed towards the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux Platform. On contacting its Indian counterpart, Amit Boraskar,
Head (Alliances), he confirmed it saying, "The pace of development on Linux
versions 7,8, 9 etc based on open source is real fast and more importantly, now
customers want a more secured environment. Linux has become strong at the
enterprise level and it is essential today that work is to be conducted
seamlessly and hardware also is to be certified. RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Level)
certification is important for enterprise networks and in these networks,
technology enhancements also take place at a fast pace. Therefore, now these
hindrances are overcome with the certified versions. Customers from enterprise,
SME and even home will be ready to pay for support as security is most important
today."

However, Boraskar was not negative on its marketshare or penetration being
affected. According to him, "It all depends on freedom of choice and
customer perspective. Customers wanting a secured kernel will adapt to RHEL and
the newly launched Red Hat corporate desktop based on the same kernel. On
marketshare, we haven’t still touched the tip of the iceberg therefore there
is still a long way to go. But now RHEL would definitely provide a better
platform to achieve such high goals. In fact, we are counting on the scalability
of RHEL and endorsing this as a desktop strongly even in the SME and home user
space. The OEM vendors have already been upgraded on the RHEL platform,
therefore home users would be targeted in this manner. With the new RHEL and the
Red Hat corporate desktop, we expect to target data centers to the
desktop."

With this announcement, it is clear now that Red Hat wants its users to move
to Red Hat Enterprise, which is a fully commercial licensed version of Red Hat
whereas, Red Hat 9 was a version that could be downloaded and used freely. Now
that it’s officially the end of the line for version 9, market insiders add
that the decision to end support was something that all vendors have realized
that needs to be done, in order to make Linux a viable operating platform within
the enterprise. Both Red Hat and SUSE Linux Inc, which have major Linux
distributions, now have a fully commercial model.

On the user side, the announcement has caused a debate between those who buy
into the open source model, versus the commercialized Linux model, which tend to
be developers or open source advocates versus business decision makers, noted
market insiders. There has been a perception that Red Hat has really needed to
do something like this, as users have been demanding from the vendor to provide
visibility into their security plans going forward.

One-year Web based support is provided on the RHEL platform and also extended
professional services and consultancy. Presently, Red Hat has three value added
distributors, which include Sonata, Integra and GT Enterprises in India. The
vendor has 55 channel partners across the country.

Nancy Sudheer

Mumbai