Matt Asay on Red Hat vs. Novell vs. Oracle vs. CentOS (and how Windows benefits from piracy): the usual cogent analysis

By Steven Rosenberg on October 16, 2009 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Open Road blogger/FOSS business guy Matt Asay shows how Novell and even Oracle can try to compete with Red Hat on price and support quality, but all is trumped by the presence of free Red Hat clone CentOS for shops with competent IT staffs.

And he brings it on home by pointing out that the worst thing that could happen to Microsoft's anti-piracy efforts around the world would be for said efforts to succeed, raising the price of Windows and Office above "free" and subjecting both OS and productivity suite to an ass-kicking by the free Linux operating system and the substantial (and just as free) application stack that runs atop it.

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