Perhaps not as revealing as mandatory financial reporting...but over the past two years, we've worked with a client and their devs who use RH on Dell hardware.
While not at all scientific, one can see a sincere interest on Dell's side in RH. I say this because of the the evolution that I personally witnessed in the offering - specialized RH AS releases bundled with Dell's 6600 series servers. The first box came with a much less evolved suite of server and management SW. Two years later it was like day -v night, where clearly, Dell and RH had been very busy. Same drill, loaded Dell 6600, but this time the [very costly], RH server and management bundle was very evolved and was clearly developed with Dell.
It was/is far better and certainly far easier to manage. I and the devs, especially DB Admins, were very impressed.
That said, the price [per year] for basic updates and access to required packages is nuts - > 3500.00/year
Finally, same hardware, same database and same volume of transactions using W2K3 Server "smacked down" in both performance and price, the Dell/RH offering - it was just sick in fact...Windows just beat the tar [no pun] out of it and with SP1, it's even worse. I can only imagine what x64 W2K3 and x64 version of MS SQL 2005 will do...
I could/can clearly see where Dell has invested enormous energy in RH - but open it sure is not. Now, setting all sports team like fervor aside, I'd bet the two men had a face to face coming on the heels of a lot of calls/emails that reflected a much more mature posture where MS and RH and Dell are all interested in exploring how they can work together to make better software and interoperate in entirely new ways. For MS, I'd bet working with another "COMMERCIAL" SW house like RH, is simply wise...it reinforces the very real truth in the strength of governance present in commercial SW. Working with RH, Suse, Debian, and other distros each day, and all of their devs [who by the way are really kind of stuck and would love to have the time to explore MS's IDE and .NET, but just can't at the moment], I can see a maturing across the board and real interest in interoperation - it just has to be, because like it or not, "property" and all that attends that word drives this, and the costs of working in a purist environment just cost too much and for too long. RH I assess recognizes that it needs MS more than MS needs RH. At a micro level, we see and do the same things...reaching out to help other devs get something going, or bridge areas where they are weak - with Microsoft software.
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