Stuart Gathman

Authored Comments

They certainly could run the embedded Windows product (you'd have to buy the development kit), but not the usual desktop Windows since it and 3rd party applications are pretty much soldered to the Intel ISA.

We had some customers with official EL5. You do have to register each machine with the update server, and pay the bill, but other wise there is nothing stopping you from installing on unregistered machines (no official updates however), and you can always switch to community update servers (CentOS), or hire another company supporting compatible binaries if you are not getting your money's worth from official support. Try *that* with Mac/Windows. In fact, competition for support of opensource OS is heating up - see the flack over no longer supplying kernel source in base+patches format.

I do think that the biggest selling point of RHEL is certification for various government and big business applications, and not getting your updates a few weeks sooner.