“Open source software vendors” is a sentence that may sound odd to many of you. Indeed, what’s the point of being the vendor of a product that can easily and legally be acquired. The answer is security.
Red Hat, maker of one of the leading Linux enterprise distributions, emphasized recently in a statement on its software subscriptions.
The source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat’s main product, is freely available for anyone to download. In fact, it’s so freely available that a competing Linux distribution, CentOS, is basically just the RHEL code, compiled and packaged by a third party. Red Hat doesn’t mind.
That, of course, is because Red Hat focuses on selling software support via subscriptions, rather than the software itself. Usually, the motivation for enterprises to buy support centered software is the availability of updates and the possibility to avoid bugs of various kinds especially when it comes to security bugs. Subscriptions also provide help in case something goes wrong, offering an alternative to the "do-it-yourself" approach that is the default for solving problems in the open source world.
Keeping up to date is still a key part of Red Hat’s services. But in a recent blog post, the company’s vice president of Customer Engagement and Experience, Marco Bill-Peter, stressed on the security dimension of subscription-based software support as a leading reason to become a paying Red Hat customer especially after the major security scares that occurred in the last year, from POODLE to Shellshock.
Of course, since software subscriptions can’t protect enterprises from vulnerabilities that aren’t yet publicly known, paying a vendor for open source support would not actually have completely protected anyone from Heartbleed. But they would have ensured the delivery of a quick fix, as well as “timely advice, industry-leading security expertise, access to technical information and support, proactive notifications, Customer Portal alerts and articles and a Red Hat Access Labs self-detection tool” to help cope with the issue, according to Bill-Peter. To conclude, in the light of the latest market developments, Open source software vendors have a big opportunity to increase the number of their subscribers.