Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0 on schedule

The final version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0 will ship next month, confirmed the software company, which continues to dismiss suggestions that Oracle is stealing its Linux customers by offering lower support costs.

Red Hat Enterprise OS Marketing Manager Nick Carr said that the proposed schedule for a downloadable version of RHEL 5.0 is looking good for mid-to-late February, but added that OEM partners may not start to put the operating system onto new servers until later.

“Dell, IBM, etc., will not offer it to customers until a later date, when they stream it into their production schedules, because they need to test it before preloading their systems,” he said.
Joel Berman, Product Management Director for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, reiterated Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik’s earlier assertion that Red Hat has only lost one customer since the Oracle announcement: Oracle.

He also contested the software giant’s ability to deliver at lower cost the same level of support to Red Hat customers as Red Hat do, pointing out that bug fixes and other alterations to the code are not easy or quick to certify.