War among the penguins? Red Hat goes all competitive

Bids to break evil grip of, er, Mandrake and SuSE

By John Lettice • Get more from this author

Posted in Software, 10th May 2002 11:35 GMT

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What's this, war among the penguins? Red Hat is celebrating the rollout of Red Hat Linux 7.3 with a competitive upgrade scheme, offering a $20 rebate on 7.3 Professional and $10 on Personal for people upgrading from earlier versions of Red Hat or competiting operating systems.

Well, that'll certainly put the wind up Redmond, won't it? Er, no. Aside from the earlier Red Hat distributions, the other qualifying products are various versions of Mandrake and SuSE, including the recently-released 8.2 and 8.0 versions respectively.

The two victim companies would no doubt be justified in viewing this as somewhat uncomradely, but they console themselves with the thought that the rebate offer page isn't exactly easy to find, unless you know it's there* in the first place. Is Red Hat just a teensy bit bashful about it? Surely not.... ®

* It's been pointed out to us that this one only applies to the US and Canada. UK and German versions are dealt with here, and no. we don't know why nobody else in Europe gets a competitive upgrade either.

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