[mhicks]

Not sure where the second statement came from but if you can let me know the source, I can correct it.

I can represent OpenShift fairly well. We will always have a free level of service and we are trying very hard to keep what is free today, free forever. We have tweaked a couple of things based on user feedback but the goal is to have a meaningful free offering.

At the same time, we are getting constant feedback that users want more than just the free offering. We also know that with pricing, they will want stability and predictability in pricing so we've spent a lot of time to get users involved and a lot of feedback in the pricing before we launch it. We want that pricing to be sustainable as well as valuable to users.

Hope this helps

[gcr]

Thank you for the clarifacation. The service sounds interesting.

How are you keeping the free plan going now though? Who's paying for it? RedHat doesn't exactly strike me as the kind of company that's wallowing in spare cash.

[mhicks]

Red Hat is funding the free plan right now. One of the reasons we started the service this way was so that we would really understand cost control in the public cloud from the point of view of customers. That lead us down the multi-tenancy path (lots of workloads on a single VM). SELinux and Linux Control Groups (as well as a lot of other tech) have been key for us in keeping costs under control.

Check out the OpenShift Origin work (https://github.com/openshift/crankcase) if you are interested in the code that we use to run all of this.

[rpsw]

I don't know how much was profit, but they did hit $1 bn in revenue recently and an in share price. http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/red-hat-hits-a-billi...