Red Hat Linux Support To End 1175
Orbital Sander writes "Received a missive this morning from the Red Hat Network, stating that they will discontinue maintenance on Red Hat Linux 7.x and 8.0 by the end of 2003, and on Red Hat 9.0 by the end of April, 2004. And, more ominously: 'Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.' [The full text of the email is on Newsforge.] Kind of the end of an era, and the new king has already been appointed: Red Hat Linux is dead! Long live Red Hat Enterprise Linux! Looks like they realized that only their support contract-based version of the product was making them any money." Readers also note that Red Hat is pointing users to the free Fedora Project.
Dang. (Score:3, Informative)
Hopefully Fedora will keep pace with things.
Not completely gone. (Score:2, Informative)
(2) Fedora is still going to be around, which will most likely fill the gap left by the death of non-enterprise RedHat
Well... (Score:2, Informative)
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
Another reason to use Gentoo or Debian (Score:2, Informative)
Need a lower tier version. (Score:5, Informative)
Under the old scheme, I was able to purchase the low end version and run it as a light duty web server. Now, looking at the product mix, it looks like they are taking the Microsoft 'your workstation isn't a web server' approach to stratification.
now before we all start crying..or cheering (Score:5, Informative)
BUT They still have and fund the Fedora Project [redhat.com]. This is essentially Red Hat linux. It's just no longer commercially supported. Just like debian.
Fedora is in, though (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Old news (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Crud. (Score:5, Informative)
All that's happening here is that the free download, no support Red Hat is going to be called Fedora, and a loose committee of volunteers will pick package versions and make other decisions, kind of like Debian or Gentoo or other distributions not run by a business. Red Hat will sell a version of that with support contracts, and keep a close enough eye on Fedora and have enough employees helping out there that they can steer / follow the direction it is going in.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Or other [lindows.com] great [mandrakesoft.com] user oriented distros [ximian.com] out there.
Re:No problem for me.... (Score:3, Informative)
However, as commented on in a previous
The comment I am referring to is a couple of posts down on the first page of comments.
Re:No more income from me then (Score:5, Informative)
You don't have to pay to use up2date
The end result for Redhat, no more income from me.
Still, this was not done to stop freeloaders, as we can still use fedora (a.k.a red hat linux 10).
So the only thing that is changed, is that you wont receive installation support or being able to buy it at stores
You should... (Score:5, Informative)
Buy Slack distros. I do.
If you don't like Slackware, there are many other distros out there ...
RedHat stock on the rise (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The worst thing about this... (Score:2, Informative)
It's not only a painless way to get a full, normal, and healthy Debian testing system installed, but they can see what it's like on their system before they even install.
Re:Crud. (Score:3, Informative)
So the move makes sense, both for RedHat and for users. So I, for one, welcome our new Fedora Overlords. (Come on, you saw that coming, didn't you?)
Red Hat on Fedora (Score:2, Informative)
To view information about SUPPORTED workstation offerings goto:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/
From the website: (http://fedora.redhat.com)
The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc.
The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community.
Re:Old news (Score:5, Informative)
stupid redhat. (Score:3, Informative)
Free RedHat cds at frys, bestbuy, target, circuit city, office depot....just the sales of support contracts from doing that would have made it worthwhile.
Instead they shoot themselves in the foot with fedora and will now be going toe-to-toe with IBM, Sun and Microsoft.
If any other company has the money and the guts to do it, they should embrace this idea and run with it. Maybe the mp3.com guy or IBM (they had a retail presence before) or even Sun or SGI might do it...hell, SCO should STFU and do this.
Linux has always been grassroots...the problem is the seed never spread far enough for the lawn to grow up healthy and green. Some company needs to spread the seed, spray it all over the country, in the form of free CDs with $1.99/minute support or yearly contracts...that is the way to make linux happen.
my recommendation (Score:4, Informative)
-t
It's worth it to do it by hand (Score:2, Informative)
I learned so much about how the OS works. The partitioning, mounting and all the really basic stuff was all black box to me. I had only used mandrake's installer before. You will learn so much installing gentoo by hand that it's worth the effort.
Re:They should be (Score:4, Informative)
They only need to update the packages once, that's a fixed cost, no matter how many subscribe to RHN.
The only variable cost is the bandwidth, lets say 2gbyte per server per year, it's probably lower than that. That's 62 bytes/sec per server subscribed, if you average it out. That's 3000 servers on a T1 worth of bandwidth.
Yes, this is about money, but their logic is faulty. They think that most of the RHN users will mostly upgrade to RHEL. This is where they are very wrong. Most of us don't need phone in support, we just need updates, and we are willing to pay a reasonable amount for it. Maybe up to $100 per server per year. That's about what RHN used to cost, before they lowered the price to $60 a year.
But not $350 per server per year, with an EULA to rival something from MSFT. In my eyes, the EULA is a bigger deal than the money. I might want to spend the money, if I didn't feel like I was giving up all my rights under the GPL just to get updates for a server.
Re:No more income from me then (Score:2, Informative)
Updates a la SuSE 8.2 (Score:2, Informative)
Seriously though, SuSE 8.2, Yast Online update, and you can rsync the SuSE distributions from any of the mirrors listed via ftp.suse.com - just fine one that's rsync-friendly.
Rsync via an entry in
Re:No Red Hat 10? (Score:3, Informative)
The only problem with using Fedora, is that it seems to be a way for RH to test out bleeding edge software. I've been using RH since release 4, and have deployed and recommended it to many small to medium sized businesses. It is a rock solid distro, with great support and easily updated (Gotta love RPMs
I'm not surprised actually. Still - its sad (Score:3, Informative)
In fact. that server ended up as a desktop machine for me and never did see the net other than from behind an OpenBSD firewall.
So I asked myself, why did I pay RedHat so much? Because of the hype?
Next on advise from many folks I bought Mandrake and did install it in a machine. It suffered the same redhat syndrom and I never dared putting it into a DMZ either.
In fact, I never got around to installing it into any machine that was in regular use. I could never figure out how to reinstall that older RedHat boxen without losing everything I had done... years of work. Or weeks of rebuilding.
So later I decided to upgrade and this time I went out and bought a new box and left the RedHat machine as it was and still is...
Then I put Debian Woody on it and I have never looked back!
As for the Mandrake machine? Well - it got an install of MaxOS (www.maxos.ca) which is derived from debian and knoppix with lots of great stuff added... and I gave it to my daughter who is somewhat computer illiterate but probably better than average.
She wanted winders too so I gave her a copy of NT and NT2000 and either 98 or 95 (I don'tknow - I don't use them) and a spare drive for her to play with and told her it is a free country and she is free to do whatever she wants.
If she wants M$ support, she can find it on her own or pay M$. IF she wants maxOS support or to try a different distro, then if I can't help her I know ppl who can.
So far, she is telling me she likes MaxOS and I have not heard that she has gone through a reinstall of anything else.
Meanwhile my son is musing about installing debian or macos because he's tired of w2K self distructing every few months. Since he has re-installed it about 5 times he has learned about how to install an OS into a computer. It would seem that M2K is good for something. (an educational toy perhaps?)
But I doubt he'll be interested in Red Hat.
RedHat had some serious issues with broken deamons and upgradability that IMHO were not properly addressed. So the center of the world moved to a new location. They may do ok for a while in enterprise level support. But I've looked at their pricing schemes and we are simply not interested.
There are many very good systems admins in this city that can provide a better level of support at a better price.
Perhaps Red Hat should have looked to work with the consulting community more.
Well, I find that Debian is a breath of fresh air and I'm sticking with it. A lot of this has to do with the idea that Debian is not RPM based.
Another part of it is that IMHO for a server you want a lean mean serving machine and OpenBSD fills this role just beautifully. For a desktop you want a different approach.
Perhaps Red Hat saw these two requirments and aimed for the middle ground.
If so, then really it was two boats... one being the server boat and the other being the desktop boat and Red Hat pisitioned themselves right in the middle... in the drink so to speach... and found themselves having trouble keeping their heads above water as a result.
the people with huge budgets disagree with you (Score:1, Informative)
e.g. the tens of thousands of RH Enterprise Linux AS servers that have been deployed on Wall Street in the last 18 months.
The major investment banks are in a sense key trendsetters for enterprise technology.
Re:No more income from me then (Score:2, Informative)
Further, the Fedora Project will still be heavily influenced by Red Hat. If you take a look at how the project is developing, it has a lot of potential. Remember that Fedora is merging with Red Hat, so it can become something quite interesting, with a large community base like Gentoo or Debian, and Enterprise-level programming and planning from Red Hat.
Give it a chance. I was quite skeptical when Red Hat announced this originally, but as I have watched the Fedora project start to move, I am becoming more hopeful.
Re:No more income from me then (Score:3, Informative)
Ewan
Fedora will have errata! (Score:5, Informative)
Q: What is the errata policy for The Fedora Project?
A: Security updates, bugfix updates, and new feature updates will all be available, through Red Hat and third parties. Updates may be staged (first made available for public qualification, then later for general consumption) when appropriate. In drastic cases, we may remove a package from The Fedora Project if we judge that a necessary security update is too problematic/disruptive to the larger goals of the project. Availability of updates should not be misconstrued as support for anything other than continued development and innovation of the code base.
Red Hat will not be providing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for resolution times for updates for The Fedora Project. Security updates will take priority. For packages maintained by external parties, Red Hat may respond to security holes by deprecating packages if the external maintainers do not provide updates in a reasonable time. Users who want support, or maintenance according to an SLA, may purchase the appropriate Red Hat Enterprise Linux product for their use.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Informative)
+5 Insightful? Free RedHat == Fedora [redhat.com]
Why is this so difficult for people to comprehend?
It costs a lot of money to backport security/bug fixes to old releases for years on end. RedHat can't afford to be doing that for products that people download for free. So, you get your free community-supported Fedora and your $$ commercial-support-for-five-years RedHat Enterprise. Fedora will be the proving ground for things that end up in later Enterprise versions.
This was announced many months ago - first that the "consumer" RedHat distro would only be supported for 12 months, then that the "consumer" RedHat distro would no longer be sold as such and it would merge with Fedora instead. If this story caught you by surprise then you were asleep at the switch.
Re:G P L (Score:3, Informative)
How long do they guarantee support for on the Enterprise releases? I would expect at least 5 years or they aren't worth the price. We still have NT4 boxes on servers taht don't need an upgrade.
It's right there on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux [redhat.com] page:
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Informative)
You would use RHEL over a competing Linux distro mainly for the strong support of other software vendors like Oracle, and IBM (Java, WebSphere Studio, ClearCase). Sure these applications will most likely work on other distros, but the systems are already designed to play nicely with RHEL and vice versa. There's also the backported security patches for 5 years. You won't have to upgrade to a new release of openssh when 5 exploits are released in the span of one week next year, you just get the patches backported to your current version by RedHat, typically in less than 12 hours. And if you have 100 servers, I'd take RHN over apt-get. You just log onto rhn.redhat.com, identify which patches to apply (you can apply them to all affected servers or a subset you define), and the machines all upgrade themselves from one handy administrative interface. I'm not aware of such an interface for any other distro. You can delegate privileges to multiple users too.
Re:the people with huge budgets disagree with you (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/03/27/032
Similar migrations have happened at Morgan Stanley and CSFB, don't know about the rest of the street, but with all the banks bleeding profusely the last couple of years, I imagine Linux was a very attractive proposition, purely in TCO terms.
I know first-hand that Morgan Stanley has deployed around 12,000 RedHat AS 3.0 servers in the last year and a half.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A sad day (Score:3, Informative)
I think you guys don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
I think this makes a lot of sence.
1. Technological advances made in Fedora will make it into Redhat Enterprise Linux.
2. RedHat developers will work on Fedora. (Maybe not as many as before)
3. Non-Red Hat Developers can now change RedHat for the better. If you don't like certain things in Fedora you can now change it.
I think RedHat is saying...
We want to concentrate our work on creating the most
- stable
- secure
Linux OS.
I think this is good. Finally there will be a Linux version that you can trust on an enterprise system. I'll bet IBM will jump into bed with this one.
Fedora may suck. But, it doesn't seem that different from the original RedHat.
Redhat just isn't going to spend effort to make it
Robust
Secure
Reliable
Stable
RedHat 6, 7, 8 weren't very stable or reliable in my opinion. And I'll bet the Fedora community could create some sort of update server as well.
I might still migrate away from RedHat. We will have to see what happens. Its all perception... This name change might hurt there image.
Re:No Red Hat 10? (Score:3, Informative)
The fact that Fedora will incorporate new technology before Enterprise does does not mean that Fedora will be beta-level software. It means that Enterprise is a much slower moving platform, for the benefit of application vendors like Oracle. Fedora will continue to go through all of the QA that Red Hat Linux ever was. (ntp 4.2 was removed from the distro, in favor of 4.1 because 4.2 wasn't working. Just like you'd expect).
You might choose to switch to Mandrake. That decision is up to you. I'd do so slowly, though, and with plenty of testing. I've never really heard great things about Mandrake's stability.
My plan for the time being is to continue using RHL 7.3 (as we have for some time), with support from FedoraLegacy. If that group needs manpower, I'll probably end up involving myself to make sure that we get the support for our servers that we need. We'll continue that for as long as it takes for Fedora Core to prove itself, or to fail to do so. I expect the former, but maintain plans in case of the latter.
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Fedora will have errata! (Score:2, Informative)
There are no plans for easier upgrades either (like apt-get dist upgrade), so you have to have downtime while you reboot from the CD.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, this has been a long time coming, and it should be no suprise.
Re:No more income from me then (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you meant access to the official RedHat repo. Oh, wait, it's a yum repo that you can point to for free.
Please, go poke around fedora.redhat.com before you spread any more FUD.
Re:A sad day (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A sad day (Score:3, Informative)
For me and the company I work for, this means switching to something other than Fedora.
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't wrong (hell it's good business practice) but do not mistake it for something that it's not.
Re:A sad day (Score:2, Informative)
Redhat has chosen to abandon its tens of thousands of box sales per year for a dozen "enterprise" contracts. Redhat was making way more selling cardboard boxes at Best Buy and Walmart, minus the cost of their bandwidth for free downloads, than they have ever made from 'enterprise linux.'
Please, back this up! I went over to the Investor Relations section of the Redhat site and had a look at the 2003 FY report [redhat.com]. Please take a look at it for yourself. IANAA, however they seem to be doing much better in the Enterprise arena than in the Retail arena. N.B. As per their conventions I'm going to quote numbers in thousands.
They declare revenue as derived from either Subscription or Services. For FY 2003;
Enterprise Subscriptions + Services = 68,960(30,438 + 38,522 respectively)
Retail Subscriptions (No Services) = 14,833
Now split the cost of subscriptions 2/1 between Enterprise & Retail (Total: 8,625) and then take cost of servies into account. N.B. Subscription costs split is best guess assuming the subscriptions costs are distributed in proportion to revenue.
Costs are:
Enterprise: 24,288
Retail: 2,846
Net position is:
Enterprise: 44,672
Retail: 11,987
Then take a look at the trends over the three financial years and the money is in enterprise not retail, especially looking to the future. Redhat is a business and has to look to the market.
However, others have raised the issue of the effect that the Redhat move will have on perception in the marketplace. That remains to be seen but I would think that Redhat has a sufficiently strong image in the Enterprise market to cut loose the free offering from the core business. Continuing to work on Fedora should sustain sufficient goodwill, where the money is.
Re:No more income from me then (Score:3, Informative)
Fedora is now the "officially" tested and sanctioned free release made by the company known as Red Hat. The only thing that has changed is that you cannot pay Red Hat for phone support now, but that is no loss for Red Hat as they were losing money on that anyway.
Furthermore, the Fedora packages form the basis of the for-pay Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, and the improvements Red Hat funds for them go back, via the GPL, into Fedora.
As Fedora is sponsored and to some extent driven by Red Hat, this is a non-issue for most of the packages (virtually all of the major ones) in Fedora.
Re:A sad day (Score:2, Informative)
Because Debian is better, much much much better, and Redhat have a solid history of never wanting to integrate anything that's better into their distribution. In fact, their goals are apparently to make their system more like Microsoft Windows. So rather than going forwards, they're going backwards... and they make things worse by forcing everyone else to adopt their standards like the LSB and the FHS as the official Linux standards.
That being said, Fedora sounds like a step in the right direction, and as the proverb goes, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.
Fedora seems like a duplication of effort: something already accomplished by Debian.
Well, you could say the same for any Linux distribution - you could argue Debian is just a duplication of the efforts of SLS or Yggdrasil
The problem with having a sole distribution is that you trample all over progress in the name of stability and compatibility. At some stage no-one will be game to try something new (for example, replace the default desktop environment with NewSnazzyThing) because of what will amount to corporate pressure. Corporations are, for the most part, afraid of change. Creating a whole new distribution breathes life into the whole community by giving talented and creative folks freedom to try out new things, do things a bit differently, and find out what does and doesn't work, without affecting something important. You could argue a "unstable" or "development" branch could also permit that but I'll nip that in the bud by putting forward that those branches need time to stabilise therefore you're still boxed in, limited in what you can try out, particularly if it involves core functionality.
Most Incorrect, Misleading article *ever* (Score:5, Informative)
Real story (a Fedora project member might have additions, but this is pretty close to what's happening). Red Hat realized that Debian was doing something right -- big set of packaged software, auto-updates on 'em, etc. Red Hat was trying to set up their own Debian-style setup called Red Hat Linux Project (RHLP). At some point, Red Hat picked up on the fact that most Red Hat users already like and use Fedora. So they talked to the Fedora folks, and combined RHLP and Fedora. Basically, it means that Red Hat pays for Fedora hosting and distributes Fedora (major value add) *with* their own software packages.
What's the end-user result? From a RH user standpoint, it's something like Powertools being readded to RH plus a lot more. A lot of Debian-style goodness being made available to the masses. There's a much larger package set, so less needing to use checkinstall to automatically produce halfassed RPMs from tarballs. You get a *good* set of download-and-install tools (Fedora uses apt and yum, unlike RH's piss-poor up2date...I've been griping about this on Slashdot for ages). You don't need to add Fedora's apt or yum package to your distro to actually use the large set of well-packaged packages.
This is the *best* thing that's happened for RH users for a long time, and we someone, confused or malicious, posting a "RH is dead" story? What the heck? Is this guy a Mac OS X nut, or just completely and utterly confused?
Clearly, RH should have done a press release, but it was damned irresponsible of Slashdot editors not to add a followup comment, given how significant this is to the Slashdot community. It's like a story claiming "Debian is being acquired by Microsoft" when someone packages WINE for it, or something equally ridiculous.