Red Hat Recap 359
We have some assorted Red Hat stories which can be - and in fact already have been - jumbled together for your reading pleasure, like a sort of literary succotash. Forbes has an accusatory piece about Red Hat's licensing model, which is apparently, err, Microsoft-esque. Red Hat reminds everyone that RH9 is not going to be officially supported for much longer. Internetnews.com has a brief interview with Red Hat's CEO.
Red Hat's Going on (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Red Hat's Going on (Score:5, Informative)
They then charge the licensing fees for the commercial releases, *which contain licensed tools which RedHat could not publish as freeware* due to some of the odder and non-GPL compatible licenses. (Take a look at QT and the recent XFree86 copyright issues for examples.)
You could install it entirely free before from downloaded ISO's or RPM's, and you can still do this with Fedora. What you can't do is buy one copy, install it on 500 machines, and expect RedHat to support all 500: that was slaughtering their Linux tech support.
Re:Red Hat's Going on (Score:3, Informative)
and with lots of enterprise features.
You can pay for it and get support,(and not to mention "support" redhat).
Or you can get it for free - www.whiteboxlinux.org
Re:Red Hat's Going on (Score:3, Informative)
Folks with 500 systems don't bother RH's tech support, except possibly with kickstart issues to automate their rollouts. I've gone and bought copies so I could call and ask questions (well, once, I learned my lesson after that). They help with basic install issues only. Redhat's Bugzilla system is a far more useful means of getting support, but at that level I
What, no editorial? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can we accept Red Hat's per-seat pricing and overbearing EULAs that allow them to audit user sites for license compliance? Why does Red Hat get a free pass from the community and from the FSF for constricting our freedom as badly as Microsoft ever has?
Rick Carey speaks the truth. Red Hat is no more a "Free" choice than Microsoft is.
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't get a free pass; RH is just free to offer any stupid EULA they can come up with. However if you accept such EULA then it would be none other than you who constricted your own freedom.
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:2, Insightful)
Read the EULA. Read the license. Tell me how they don't violate the GPL.
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, tell me how they do violate the GPL.
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you remove redhat-logos and anaconda-images (something like that) you can roll your own distribution based off RHEL without worrying about their EULA.
Where do you think projects like White Box Linux and others came from?
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:4, Informative)
An update to a GPL program that you download via RHN is surely a derived work of the program; as such the GPL applies and Red Hat have no ability to stop you from redistributing the update.
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:3)
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Informative)
What Redhat can and do restrict is the access to their download servers. They are not required to let you use their bandwidth.... and that is what you are paying for, along with support.
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think that this is correct... I hope you got it in writing from your RH contact ;)
From the RHEL FAQ on the RH site, Questions #5 and #6 [redhat.com]:
Q [#5]: How are the Red Hat Enterprise Linux products delivered, in terms of services and prices?
A: The basic delivery model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is unchanged from Red Hat En
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:2)
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:3, Informative)
"BY USING OR PURCHASING RED HAT LINUX ADVANCED SERVER OR SERVICES, CUSTOMER SIGNIFIES ITS ASSENT TO THIS AGREEMENT." (emphasis added)
The second document is not, by any reading, just a service agreement. In it, the user of RHAL software agrees to be subject to audit and monetary penalties for violation of the agr
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Informative)
You link to the wrong license agreement. RedHat uses the nice license [redhat.com] for the software, and the nasty license [redhat.com] for the support contract. Of course, RedHat will only sell you the software with a support contract, so the support contract terms apply to anyone wanting to purchase RHEL.
The support contract plainly states: "If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement."
The end result, of course, is that you can't buy RHAS without giving up rights the GPL explicitly gives you.
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:3, Informative)
What that paragraph states is that you CAN put the software on as many computers as you want, but if you do you're not getting any tech support from Redhat. This is the support contract, not the software contract.
NO -- though is GPL really violated? (Score:3, Informative)
If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System [sic], then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System.
An "Installed System" is defined earlier on in the document:
The term "Installed Systems" means the number of Systems on which Customer installs the Software. The term "System" means the hardware on which the Software is installed[...]
I don't thi
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Informative)
Red Hat Linux itself is a collective work under U.S. Copyright Law. Red Hat grants you a license in this collective work pursuant to the GNU General Public License.
Nothing in the EULA says anything about not being able to copy the software.
Now, from browsing around their site I gather that what RedHat is charging for (and restricting on a per-machine basis, is a connection-to/right-to-use their update service. I wasn't able to see anything that said that you couldn't take one ISO of Advanced Server and put it on two machines. However, you would need to pay twice to be able to update both of them via RedHat's update system.
If you want to install RedHat AS and then compile all updates your self, it seems that you would be welcome to, but why then use RedHat?
This kinda actually makes sense as a business plan. If you have mission-critical servers, but not the expertise to admin them under Debian, *BSD, Gentoo, etc, buy a RedHat license and have it "just work"(TM).
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:3, Interesting)
In it, the user agrees not to install RHEL on machines not covered by a service agreement and that if they are caught doing so they may be charged penalties by Red Hat.
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:4, Informative)
It does not prohibit copying. My personal opinion is that if you removed RedHat trade marked packages, in accordance with appendix 1 sections 1 and 2 of the RHEL licence, replaced them with your own image packages and called it "My Personal Advanced Linux" you could then install that on other machines without breaching the RHEL subscription agreement. But ask a solicitor first.
Even if you could not, you definitely would be able to give copies of "MPAL" to other parties, as well as individual update packages received via RHEL update channels from RH. (but dont take my word, ask a solicitor).
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Informative)
RedHat are not violating the GPL. You are allowed to copy RHEL, sans the small number of packages containing RedHat Trademarks. And RH even make this easy by seperating the Trademarked art work into seperate packages from the actual GPL'd packages which use those Trademarked images. Indeed the frupping RHEL subscription agreement even goes into detail on this in section 2 of Appendix 1. And you cant call the resulting distro RHEL or even allude to it being RHEL.
There are 0 additional restrictions placed on the RHEL user in terms of what they may do with the software components. The only thing you are not allowed to do as a RHEL subscriber is lie to RedHat about how many copies of RHEL you have installed, which relates to the support & subscription side of RHEL or copy their proprietary RHN server software (which isnt (AFAIK) part of RHEL), which is fair enough.
Whether you use RedHat or not, and you dont have to, there are plenty of linux distro's out there to choose from, you still benefit from the resources RedHat puts into bettering linux by paying people to work on it. Indeed, you can even download a free and unsupported version of a Linux distro into which RedHat invest a lot of engineering resources if you want to. Even if you dont though, you will still be benefiting from the work RedHat employees are paid to do on free Linux software. (as well as those IBM, HP, Sun, SuSe, Mandrakesoft, $whatever_corporation, etc.. etc.. employees who also are paid to work on Linux and linux related free software). If a subscription fee means RedHat can continue to work on contributing to Linux, then that is good, because we will _all_ benefit, regardless of which distro we use.
I wish the clueless "leet" kiddies would grow up, get a clue and stop the inane ill-informed RedHat-bashing, but I guess there's little hope when even long long standing members of the community (such as yourself, thanks for the bovine project
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:5, Informative)
'Cause the EULA is only to impress PHBs. Anyone who knows their salt doesn't have to abide by that EULA in any meaningful way [whiteboxlinux.org].
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:2)
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:2)
Seriously though, there's a niche there for selling to Oracle customers, given how expensive their software is the $2k for RHEL is almost nothing for large enterprises.
If large companies are going to spend a boatload money on Oracle and CA then why not Linux? Red Hat makes money, invests it in Fedora and GNOME, and I get a modern distro for free.
I don't see what people are so pissed about. Fedora is a better distribution than Red Hat Linux was, and with Fedora
Per-Seat pricing is fine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe my perspective is different on this because I make my living in the Support department of a company that sells support contracts that ultimately pay for me. I tend to be frustrated by our Sales and Implementation departments driving things under The Manufacturing Delusion [catb.org], more interested in 'making the sale' than creating an environment that offers our customers an ongoing service. Lately I've seen signs to suggest we might be turning that around, though.
Re:Per-Seat pricing is fine. (Score:3, Informative)
White Box Enterprise Linux [whiteboxlinux.org] is doing just that.
WHAT obligation to distribute ISOs? (Score:5, Informative)
License does not forbid sharing. (Score:3, Interesting)
I read the license. It specifically explains how to legally share the software - specifically by deleting RH trademarks and 'anaconda-images'. I don't believe anyone thinks that someone has the right to distribute RH software, with its trademarks and everything present. But I could be wrong. Maybe the FSF should look into it.
RH does not lock out other support vendors (Score:3, Insightful)
The GPL never guaranteed gratis, only libre. RH is doing the source gratis to anyone who wants it.
I fail to see how anyone is forbidden from opting out. You can either compile it yourself, find someone who bought a service contract to give you a copy with the RH trademarks removed, or buy a contract your
Re:What, no editorial? (Score:3, Interesting)
While I haven't paid as much attention to the whole thing as some people probably have, I've seen nothing of a "free pass" for Redhat. Ever since they announced the changes to their licensing/business people have been royally pissed and not shy about
Summary (Score:2, Funny)
At a loss.... (Score:5, Interesting)
*shakes head at RedHat*
Re:At a loss.... (Score:2, Interesting)
$179? No problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see any particular problem with paying for software I need and $179 really isn't that much. I'll end up paying it one way or the other to RH or Novell (SuSE). No, I have NO intention of moving to some boutique distro that requires a Linux Guru to manage.
By the way, I don't quite understand why people that will pay $200 plus on an iPod, big cash in the latest game toy / case mod / whoop-dee-doo / sushi bar excess, why $179 for an OS is a proble.
Re:$179? No problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not aware of too many businesses that purchase iPods for all their employees. Or outfit their serverfarm with iPods.
The point isn't a single $179 purchase. It is $179 times the number of systems (or processsors) invovled. It adds up - and quickly.
But wait a sec - it's not just $179. It is $179 plus t
Re:$179? No problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
That is an outrageous price when talking about software that is both Free and free. I can see paying that much for support services, but not for the actual software itself. Given that you cannot download RedHat Enterprise for free, you aren't paying for support.
All systems require some degree of competence an
Re:$179? No problem. (Score:5, Informative)
Redhat and SuSE both offer discounts to students.
Redhat [redhat.com]
SuSE [suse.com]
Prices start at $25. Consider those facts before running your mouth.
Re:$179? No problem. (Score:5, Funny)
(shrink wrap and box are sold separately)
Re:$179? No problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
-a
Re:$179? No problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the $179 isn't paying for anything, then use Fedora; if Fedora isn't good enough, then the $179 must be paying for something worth having. You can't have it both ways.
Re:At a loss.... (Score:2)
I suggest checking out the major GNU/Linux distros [distrowatch.org] that use the RPM system. Mandrake [mandrakelinux.com] looks particulary good for someone abandoning Redhat.
Of course, I use Gentoo [gentoo.org]; so this is pure speculation. ;)
Re:At a loss.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:At a loss.... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.taolinux.org
http://www.whiteboxlin
Both are rebuilt Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 distros, free to the community, and supported with updates. And even if those projects stop doing updates, you can just download the SRPM updates from RH's site and rebuild them!
Best of all, RHEL is supported for FIVE years. Stable, polished and long-lifed, community RHEL variants are the way to go!
Re:At a loss.... (Score:5, Informative)
Thats why the MS comment is so off, you have lots of choices. In fact I believe Progeny were also talking about RH9 extended support, and there is a Fedora legacy project. Probably the support quality of the volunteer projects won't be as good as RHEL or SuSE enterprise products, but there is a reason for that you can copy code for free, but support and errata testing cost real money.
As to updates. FC1 will update RH9 smoothly.
Alan
Forbes is optimistic (Score:5, Interesting)
Linux Loyalists Leery
- IBM Refuses To Indemnify Linux Users
- Red Hat's Mad Matt Vs. Humongous SCO Lawsuit
- IBM Takes Linux To A New Level
- Why You Won't Be Getting A Linux PC
- The Limitations Of Linux
- Boies' Take On Linux
- PeopleSoft Jumps On The Linux Train
- Oracle's Linux Lineup
- The Cult Of Linux
Re:Forbes is optimistic (Score:5, Informative)
Daniel Lyons Article (Score:5, Insightful)
Daniel Lyons is an idiot. He does no research whatsoever, as far as I can tell. He wrote a piece on Groklaw that consisted of reading PJ's (inaccurate, to protect her privacy) whois information on her domain and accusing her of working for IBM simply because IBM has an office in that city (the irony being that she doesn't actually live there...).
To support his arguements, he quoted random trolls. I don't remember offhand if they were from Yahoo or Slashdot, but it doesn't matter and I mention this simply to give you some idea of how little thought this man puts into his pieces.
In short, the proper response to an idiotic article like this is simply to consider the source, and then ignore it. Save, of course, that I reccomend to everyone who might care that they never subscribe to Forbes because their research is shoddy, and I can prove it with respect to these stories.
At least Didio seemed to finally wake up when last she commented on SCO, only to stop commenting on it (at least, so far as I have seen as of this writing). Lyons, however, seems to have gotten upset when it became clear to anyone following the SCO story that he had done no research, and is thus personally invested in the story at this point. That is the only explanation I can give for his incredibly infantile and poorly reserached article on PJ, which was, ironically motivated by her comments that he needed to do better research...
So then, it is clear that Forbes' editors are prone to letting poorly researched crap past them (assuming they actually do any sort of editorial review over Lyons to begin with), and that the entire publication should be considered suspect until such time as they can demonstrate better research skills, not to mention a higher level of maturity.
Frankly, to me, Lyons is nothing more than a troll who uses a spell checker and has wider readership. My primary uses for his article consist entierly of a meager amount of comedic value and source material to have printed on novelty toilet paper. I should hope that no one ever decides to challenge that as fair use, because I would have too much amusement in creating bad puns with the acronym IP...
Worried about Paying Anything! (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't recommend RHAT to customers these days... (Score:3, Interesting)
Red Hat is now three separate moving targets:
fedora
rhel
rh9
Present that to a business person and they just say... "Thank you. Next".
Re:Can't recommend RHAT to customers these days... (Score:5, Insightful)
rhel
rh9
Not really. RH9 is irrelevent next month and I think it's been made pretty obvious that Fedora is the unstable beta development branch that feeds into RHEL and you use it at your own risk with zero support. Red Hat's only product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you're a home user then they're pretty much telling you to go use some other distribution. Mandrake would be the most logical choice for former home Red Hat users, but they should give Debian a try as well.
With all that in mind, our group decided to stick with Red Hat and purchased the 20 WS licenses and a couple ES licenses for our machines. I can't say I'm particularly impressed with RHEL so far. The lack of packages that used to even be in RH 9 is amazing. They don't even include xcdroast anymore so I'm kind of at a loss as to how I'm going to burn CDs until I can get it to compile from source (I'm having trouble with that for some reason). I also love how they leave out several packages like dhcp and openldap-servers from WS and expect you to buy the much much more expensive ES brand to get them. Not a big deal since you can still just download the server packages you need from the ES channel, although it probably won't auto-update through RHN. All-in-all, an incredibly lackluster product. If we didn't insist on "commercial support" I'd have just went with Debian.
Two simple targets (Score:5, Insightful)
RHEL - business oriented product with Red Hat support and with certifications and testing guarantees for things like Oracle. In order to b e supportable it handles less hardware, contains less packages and picks more conserative ones, as well as having a long lifetime.
I've not found many businesses have problems untangling this. but some of the non business folks got a little baffled or still don't realise that
a) FC1 updates RH9 fine
b) FC is exactly what old RHL (7.x etc) was about.
Re:Two simple targets (Score:3, Interesting)
Yup. In fact, I went insane yesterday and installed yum on my RH9 box. I then used it to upgrade to FC2test2 while everything was running (including X), I then restarted X and boom, I'm running FC2test2.. including the x.org X11. I still need to reboot to use the 2.6 kernel instead of RH9's 2.4 kernel.
The only problem I had was I had ximian installed, and had to uninstall a couple of ximian packages.
Cost of switching distributions? (Score:5, Interesting)
That one strikes me as a little odd - I've been pretty distribution agnostic myself, and never really had any problems moving from one to another. At worst you can just install a few extra packages to cover some version differences. Then again, I'm a single user - I'm not trying to maintain an enterprise wide system, nor do I really have any experience with such things.
So, my question is, how big are the costs of an enterprise changing distributions? I can certainly understand some significant cost (potential retraining, reorgansing the system a little to work with any new structures) but I can't quite imagine it being that high. If I had to guess, I would imagine it not being overly different from say, upgrading from Windows2k to WindowsXP or some such.
Can someone with some experience in this provide some insight?
Jedidiah.
Re:Cost of switching distributions? (Score:2)
The pain of migration from Win2k to WinXP... nobody in his right mind would do that. Win2k is the best OS that MS ever came up with. But if you insist, that migration would b
Re:Cost of switching distributions? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks, that's the sort of summary I was looking for, and was pretty much my understanding. Yes, there are some significant differences, but nothing too challenging. Unles
I say bullshit.. (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, I'd be worried about user training. Different distros may look quite different on the surface, and normal users might have trouble finding stuff. But I don't think it's worse than a Windows version change...
Kjella
Re:Cost of switching distributions? (Score:2)
Re:Cost of switching distributions? (Score:2)
Re:Cost of switching distributions? (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, lets say I write something to run on Debian specifically. This app requires a init script as the system boots, so it is hard coded into the app to write the script to
The reaction should be, write it in a more neutral way, not whine that I wrote for a specific feature that surprise, surprise, doesn't exist on another distro.
What made me laugh about this is that its no different then any other OS, I write something for Windows its not going to work straight across on Solaris, or write for *BSD and it wont run on OS X.
Re:Cost of switching distributions? (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Most inhouse code is not so clean. It's not uncommon for scripts to look for
RedHat not for the SMB market (Score:5, Informative)
I have a Red Hat certification but I am unable to install it anywhere. I get install jobs because of the price and they priced themselves completely out of the SMB
market.
When I bid a job against the local MS junk pushers I under cut them typically by as much as one tenth the cost. Red Hat is way to costly in this cut throat environment to compete with small business server so I don't even consider it.
Re:RedHat not for the SMB market (Score:4, Insightful)
redhat [redhat.com] Server costs $350 a year and can be compared to, say, Microsoft Small Busines Server which is a snip at $1,250 [dell.com]. Yet MS shops are undercutting you?
Re:RedHat not for the SMB market (Score:3)
There is a Standard edition which just has Windows Server and Exchange. It's about $500.
The Premium edition which includes SQL Server and ISA Server costs $1200.
As the other person responded, Microsoft only charges you once for the software and then self-serve support and updates are free. That's not the position Redhat has taken, where security patches and other updates are only available now to people who pay the year subscription. So you are forced to pa
Other possibilities (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Other possibilities (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Other possibilities (Score:3, Informative)
Redhat is still around? (Score:5, Insightful)
Novell has Ximian for its connectors (that means ZENworks for Linux is on the way), a solid distribution to integrate their tools with and run their services (like eDirectory) on, and GroupWise for productivity - which is already mature. In other words, Novell has the future of Linux on the corporate desktop locked, and is poised to make Linux easily managed in the low end server market with their already existing tools and directories.
It is only a matter of time before IBM stops relying on Redhat as a partner, and instead chooses Novell/Suse or their own Linux distro.
Redhat is pretty much over. I stopped caring about them after they released Fedora.
Re:Redhat is still around? (Score:3, Insightful)
SuSE and IBM would have nothing to sell if they had to take out Red Hat's contributions, and would not be able to effectively take over if all the maintainers of vital Linux and GNU components being paid by Red Hat were to disappear.
I am often irritated by Red Hat, but I never make the mistake of thinking that we can do without them.
Novell has nothing "locked", as their contributions are GPLed just like Red Hat's.
To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish (Score:5, Informative)
1) They release all their config tools under the GPL
2) They contribute to the kernel, GCC, glibc, XFree86, GNOME, OpenOffice.org and other projects
3) They're standing up and fighting SCO
Hey, I'm not too happy about the whole RH-to-Fedora business, but Red Hat as a company deserves huge respect. Without its help and funding, Linux would not be progressing so fast.
Go back to the days of GCC 2.7.x, XFree86 3.3 etc. to see what I mean...
Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish (Score:2, Informative)
Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish (Score:5, Informative)
It simply means that you can compile things with the Cygwin gcc on Windows and the resulting binary isn't covered by the GPL. This wasn't true with earlier versions, which were linked against a GPL Cygwin DLL, and hence compiled programs were required to be GPL if they were to be distributed. This just brings it in line with the GNU development toolchain on other platforms. There's nothing sinister going on here. These aren't the droids you're looking for. You may go about your business. Move along...
Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish (Score:4, Informative)
This is slightly off-topic, and while I agree with you that RedHat is most definitely a friend of Linux (and always has been), there are always going to be some people who see conspiracies everywhere. Your 3 facts show RedHat to be one of the good guys but the facts will be ignored by some people. They want RedHat to be evil. They will misinterpret the facts to support their warped view.
Another recent example is Sun. Here are just some of the things that Sun has done for Linux.
Yet we're already seeing the "Sun is evil" comments regarding the recent settlement between Sun and Microsoft. I've even seen one normally respectable site accuse Sun of entering into a conspiracy with SCO and Microsoft as early as March of last year, and this $2 billion settlement is part of the "pay off" for Sun's cooperation in destroying Linux. I can't even imagine the kind of confusion that would make somebody think like that.
My point is that people believe what they want to believe. You and I both know that RedHat is a bloody good thing for Linux, and so is Sun, but people who want to believe that RedHat and Sun are evil will continue to believe that, and no amount of facts will change their beliefs.
Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish (Score:3, Insightful)
He wasn't implying that, he simply said that red hat contributes. They don't just take the 200 buck licenses lauging to the bank, they pay people to make stuff available for everyone.
Uh what?
Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish (Score:3, Insightful)
He wasn't implying that, he simply said that red hat contributes. They don't just take the 200 buck licenses lauging to the bank, they pay people to make stuff available for everyone.
He may not have been trying to imply that, but it sounded like he might have been.
Uh what? That's a nice red herring. Again, red hat contributes back, the misbranded gcc is irrelevant here.
Ok, so the gnu link wasn't that informative. However, gcc 2.96 (before it was fixed) was -very- broken, and n
No Complaints here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is $6.95 Too Expensive For Anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
Enterprise Linux AS 3.0 ISO's [cheapiso.com]
You don't get support, but you aren't paying for it.
On the way out? (Score:2)
--
3 million strong can't be wrong...
Ma [madpenguin.org]
Linux and Redhat confusion (Score:3, Insightful)
Forbes:
"Most open source is imitation," Carey says. "Linux is an imitation of an operating system. If these [Linux] companies are going to create a price point that is significant enough that they are approaching the same pricing model as the innovation premium, why pay a premium for imitation when I can pay a premium and get innovation?"
This comment is a prime example of such a case. They see the cost of Linux going up when the cost of Linux never went up in the first place. They fail to see that they are paying for the support that Redhat provides, not for linux itself. In order to push linux in the business world, it is important that PHBs understand that linux does not come from a single company. They must understand how the liscencing works, and that they can always just hire a few admins to update their boxes -- not just rely on Redhat to do it for them.
thank god for FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
Or if its a server do a cd
If you absolutely need Linux, then look at Debian stable. Very well tested and also free.
Re:thank god for FreeBSD (Score:4, Interesting)
But I switched because upgrading IS HELL ON LINUX. It really is simpler on FreeBSD. All the ports are tested. Perfect? No, but hell and I mean hell of alot better then RPM.
Upgrading isn't hell. All I have to do is "urpmi.update -a ; urpmi --update --auto-select", and I've upgraded software or the entire distro. Do not fault the "linux upgrading system" for the sheer stupidy Redhat used to employ. Also RPM is rather powerful, but once again thanks to the stupidity of redhat, RPM has been marred for life. No matter how cool other people (mandrake, yellow dog, etc) do with it there are lots of ignorant people who will hate it automatically, even if they haven't tried the newer set of tools.
the profile system under Unix is meant for a centralized mainframe/server and dumb terminals for each user. All the apps are on 1 system so all you need under
You give no clear reason why you desire this massive un-UNIX like change. Also thanks to nss_ldap, much of the above can be done in one manner or another. (however, nss_ldap requires running nscd unless you want massive lagage, but that in turn causes sync'ing issues. One day all fo this will be fix0red. Only linux and Solaris support nsswitch(), none of the BSD's support it in a correct manner, therefore this is not possible with them.)
Why the hell do
Because the binaries are linked that way. (read my other comments to see how all this works out.)
I can run an ancient Windows95 or Windows3.11 app without a problem under Windows2000.
Thats because retarded Windows applications like to over-write critical libraries with their own versions. Hence why Windows has a "roll-back" feature, and why LongHorn's WinFS allows for invisible versions of the same file. Its to allow for sheer windows programming stupidity.
Why can't they just keep older libraries and make a seperate newer one?
No one ever said you can't install old libs, I do it all the time to play old dynamically linked binary only games on my linux machine.
If the developer wants to link to the new one they can but the old one should be linked at compile and execution automatically.
Thats gotta be the biggest "dum-ass" idea ever (and yes, I spelt dum instead of dumb.). Different libs have different features, calls, etc. Go read a CS book to see why the MSFT people are smoking real crack. (go read ESR's "art of unix programming" to see why they're on more than just crack)
Sunny Dubey
They spelled my name right... (Score:5, Informative)
Once the article came out, I called Red Hat to make sure I hadn't misinterpreted what they were doing -- and to attempt to clarify how they were restricting distribution of what was apparently GPL'd software.
The person I spoke to make a clear distinction between the binary distribution and the source code. The source code is available for free download, and will continue to be available for free download forever. On the other hand, they do restrict you from installing the binary distribution onto multiple machines. They say that the act of compiling the programs, and assembling them into a distribution, is work that they demand to be compensated for.
I was under the mistaken impression that the price of the distribution was to compensate for the maintainance, and that they really wouldn't mind of you installed from the CD onto multiple machines. That is incorrect, they "consider that a violation of their license."
There are obviously loopholes that you could drive a truck through, if you were so inclined. I asked, and there is apparently no restriction on reverse engineering of the distribution, so you could buy one copy, download the corresponding source code, and make an exact copy of each of the programs in the distribution, and put those files on all of your machines. You could also monitor what their up2date system is doing on one machine, download the source code changes and compile and install those on each machine. This would be a significant pain in the neck, of course.
It's interesting that Red Hat has not done some things that would prevent one from doing this. In particular, they do not include software that Red Hat has written, but is not GPL'd. If they had done that, then there would be no way to legally create an identical distribution from source code.
We've got about 100 systems running RH 8 and 9. Some 40 of those are dual Opteron boxes, for which Red Hat Enterprise Edition is about $800/box, so it would not be an insignificant expense to sign up for the system.
Thad Beier
Re:They spelled my name right... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They spelled my name right... (Score:4, Informative)
You can. It's called White Box Linux [whiteboxlinux.org]. Won't give you the peace of mind of running RHEL though.
Loss leaders (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in the market for another distro right now -- something that would not have happened if there were such a thing as RHL 10. So what's it going to be? SuSE? White Box Linux? Something else? Hopefully I'll have that answer in a couple of months. It's not going to be Fedora, and I've got too many customers that aren't willing to pay the premium for RHEL.
They've shot themselves in the foot. RHL was an important loss leader that established the brand. People were familiar with RHL, so they were eager to buy RHEL. Without the low end product, where do you build your market from? People who are just getting started with Linux now, might just install SuSE since there's no RHL. And when they're ready to step up, those big bucks are going to go to Novell, not Red Hat.
It's a shame that success has blinded Red Hat to the realities of the marketplace. They are ready to pretend to be Microsoft, but reality says that RH ain't Microsoft. The users aren't locked in and they will move if they feel they're being screwed with.
RHEL is not MS-esque (Score:3)
That said, I wish Red Hat would bring out their mid-level offering between Fedora and RHEL and quit the coy smiles. It's giving me fits for planning our deployments this year, since Fedora works great for some things and not others, but I really need a middle tier (lower than RHEL WS).
Now, when Red Hat starts exclusionary license agreements, killing competing products with vaporware announcements, and changing APIs without telling anybody, then they'd be "Microsoft-esque". But being that they're distributing Free Software, that would be really hard to do. This is more FUD from Forbes, a magazine noted in the past for its difficulty understanding Free Software.
Re:RHEL is not MS-esque (Score:4, Informative)
Antitrust violation (Score:4, Interesting)
The above quote is from redhat.com [redhat.com]
Seems they're rethinking their corporate focus after the backlash from the RHL screw up. So which is it RH, enterprise or personal? Thought you guys didn't want personal users? You've lost my business for good... business & personal.
SCO Fallout (Score:3, Insightful)
Regardless of who is right, its going to take us years go get over this bad PR-image they have rather successfully created.....
Jumping the Shark (Score:5, Interesting)
Novell is moving aggressively into the corporate market, while reveling in the power of viral marketing by "doing the right thing" by the Open Source community. It's agressively pursuing big deals, like the recent one to put SuSe on IBM's boxes. Knoppix and Mandrake have the n00b market all but cornered, and Debian and Gentoo are the must-haves for the Power Users.
Fedora is the odd distro out: not as approachable as Mandrake, not as stable as Debian, not as bleeding edge as Gentoo, and without the corporate cred of Novell. Red Hat, in spinning off Fedora, has really alienated a lot of potential customers, most of which buy on the say-so of seasoned geeks. Geeks are no longer saying Red Hat.
Oddly enough, Slackware is seeing something of a renaissance... stable and secure and with support contracts available is very attractive to a lot of traditional Unix shops who don't need flash and flair.
SoupIsGood Food
Re:Jumping the Shark (Score:5, Interesting)
The last time they came to my university (around 3 weeks ago or so), it was a _debacle_. They said they didn't feel any particular need to GPL everything. They said they weren't going to support anything but SuSE for Netware. They lied to us directly when we asked whether Netware was going to move entirely to a Linux kernel ("we'll do both forever!" Right.). They talked about how great their pricing scheme was, but when further queried, they _didn't have one ready_. We could not have bought from them even if we wanted to!
Compare this to the Red Hat rep, who told us exactly what we wanted to hear, and then offered us amazing terms for licensing. Novell may or may not be doing a good job on the corporate side, but they've effectively locked themselves out of the rather lucrative educational market, unless they magically turn comptent real fast.
In other words, Novell just bought SuSE and Ximian. Give them some time to make idiot mistakes in public, and I promise you'll see them. Novell's management is not exactly the greatest ever.
I also think that people don't understand what exactly the benefits of RHN are _besides_ the updates. That's only part of it. It's absolutely excellent to be able to remotely schedule individual updates to individual machines, as well as remotely install packages without touching the command line. Red Hat _is_ genuinely easier to administrate than pretty much every other distribution I've seen - I think RH just does a poor job of marketing that.
Making a mistake is not the same thing as jumping the shark. If Red Hat starts bleeding subscribers (which, I should note, they have NOT done), we can talk about their situation in more dire terms. But Novell buying SuSE does not suddenly make them into an unstoppable juggernaut.
-Erwos
Want RH Enterprise 3 without the RH license crap? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.centos.org/
It's Redhat Enterprise 3 minus all the proprietary crap (built from the same SRPMs) and it's free. For those who don't have time to keep up with all the security goings on, they seem to be Johnny on the spot with security/bug updates so a simple:
yum update
will check for and install updates on all installed packages. Good stuff. I'm in the process of upgrading my farm of RH 7.3 boxen to Centos 3.1 now and it has been rather painless. I wanted to stick with something that "looked like" Redhat to eliminate the admin learning curve and to make it easy to install commercial packages that are dependent on Redhat-isms.
Cheers,
"Lightning rod" (Score:5, Insightful)
Although Linux and open source in general are favorite Daniel Lyons topics, he recently published two incoherent rants trashing Sun. But it's likely he gets a bigger response out of trashing open source, so he'll probably return to that.
So if you like this kind of trash talk, fine, but if you don't, just do what you do with Rush: stop listening.
Man. (Score:4, Interesting)
-I wouldn't. The Linux OS is about stability and integrity. Dictionary.com defines Integrity : 'Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.'
-The companies that represent what linux is should reflect this in their business practices as well as their products.
'"This is not a religion," Carey says. "I want the most value for the dollars I spend." '
-It is not a religion. But, we do have loyalty, followers, proclaimers and believers of this technology.
-Do not overthrow microsoft and replace it with a wondersoft or megasoft. Replace it with something good.
Something good.
-Replace it with something we can respect and admire; with something that reflects the target-audience's beliefs.
It is smart to get the most value for your money.
It is not smart to support a dictatorship regime.
-We will not be enslaved as history has previously demonstrated. But we can still be enslaved through the rules of business and money in newer more creative forms.
To ponder: If someday we create AI, and it becomes self aware, and it asks us what it is.. We may not be able to say that it came from something perfect, but wouldn't it be nice if we could at least say it came from something good?
Re:Imagine that, another inflammatory Forbes story (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Imagine that, another inflammatory Forbes story (Score:3)
Linux had a kernel HTTP acceleration before Windows did (Windows 2003 adds kernel IIS acceleration). Apache doesn't imitate IIS, Perl doesn't imitate VB etc..etc..
Re:"Red Hat reminds everyone" (Score:2)
How many times do you have to be kicked in the nuts before you buy a cup? Just filter them to the trash.