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.
No more income from me then (Score:4, Interesting)
I have two Redhat boxes at the moment, one running 7.1 which handles mail and DNS for me a half a dozen friends/family, the other running 9.0 which is purely a remote backup server (rsync copies data to it daily).
I use Redhat because despite the fact that I installed 7.1 a couple of years ago I pay my $60 a year so that I can run "up2date" once a day to keep my security patches up to date. I pay my $60 for both systems.
I also buy a copy of Redhat every 18 months or so.
Now that they have decided to stop updating 7, 8 and 9 they are forcing me to migrate both boxes. I don't have time to scan the web looking for security updates for hundreds of packages, so I need an update service. Hell, I only installed the 9.0 box 4 months ago and come next April updates stop !
So it looks like they are forcing me to either move to Redhat Enterprise to get security updates from them. It looks like I would have to stump up two lots of $379 just to get a two copies of Enterprise and 12 months of update for my two boxes.
I obviously don't want to pay that much...
So I guess I'm going to have to migrate to Debian or something instead ?
The end result for Redhat, no more income from me.
wow. (Score:3, Interesting)
Best of luck to you, RedHat; hopefully this move won't anger too many large clients of yours...
Branding Move - it seems to be (Score:2, Interesting)
To me it looks to be a smart move. Others might disagree
This shouldn't be a surprise by now (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a bad situation for those of us using RedHat Linux, but there *is* hope.
Who stands to reason? (Score:2, Interesting)
1. everybody's got to eat, which means, someone's got to pay
2. going opensource is not for every company.
It's a good day in Redmond.
Re:No Red Hat 10? (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't say there won't be a distribution in the tradition of Red Hat Linux. In fact, Fedora Core 1 is about to be released
They'll lose (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No Red Hat 10? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not trying to troll or rant, but i probably am. (Score:5, Interesting)
possible side benefit (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, I realize that Debian can be made to use RPMs but frankly fooling a 3rd party installer into thinking I'm running Red Hat is not my cup of tea.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Interesting)
A serious question (Score:5, Interesting)
Open source software doesn't feed the family so what do all those out of work developers do? It seems to me that OSS is like a virus that eventually consumes its host, thus ending its own life.
This is a serious question from one who seeks to be educated.
Oh yeah, I already know that I am an idiot and most likely a facist, capitalist, bozo, insertyourlabelhere so save those type of comments for your high school classmates and please seek to address the question.
Interesting experiment (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft has been rumored to almost encourage "piracy" of their office suite because it leads to adoption by paying customers. RedHat is obviously a stepping stone to RHEL. Without providing a "personal" version, RedHat will be able to devote much more energy to large dollar corporate customers, but the lack of grassroots support may offset the increase.
"Pirated" RHL Enterprize CDs? (Score:2, Interesting)
IANARU btw.
Stuck with hosting provider and RH9 (Score:1, Interesting)
Could someone be kind enough to supply me with some good FreeBSD dedicated server hosts?
Re:Old news (Score:4, Interesting)
OK. Will Up2Date still work? That's the question I want answered.
About Debian (Score:4, Interesting)
They should be (Score:5, Interesting)
We're migrating slowly to Debian since this latest Red Hat policy change was announced.
This article [seifried.org] pretty much sums up what I am facing.
Putting the genie back in the bottle (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They should be (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't you understand? By providing you this service they're LOSING MONEY, even with your $900+. They will come out millions ahead by ending the Red Hat Linux product line and focusing on their enterprise package. It's all about business.
Fedora Core (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd played around a lot with the Fedora Core beta (Severn) over the weekend, and wanted to describe my experience a bit for those thinking of going that route. Purely anecdotal, your mileage my vary, and all that stuff.
I initially installed over an existing RH9 install, and also tried an install on a fresh partition. The install process was very similar and it upgraded my existing packages nicely, and did a good job of preserving configuration.
Fedora also has a couple channels on redhat.com for up2date, they work a lot like the one from RH9, but with newer versions of the software. Initially I was subscribed to the Rawhide channel, but after updating up2date itself, it changed to a Fedora Core channel that offered the same stuff. Four of the packages (the desktop backgrounds, indexhtml, and some http configuration package) did not have the right GPG signature, which causes up2date to prompt you (annoying during a very long download that should be able to complete unattended), and can also make up2date hang when it goes to install those packages.
On a positive note, Fedora can recognize my Broadcom ethernet on its own now, with RH9 I had to download and install a separate driver.
Red Hat Graphical Boot (rhgb) is pretty hit or miss, I had it working briefly but it broke again. Looked pretty good while it was working, but was hard to keep working. Also didn't appear to have much in the way of man pages.
The system would sometimes slow way down when booting as it got to probing modules and/or detecting new hardware. I got errors about it trying to install the floppy.o module (floppyless system), and sometimes lots of stuff scrolling by about other block-major devices not being found.
The Linuxant Driverloader program I need to use my WiFi card installs under the 2.4.22.2088 kernel, but after doing up2date and getting the latest (2.4.22.2115, iirc) it would not install. Even under 2088 it gave me problems I had not encountered when running it on a RH9 system that had been updated to the same kernel.
When doing an update install, it adds a new entry to your existing bootloader, as would be expected. When doing a fresh install, it seems to only let you use GRUB, which could be an annoyance to those who prefer LILO. Of course you could change it after the fact.
To sum it all up, Fedora Core is for the most part quite slick and I really liked that it has more current versions of the packages than RH9, which has to play it safe for the corporate world. However, I experienced enough frustrations to have doubts as to whether Fedora Core is really as ready as it needs to be to take over from Red Hat 9.
16 RH boxes running up2date will now be Debian (Score:2, Interesting)
The end for Red Hat? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bye, bye Red Hat the distro - thanks for the memories. I guess your time had to come as a conventional, any one will want to use, let's me borrow the CDs from a friend, find it available at any hosting ISP distro.
P.S. I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95 and used it until I was able to get our PHBs to look at Linux in '99, which was Red Hat. I am now using Gentoo at home, yet I am slowly moving my systems at work and on the net to Gentoo [gentoo.org] - thanks Gentoo!
enteprise versus normal (Score:4, Interesting)
(I just googled a bit and an ssl'd apache is included,
anything else?)
By saying they are no longer supporting standard rh standard does this translate to just no iso's or just alias fedora rh?
-bloo
re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they're hoping that the flavor switched to will be Fedora; they would then take the best versions of software from Fedora (which will update frequently enough to keep the hackers happy), and stick them into Enterprise (which will update infrequently enough to keep the companies happy). Whether that strategy will work or not, we'll find out.
They just charged me $60 (Score:2, Interesting)
Call RedHat & they still sell the old products (Score:2, Interesting)
Fedora Core 1 won't be ready (Score:4, Interesting)
Think of Fedora Core 1 as if it were Red Hat 5.0 or 6.0, which each burned lots of people who installed them right away (rather than after the first few weeks of major updates came out). It's the equivalent of a Red Hat x.0 release, and I don't have any higher expectations.
The question is whether we'll ever see the equivalent of a Red Hat x.1 release, when instead of spending 6 months hunting down every subtle bug they can find in their current software, the distro developers will be upgrading everything to brand new versions and ditching the "ancient" stuff by the time it's 9 months old. Red Hat (again, assuming you waited before installing x.0 versions) always struck me as a happy medium between having the most brand-spanking new software versions for features and having time-tested old software versions for stability. Now I worry that Red Hat users are going to have to choose between an unstable Fedora version and an outdated Enterprise version. I used to feel bad for the Debian users who had to make a similar choice between "Debian unstable" and "Debian stable" versions of that distro; now IIRC Debian users have a more moderate choice available ("Debian testing"), and Red Hat users may be losing ours.
Re:A serious question (Score:3, Interesting)
Large Enterprise (Score:4, Interesting)
We have thousands of servers, hundreds of them are RedHat Linux. Our Flagship Systems Management product runs on RedHat Linux and FreeBSD. Our model has been very effective and efficient so far, because RedHat Linux had known reliability and cost factors. With Cost about to skyrocket, and a limited migration opportunity timeframe, we're screwed. Many other organizations who chose RedHat Linux for similar reasons and deployed it in similar numbers are screwed as well.
IMHO this is a bad move for RedHat only because of the no advance notice. Had they said this 6 months ago, everyone would be in a better position to deal with it.
My company can not, and does not, just go around upgrading all the servers. We do them when the box fails, customer has problems, or is hacked. This is the only time when the customer feels that a change is necessary. No one has the time to migrate en masse.
RedHat does want our money, I can assure you. Though we haven't paid them much, many of our customers have. Plus, we help give them Name Recognition. Customers come to us for our excellence of service (we are actually that good), and if they choose Linux they get RedHat. They learn more about RedHat and coupled with our quality, they will probably continue on in life very happy with the idea of using RedHat Linux.
Now we have to start figuring out what to do.
Thanks RedHat. Your loyalty to your customers is crap.
Next time, how about just two weeks for the End of Life announcement.
Time for a different distro (Score:3, Interesting)
This has to be the craziest decision ever. I'll probably go SuSe now.
Damn, I just installed this on a friends computer and bought the "RH9 Linux for Dummies" book for him.
If Red Hat don't think this will impact their enterprise business negatively then they are certifiably insane.
Adios Red Hat.
Well a few counter-points. (Score:5, Interesting)
2. In-house developments and/or adaptations of OSS work requires programmers. In fact, most programmers today are busy doing in-house things.
3. There's always some things for which there is more money than programmer interest, which simply wouldn't be written unless those with money paid for it. Think uncool, boring, tedious, repetitive programming with hardly any value to the general public.
Besides, there's nothing fundamentally wrong or unique about the process destroying the market. Think e.g. a company that has specialized in automating manufacturing - replacing humans with robots. Once they're "done", they've obsoleted themselves, since their services won't be needed anymore.
Except that for them too, the job is never done. All the time new products go from prototype stage (typically with some or a lot of manual labor) into full-automated production, creating new jobs. Same with programming. This program or that has been "done", but there'll be other programs, other software.
Maybe you think the PC and Linux is like the "final" step. In my opinion it is only the beginning, as more and more embedded devices (everything from cell phones to dish washers to PVRs) are becoming "mini-computers", almost without exception commercial and proprietary (at some level, like OS X over BSD and Tivo over Linux). And all of those will need developers...
Kjella
This is a GOOD thing! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've just read the posts at +3 and it seems like everyone thinks this is a negative, bad thing -- it's not at all :-)
RedHat have found that a free software project cannot be developed in a close way -- it is too expensive amoung other things. So they have opened up development to the community.
If you just follow some of the mail on the fedora lists [redhat.com] you will find that the opening up of the project has led to loads of cool stuff starting to happen, the fedora legacy project to support old versions, people offering to do i18n stuff, people working on a PPC version, support for apt and yum -- none of this would have happened without out the dev being opened up.
Also why is it called Fedora? -- well one reason is so that anyone can duplicate CDs and sell it! Before people doing cheap CDs had to remove the Redhat trademark stuff, now you don't need to :-)
What will this mean for hosting providers? (Score:4, Interesting)
What will this mean for them? Although direct support isn't really their problem (once they give you root, anything you ask them about non-hardware costs money), I can't imagine their marketing people will feel warm and fuzzy offering "unsupported" distros.
Do you think they'll just fork over for RH Enterprise? Or maybe switch to something else? I think their profit margins are fairly thin to begin with.
Once again, I don't think many of those providers actually have service contracts with RedHat et al, but shared hosting providers may well have.
Anybody work in that industry and have any insights?
Re:A sad day (Score:2, Interesting)
So they are going to rely on Volunteers to do the work for them? It seems a little dirty that RH has decided that they want to use the community to provide Fedora -- to maintain this 'farmiliarity' -- but not do it in house.
People (companies really) should not start to count on the good-will of a favourable public. What will RH do when people discontinue wanting to work for RH without pay? Wont they just move to another More Libre distro?
no, they won't... (Score:3, Interesting)
From the perspective of the large customer:
They want to pay someone and have a contract for support. For the same reason "no one got fired buying IBM", No one got fired for buying a suport contract that they didn't fully use- only for not having a support contract for when they needed it.
While support contracts mean nothing to a 10 peson outfit with a linux hacker in their midst, larger corporations see a different story.
They want to cut costs, but they don't want to be left high and dry. This isn't for a working groups personal file server; this is for mission critical applications. They need to gaurantee minimum down times, and support contracts help managers sleep better at night.
Look at IBM... their new pSeries machines are crazy expensive- But you can run linux on them! Red Hat is gearing for the same market that IBM is- cost cutters and those switching from Solaris on the enterprise level.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Interesting)
At my work we had a lot of small group servers running Redhat because the guy in charge of setting them up ran Redhat elsewhere. He's gone now. These are slowly getting converted over to FreeBSD because the people who inherited them run FreeBSD. Now there's this new guy who is bitching that we should really be running Windows XP instead. Fortunately we won't, because these are 100-400MHz machines with no budget for replacement or licensing.
Redhat may be making all of its money with Redhat Enterprise, but all of its advertising comes from plain old free-beer Redhat Linux.
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Interesting)
All i expect in a version I'd pay that amount for would be a software update util (akin to windows update). I want something that isnt targetted at the corporation. And I dont expect too much for the money I'm willing to spend. Just give me the "Redhat Home" or "Redhat Desktop" version. And cut down on the number of syllables in your product name.
$65 for RHN? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've paid my $65 (or was it $60? I forget) for Red Hat Network (RHN) -- what do I get for my $$ after April 2004? Will they automatically stop my subscription? Will they keep charging my credit card every year but give me nothing? Is Fedora going to be part of RHN?
Many questions about all this... all I know is confusion is bad for Red Hat and bad for me (and my small business). Personally, I'm experimenting with Debian.
Re:A serious question (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the idea behind free software was that software was once a service rather than a product. Maybe programmers will have to work directly for clients rather than hiding behind IP holding companies.
Open source software doesn't feed the family so what do all those out of work developers do? It seems to me that OSS is like a virus that eventually consumes its host, thus ending its own life.
This shit began in a garage, not a boardroom. The realities of the job market are no more the problem of the computer community than are the distribution problems of music/movie industries.
Switch to FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
Switch to FreeBSD, and you'll get a choice of the "always up to date but sometimes unstable" -CURRENT, the "mostly up to date and generally stable" -STABLE, or the "completely stable, security fixes only" -RELEASE branches. All of which allow you to rebuild the entire system whenever you like.
Binary security updates are available for the -RELEASE branches (see
Re:G P L (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't anything that would stop, or seriously discourage anyone out to sell copies. It would merely stop hobbyists, and professionals without a business behind them.
To paraphrase "Let them eat RawHide!" (equiv.: "Let them distribute Fedora!").
Personally, I've already switched my main system over to Debian, and I'm waiting for my order for the new Mandrake to be filled. At that point I'll decide which is my new system. Red Hat has the right to do what they've done. And I have to right to do what I've done. And I doubt I'll be recommending Red Hat again, as I won't be using it. I rarely recommend systems that I don't use.
Sears and Discover/Novus (Score:3, Interesting)
The gamble worked: Their retail division went from crap to profit in one quarter. By focusing their efforts on one thing and doing it well, they were able to create value.
Why Microsoft is succesfull (and Linux) (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Interesting)
Same reason I've been bitching about for months on slashdot (if you've read my comments, about 1 in 10 is bitching about being in the webhosting biz, and all of your customers wanting redhat, and having to tell them that it's not free anymore).
The name redhat is now worth money to them.
They want people to do exactly what is happening. They want people to call up and say "i want that thar red hat linux" because it's synonymous with linux, the same way office is synonymous with "microsoft office" at the managemen level, and at the average customer level.
So, now we say that we can get them redhat, but it's cheaper to run windows2003 web edition. By a good margin. Oh, and we now have to tell people running redhat 8.0 (which came out in, what, feb?) that the next time that they have a security problem with their 10 month old linux distro, they're SOL, because it's past it's end of line date.
I'm seriously pissed off at redhat. Enterprise my ass. For the same price as windows server 2003 web edition, you can get redhat enterprise, but *without support*. What the blue fuck are you paying for then? It's only the name.
Now, I know a lot of people are going to say "but but but but but". Arguement #1.) Management types want to pay a lot of money for an OS that runs on their big hard ware. Answer: I don't give a fuck. I want it for free, or next to free. I don't want support. I want it for $49.99, or $99.99, not goddamn $1249.99. Arguement #2.) It's GPL'd, so buy one copy and just put it on all your customer's computers. Answer: HAHA! Redhat is fucking you the same way Microsoft wants to fuck you - YOU'RE NOT BUYING SOFTWARE, YOU'RE BUYING A SUBSCRIPTION. More at http://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_3.html [redhat.com]! You can't install it on more than one computer!
Arguement #3.) The source is free, download and compile it yourself. Answer: HAHA, you first, doogie howser. They give out the source, but I bet you can't just compile it all together! I bet you have to mess with and tweak and change --config-with-blah=18934 a billion times, and you'd still not be half way there.
Bottom line: RedHat has gotten popular enough that they're tired of being a good corporation, and, while they think they're spreading the good name of linux, what they're really doing is fucking the small business who relies on the name "redhat" for profit.
Cause, hey, folks. When Linux is more expensive than windows, who will buy it? Say what you will about stability and security, and I agree, but given the choice between redhat advanced server premium for $18,000 and a solution from the other side of the fense for $6000, who's manager is going to pick linux, especially when they heard it was supposed to be free?
HERE'S THE ANSWER, REDHAT: RELEASE YOUR PRODUCTS FOR FREE, AND OFFER SUPPORT FOR THEM OPTIONALLY. Do what you've been doing for years. Oh, but too late.
Crash and burn.
And now for some real conspiracy theorizing! (Score:2, Interesting)
If Red Hat wants to be really sneaky, they will break binary compatibility in such a way that binaries compiled on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will only run on RHEL (e.g. trivially changing C++ name mangling, incrementing all kernel syscall numbers by 1). Want to run Oracle 10i? Unreal Tournament 2004? nVIDIA XFree86 drivers? Sorry, they only provide Red Hat RPMs that won't run properly on Slackware, Debian, or FreeBSD.
One could even argue that they have already been doing that, what with GCC 2.96 and custom patches to glibc and so on over the last few years.
Just a thought... :)
Re:Ob plug.. (Score:3, Interesting)
My feelings on Gentoo are pretty simple: It's a really cool distribution with a great development team, great forums, and by and large a pretty sharp user base.
Same goes for Debian. But remember when you couldn't find a single Linux related forum (including /.) without seeing a Debian zealot post about how "apt" is "superior" to rpm? There is a small section of Gentoo's userbase that likes to run around the internet telling everyong how great Gentoo is, based on completely silly reasons, such as the ones the employees in my parody had.
If you believe what you have just written above, then you have obviously never actually tried Gentoo.
I don't know what you mean, but I do believe that there are zealots who constantly evangelize Gentoo for stupid reasons. Among the reasons are "no more dependency hell" and "building from source is faster." My personal least favorite reason is "Gentoo gives you way more control." Knowledge gives you control, not your operating system.
There are a lot of cool reasons to use Gentoo, and if I were you, as a Gentoo user, I would be upset at such zealots, who only make you look bad by proliferating the opinion that all Gentoo users are wannabe "l33t" zealots. I choose to look beyond them to formulate my opinion of Gentoo, but nevertheless I am still annoyed by them. I don't generally run around bashing Gentoo, either. Remember, this was a joke. My .sig is merely a passive way to express my opinion of Gentoo zealots, not to "bash" the distribution as a whole.
In reality, I respect Gentoo, and understand it's real strenghts and weaknesses, and my own system looks a lot like a lightweight cousin, actually. Most Gentoo users are sharp, knowledgeable, and friendly. My beef is not with Gentoo, but with Gentoo zealots. Please, don't take my attacks personally, because they're not intended for you. Lighten up, and laugh. That was my intention, not to prove to you that I'm "l33t."
Re:A sad day (Score:3, Interesting)
A community gain, personal loss (Score:1, Interesting)
I really wanted to move to a Linux Distro that had a lot of support and recognition. There isn't any other Distributions that has the RedHat effect imho. I wanted my latest and greatest gaming hardware to be easily supported so I can dual boot XP.
I know Fedora is a quite similiar OS, but its the name that counts. Its the name that gets hardware/game companies to see and know is well supported so they start their support for them. Sadly, I guess I'm going to remove RedHat this week from my main machine and go back to my Xp Pro partition untill there is another major "name" that other companies will support for the average gamer/mp3er(slowly converting to ogg).
RIP RH
What You Need To Know In A Nutshell. (Score:3, Interesting)
1) The free version of Red Hat Linux is now called "Fedora Linux", because now that the "Red Hat" brand name is valuable, they're going to exploit that.
2) Red Hat, Inc. is turning it's back on 99.9% of it's installed user base, by pricing it's future "Red Hat" offerings out of reach of normal users. Red Hat is only obligated to give you the sourcecode for RHEL. They dont have to give you pre-built binaries. Good luck compiling it.*
3) Red Hat, in one single memo, has managed to insult every developer who has ever worked on, or contributed to, making Red Hat Linux a brand name. They're taking what we helped build, and making a Cousin Oliver out of it. We put our support behind (and helped build) _Red Hat_, not "Fedora".
Thats about it.
* = How long do you think it'll take for someone to write a little program that downloads the whole bag of RHEL code, compiles it, makes RPMs out of it, and spits out a few ISOs, and undermines Red Hat's stupid ass attempt at a ca$h grab in one fell swoop?
Re:A sad day (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it's somewhat unfair to say that the "community" is responsible for RedHat the name's perceived value. The OSS community in general is notorious for being very harsh with any corporate interests whatsoever. In fact, even in stories like this one, browse low enough and you'll find tons of "Red(s)Hat sucks anyhow, I use Gentoo/Debian/Knoppix/Slackware/whoever." Sure, many of them TODAY are saying its because of this license issue, but 'yesterday' it was because it wasn't as stable, or 'only for those corporate types' or not as optimized, or didn't provide a "lame" binary by default, or up2date didn't use the same color of text as apt did, or any number of valid and invalid excuses.
In the end, what RedHat did was produce a product that people perceived had value, and they spread word of that value to their associates. RedHat initially did this for free or cheap. Now they've realized that this isn't going to keep their heads above water, or make them the kind of money they expect, so they've decided to change things, banking on the fact that the name they use has value (and at the end of the day THEY did the work, THEY produced the distribution, THEY did the work of backporting, THEY spent the money, and all "YOU" (again, collective you) did was tell people they were good.)...
Its a risk, no doubt, because maybe enough people really will say like you "they hurt me, and stole my good will and I'm going elsewhere" but in the end, its not a huge risk for a few reasons that have already been mentioned:
1) They weren't making money the old way, or at least, they figured they weren't going to make money. (And I'm sure they've looked at THAT part of things very closely)
2) People that just wanted to use the name but not pay the costs were the people costing them money anyhow.
RedHat turned Linux from a hobbiest platform into something that people could "use" (not singlehandedly by a LONG shot, but I still remember the day I installed RedHat 3.03 after having dealt with downloaded Slackware and SLS up to that point and thinking: Wow, these guys have something here)... That's the value they provided, along with a workmanlike approach to Linux that produced a distribution that appealed to enough people to make it one of the most popular. THATS what built their name.
Yeah, maybe if they'd charged from the very beginning like this they'd never have become what they are today, but I don't see that as particularly applicable of an argument. It was a very different "market" back then.
But its their trademark, and they can do what they want to. If it fails (and I don't really think it will) then I'm sure that, in order to make a profit, they will adapt. But I definitely don't buy the argument that they "owe it to us" to keep the RedHat name free for anyone to use because "we made them who they are." That takes entitlement to a level that makes no sense to me.
Adapt or die! (Score:1, Interesting)
I want a Hummer H-2 for free too, but can I whine and bitch and get one? I mean if I get one for free, I can make a lot of money leasing it out to people who want to use it for just going to the store on Fridays or to show off at the golf course on Wednesday.
I'm making money using free software, how DARE Redhat screw up my business model by actually expecting to get paid for their work! I want them to do something I am incapable of doing and give me the fruit of their labors for free, so I can make an unholy profit and retire in a year or two....
YOU have a faulty business model and now it is Redhat's fault? I fail to see the logic. There is NO free lunch, it is time to pay the piper, either in money, or by doing all that "work" of compiling the source yourself. Or at the worst, learn another distribution!
Re:A sad day (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah. I've seen it. And I've been ignoring it. But not this time.
So, now we say that we can get them redhat, but it's cheaper to run windows2003 web edition. By a good margin.
What? I'm guessing you must be looking only at the initial up-front cost, and then comparing apples to oranges. You can't take the top of the line RH EL release with all the support options and compare it to a basic windows2003 option. That's just absurd. To get all the add-ons to make that equal would cost you a fortune under windows.
And that doesn't count the forced (paid) upgrades from MS, verses getting free upgrades from redhat. Yes, you pay a yearly fee for your support and updates, but it's nothing compared to the cost of "subscribing" to windows OS releases. AND you're guaranteed an updated, and an update that actually has real changes in it, whereas with MS you can't even be sure you'll see a new release, let alone one worth upgrading to.
More than that, at any time you can stop paying, leave your server installed as is, and continue to upgrade and maintain your server for free, it just takes more work from you. You'd still be able to build and run the applications you want to run and everything. Lets see you do that with MS.
"Cost" involves a lot more than just a sticker on a box.
Oh, and we now have to tell people running redhat 8.0 (which came out in, what, feb?) that the next time that they have a security problem with their 10 month old linux distro, they're SOL, because it's past it's end of line date.
No you don't. I have a few customers who opted for this release. Mostly small offices. For them, I have offer a choice. Once your release is end of lifed, I can continue to maintain it for you as is, and you can pay me the hourly rate for doing any required security updates/etc, or you can upgrade. Your customers will see the value in an upgrade. And if you quit whining long enough to actually think about how to make this a positive selling point for your business, you'll see ways to sell it as a value-add for your customers and make them happy about it. And if you can't, you probably shouldn't be running your own company anyway.
I want it for free, or next to free. I don't want support. I want it for $49.99, or $99.99, not goddamn $1249.99.
I assume here you're talking about redhat AS standard edition. I quote from the website:
Looks like support to me. However, you don't need support. And frankly, I highly doubt you need redhat AS either. I think you're just grabbing the big one so you can whine more about the price. Are you using redhat on an OS/390? Are you running some form of ERP system? No, your post would suggest you're running webhosting services. So instead of whining about the 1500$ redhat AS release, why don't you recommend redhat ES basic edition, which gets no "support" but provides full access to the redhat network and updates and such for 349$. Now W2003 isn't even in the same ballpark. Hell, they're on another continent.
This "free" tirade is crap. Not only is readhat providing you value with the updates and tools they provide, they're providing you a name. A name which you yourself have found has value to your customers. You providing that name has value to you. Guess what, you're going to have to pay for it. It's worth it. Get over it.
Bottom line: RedHat has gotten popular enough that they're tired of being a good corporation, and, while they think they're spreading the good name of linux, what they're really doing is fucking the small business who relie