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https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Few companies want to actually let their employees share their thoughts with the general public.

Traditional companies, maybe. Companies of the future will have to support at least the appearance of openness. See blogs at Google, Red Hat, Amazon... See also the Cluetrain Manifesto.

No, really that's the answer. Those of you with roll your own Windoze software will probably be able to run them under Wine or crossover office without fuss. Most of your users won't even know the difference and that will be that. Just remember the above next week when 100% of your users are down due to a combination of IM and email worms slamming your network, you have to disconnect and can't get anything done.

As someone who does not use M$ junk, but does have to put up with network congestion, I thank each and every one of you who will liberate their users.

However, that's too late for your current client.

However, I use rss all the time. For example, I have around 300 xvid files that I like to access quickly, so I wrote a perl script to create an rss feed so that each title links to (and plays via file type association) the relevant file. No internet even needed there, although I do run Apache so that my windows box can run the same files over the LAN and display them through my projector :->
It's useful for me....

Another useful aspect (in Firefox anyway) is the live bookmark. I have live bookmarks for manybooks.net (shows me recent additions to the download list) and Redhat (shows me the latest articles in the RH magazine).

Also, as I run linux, I have access to something called gDesklets, this being a desktop applet system for Gnome. One of the applets is a News/RSS Grabber. I have 2 of these running on the desktop, one gets its feed from /. the other from BBC News. Have a look. (The clock is an applet too)

I don't think it needs to be part of the OS, but that doesn't mean it's not useful.

Convenient how you left Linspire out of your argument. Is a $498 Linux laptop at Walmart not low enough for you?

As far as the price of Windows dropping because Linux is on the desktop - it's possible, but don't expect it to happen immediately. Microsoft (like pretty much all companies, Red Hat and SUSE) gets the majority of the sale of their software, and sets the MSRP of their software. They probably have hundreds of people working out the best pricing plan to maximize profit (like pretty much every company). If they notice that they're selling less copies they'll adjust their offerings accordingly. Take a look at the SKUs planned for Vista. It hints that they're planning some major changes to their pricing plans. In fact, it's a sign of price discrimination, which many businesses do (like Red Hat).

Like COE certification?

http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/home/company/news/ prarchive/2003/press_coe.html

GNU/Linux adheres to standards where it benefits the community. Arbitrary formal standards are adhere to by corporate organizations mainly when dictated by marketing and not by engineering. Only in rare circumstances does a ragtag non-profit, free-software group form with a sole purpose to push a free operating system into standards adoption. Efforts thus far--at the level of unix03--have been very distro specific and driven by corps in it for the $$.

Though, I'm certain you can create a domain and website to begin promoting the adoption of unix03 standard across all flavors of Linux. Good luck!

Back in the early 80's I was working on an IBM computer and discovered that if I POKE'd a certain value into a certain memory location, and another value into other memory location within 15 ms, the filiment in the CRT would flare up. If not interrupted it would have burned the filiment out.

Today all one has to do is change the horz or vert sync ranges to some point out of range of the monitor and the monitor could be damaged. This is why about any description on setting up an xserver has warnings about the the horz and vert sync range setting:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/haserver/RHHAS- 1.0-Manual/s1-cd-rom-gui-xconf.html
"Caution Caution

Do not select a monitor similar to your monitor unless you are certain that the monitor you are selecting does not exceed the capabilities of your monitor. Doing so may overclock your monitor and damage or destroy it. ."

http://fedora.redhat.com/download/

Another thing: you are wrong about the RHEL versions. Neither RHEL 3 nor 4 were affected according to my research:

According to RedHat, RHEL 4 (link is a pdf) came with Gnome 2.8. The Gnome 2.8 Userguide lists the ability to edit the menus by going to the URI applications:/// in Nautilus.
If RedHat neglected to include a launcher in the menu that starts a Nautilus window with this URI, it's IMHO not Gnomes fault.

The best I find for RHEL 3 is this, which says RHEL3 contained Gnome 2.2. Its User Guide lists the ability to edit menus by going to the "Start here" folder, then clicking on "Applications" (which, IIRC, again openened the applications:/// URI)

"Results showed that all of the computers faced some
form of Internet attack during the experiment, with a combined total of
305,955 attacks recorded; the largest number of those attacks targeted
the regular Windows SP1 machine. The computers were successfully
compromised a total of ten times over the fourteen-day experiment period
with the very first compromise occurring on the regular Windows XP SP1
machine in less than 4 minutes immediately after placing the computer
live on the Internet."

"Four out of the six computers used in this
experiment were not successfully compromised by an Internet attack:
Linspire (Linux), Macintosh OS X 10.3.5, Windows XP SP1 with ZoneAlarm,
and Windows XP SP2. The Linspire (Linux), Windows XP SP1 with ZoneAlarm
and Windows XP SP2 systems placed first, second and third respectively,
when measuring systems with the fewest number of Internet attacks. These
systems provided the best protection against attempts to compromise the
computer during the two week period with each receiving less than 0.50%
of the total 305,955 attacks."

Spin. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available for nothing -- it's just not called Red Hat Enterprise Linux.... in every other way it is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. OpenSolaris (although critical components are not actually "open" in any way) is also available for nothing, but it's still called "OpenSolaris" because Sun make it available. In neither case do you get *any* official support unless you pay for it. How many fucking hairs do you want to split in an attempt to big up Sun. Have you *no* shame? At long last, sir, have you no shame?

Now go look at : http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/compare/serve [redhat.com] r/ The absolute cheapest edition is $349 and the top is $2499 !! I can get Solaris for FREE. For UltraSparc or for Intel or AMD Opteron.

That seems like a lame excuse for poor/lazy system administration.

Not that you'd use them anyway, but what about all of these redhat legacy php releases:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2004-October/msg00005.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-March/msg00005.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-July/msg00001.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-July/msg00021.html

That seems like a lame excuse for poor/lazy system administration.

Not that you'd use them anyway, but what about all of these redhat legacy php releases:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2004-October/msg00005.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-March/msg00005.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-July/msg00001.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-July/msg00021.html

That seems like a lame excuse for poor/lazy system administration.

Not that you'd use them anyway, but what about all of these redhat legacy php releases:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2004-October/msg00005.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-March/msg00005.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-July/msg00001.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-July/msg00021.html

That seems like a lame excuse for poor/lazy system administration.

Not that you'd use them anyway, but what about all of these redhat legacy php releases:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2004-October/msg00005.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-March/msg00005.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-July/msg00001.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-legacy-anno unce/2005-July/msg00021.html

Everyway eh? So I show just one instance of your being wrong, and then you are FUD; How about how many different arch does it run on? How many different companies support it? How portable is Sun's compiler? Not very

Oh, I love that. Lets see. What exactly are you getting for the 349? An OS? No. You are getting support. How much does debian, opensuse.org, or fedora cost? Nothing. Which makes it == to OpenSolaris. But why did you compare linux support to sun's code? Well, that is called FUD (BTW, if you go to argue that Fedora is not Redhat, fine, then get centos, which is redhat enterprise sans support).

So lets talk about support. How many companies support Sun's solaris directly? Just one that I know; Sun. And they charge what? And how many companies support just Redhat code? Numerous. Don't believe it? Look at e-bay. Look at Google. You can get good support for any Linux distro at a fraction of the Sun price (However, I will say "caveat emptor"). I would say that a true free market wins out.

No, that is not you guessing. That is you being an asshole, as well as FUDing. If you are not sure what is the difference, well, then just look at some of the posts around here.

I do not mind that Sun competes. But I hate the lies, and the BS. I really can not tell the difference between you, McNealy, and Bill Gates. All three of you lie. Gates and McNealy do so because they are the CEOs of their companies that are slowly losing to Linux (if Sun was not losing to Linux, then why would a man who has spent 15 years knocking MS, suddenly turn around and work with them; because Linux/BSD is becoming the common enemy). But you, are a different matter. You funded a company supporting solaris. Cool. So now, you think that you as one person can FUD here and will win over other geeks. Well, not likely. In fact, I have been running various SunOS/Solaris over the years, and will do less now. Why? Because I can not stand the lies and FUD coming more and more from Sunbots. IOW, you just lost not one customer, but probably 20 (and that was just from me).

Rather than get into a pissing contest with you over hardware, let me point out something. Sun's sales are still dropping and other companies are accelerating in sales. For all your talk about how good SUN's hardware is, others are eating their lunch (and breakfast and dinner). Finally, Sun every so often gets into the top spot in terms of performance/dollars. It never last long, but Sun's time out of the top tends to be longer and longer. Sadly, I predict that Sun will lose a great deal more sales before the recovery, but it will take getting rid of the fanatics/salesmen who FUD and return to good engineering to carry the day. Speaking of; Good Day.

RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, etc all offer linux as OSS

OpenSolaris has an OSI license. It is called the CDDL. Welcome to open source.

This includes not just the compiler but a very wide array of tools.

Sun offers the Sun ONE Studio tools for free. Vastly superior to GCC in every measurable way. Of course that is my opinion based on years of code crunching. The fact is that these are available for free. Download and go.
I believe that the source is being made open also.

ALL of the source code of anything marked OSS is available

Absolutely. All of the components under the CDDL are open. Have fun.
More on the way.
Heck, Sun just spent FIVE years working on an entirely new filesystem called ZFS and they released it and open sourced it at the same time. How cool is that?
See : http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-11/sunf lash.20051130.1.html

Now, you mention DELL and IBM. Well they both sell hardware with services.

I have heard that .. somewhere. I think Sun does that too. So does my corner store.

Neither of them directly deal with Linux

see : http://www.redhat.com/sundown/
Why is there an IBM logo on that page? Why is there an edition RHEL for POWER but not for Sparc ? Why does it say in big BOLD graphics there "Migrate to Linux with IBM + Red Hat"?
Now go look at : http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/compare/serve r/
The absolute cheapest edition is $349 and the top is $2499 !!
I can get Solaris for FREE.
For UltraSparc or for Intel or AMD Opteron.
The cost of an OPTIONAL software support contract is less than 34 cents a day.
I ought to know .. I bought one because it was five times cheaper than my daily coffee intake and I can't live with that either.
See my blog : http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=107
While you're surfing, look at the three guys at :
http://www.novell.com/linux/unixtolinux/
They are all parked on a bench outside the IT Directors office waiting to tell how reiserfs screwed up their data again and they lost the corporate database because of some messed up kernel patch.
But that is just me guessing.

You can buy just about any size machine from these 2 companies that
is both smaller/cheaper to larger/more expensive than what Sun offers.

Sure. I agree with "cheap".
Show me a 64-bit Opteron that is faster, cooler and less costly than a SunFire X2100.
Really. Anyone can make junk that is cheap and monsters that are massively expensive.
Show me a 64-bit machine that has more horsepower than an 8-core 1.2GHz SunFire T1000 or a 64-bit AMD Opteron machine with more horsepower than the SunFire X2100.
For less money.
Oh, and the Opteron gear has to be certified to run Windows as well as Linux as well as a real UNIX.
Good luck.

when I look at the top 500 fastest computers, where is Solaris in there?
Does it hold the majority of the top 10, let alone the top 500?

Take a long hard stare at my blog from a little while ago :
http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=113
I count, what? 16 e

RedHat, Suse, Mandrake, etc all offer linux as OSS

OpenSolaris has an OSI license. It is called the CDDL. Welcome to open source.

This includes not just the compiler but a very wide array of tools.

Sun offers the Sun ONE Studio tools for free. Vastly superior to GCC in every measurable way. Of course that is my opinion based on years of code crunching. The fact is that these are available for free. Download and go.
I believe that the source is being made open also.

ALL of the source code of anything marked OSS is available

Absolutely. All of the components under the CDDL are open. Have fun.
More on the way.
Heck, Sun just spent FIVE years working on an entirely new filesystem called ZFS and they released it and open sourced it at the same time. How cool is that?
See : http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2005-11/sunf lash.20051130.1.html

Now, you mention DELL and IBM. Well they both sell hardware with services.

I have heard that .. somewhere. I think Sun does that too. So does my corner store.

Neither of them directly deal with Linux

see : http://www.redhat.com/sundown/
Why is there an IBM logo on that page? Why is there an edition RHEL for POWER but not for Sparc ? Why does it say in big BOLD graphics there "Migrate to Linux with IBM + Red Hat"?
Now go look at : http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhel/compare/serve r/
The absolute cheapest edition is $349 and the top is $2499 !!
I can get Solaris for FREE.
For UltraSparc or for Intel or AMD Opteron.
The cost of an OPTIONAL software support contract is less than 34 cents a day.
I ought to know .. I bought one because it was five times cheaper than my daily coffee intake and I can't live with that either.
See my blog : http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=107
While you're surfing, look at the three guys at :
http://www.novell.com/linux/unixtolinux/
They are all parked on a bench outside the IT Directors office waiting to tell how reiserfs screwed up their data again and they lost the corporate database because of some messed up kernel patch.
But that is just me guessing.

You can buy just about any size machine from these 2 companies that
is both smaller/cheaper to larger/more expensive than what Sun offers.

Sure. I agree with "cheap".
Show me a 64-bit Opteron that is faster, cooler and less costly than a SunFire X2100.
Really. Anyone can make junk that is cheap and monsters that are massively expensive.
Show me a 64-bit machine that has more horsepower than an 8-core 1.2GHz SunFire T1000 or a 64-bit AMD Opteron machine with more horsepower than the SunFire X2100.
For less money.
Oh, and the Opteron gear has to be certified to run Windows as well as Linux as well as a real UNIX.
Good luck.

when I look at the top 500 fastest computers, where is Solaris in there?
Does it hold the majority of the top 10, let alone the top 500?

Take a long hard stare at my blog from a little while ago :
http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/pivot/entry. php?id=113
I count, what? 16 e

So? RHEL is a support contract. I doubt Sun is handing out service contracts for free or even price matching RH.

Perhaps you should start comparing prices, then:

• Sun Support is available in three levels: Basic, Standard, and Premium. The prices are $120/yr, $240/yr, and $360/yr for a single processor-socket system. $360/yr gets you unlimited live phone support 24/7.
• Meanwhile, Red Hat offers a wider variety of support plans, including separate workstation and server plans. The cheapest server plan is $349/yr and the most expensive is $2499/yr. You'd have to get the $2499 plan to get 24/7 phone support.

So, it would appear that Sun's support prices are actually lower rather than beating Red Hat's. In fact, for one of Sun's cheapest server systems, you can get Platinum support for $2304 for three years. Platinum support includes both 24/7 software support and 24/7 two-hour response time on-site hardware support. That's cheaper then one year of Red Hat's software-only 24/7 support.

Sun hardware is getting competitive, which is a good thing but 'dirt cheap'? Put down the crackpipe.

Again, compare prices:

• You can buy a 1U, Opteron server system from Sun for $745.00. It doesn't have a disk, but you can add one for $150, bringing the price to $895.
• Meanwhile, the cheapest rack mount server of any kind you can get from Dell will cost you $999. It does include a disk, but its processor is a Celeron with 256K cache.

So, the Sun server may not be as cheap as building a system out of spare parts lying around in your basement, but it really is pretty cheap compared to the competition in that space.

See:

http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Howto:Kerb eros

Not to sound cantankerous, but there's plenty of reasonable documentation hidden away on the project's Documentation page:

http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Documentat ion

See:

http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Howto:Kerb eros

Not to sound cantankerous, but there's plenty of reasonable documentation hidden away on the project's Documentation page:

http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Documentat ion

It is the evolution of the Netscape/iPlanet LDAP server. The Java UI runs pretty well on recent JVMs on recent linux kernels. If you don't believe me, try it for yourself.
http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Download

No, it's not.
http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/FAQ#How_is _Fedora_Directory_Server_different_from_iPlanet_an d_Sun_Directory_Server.3F

The first problem is that Netscape probably didn'tadd much to their Directory Service towards the end, and it is unclear how much Fedora has had to put resources into code cleanups and bug fixes, as opposed to adding the capabilities it is going to need.

Well, check the CVS log, or join the mailing list and find out. For starters, beside bug fixes, the entire admin server backend has been replaced with an Apache httpd.worker model - its loads light-years faster than the original ns-httpd admin interface.

The second problem is that there needs to be an Open Source system compatible with (and preferably better than) Microsoft's Active Directory. The LDAP side of that is absolutely critical. For this directory server to be of much interest to network administrators, this package absolutely must support two-way communication with Microsoft Active Directory's LDAP. It can support more - and it would be great if, for once, Open Source "embraced and extended" something from The Other Side...

LDAP is LDAP. Active Directory is not LDAP - it provides a LDAP-like interface to data and it does it Microsoft's way. If you need to integrate your FDS with AD, then have a look at http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Download under the Windows Synchronization section.

To be of interest to system admins, it needs to work with PAM and preferably one of the standard "unified" admin interfaces, like Webmin or (yes, it is still used) linuxconf, in addition to specialized tools. It needs both. Specialized but simple command-line tools are great for doing batch tasks or quick tasks, which will be the bulk of routine tasks. More complex tasks, changing configuration files, etc, are often easier in a unified interface. For extremely precise operations, user interfaces hide too much detail, so for those you often do have to use some hefty command-line and probably a text editor for control and config files.

For you to comment, you might want to learn a little bit about the layers of an application stack. And note that LDAP defines a protocol (over the wire) and a service. You can wrap whatever you want around it for administration (just like you can any LDAP server)..

http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Plugins

Just about everything about it is extensible by plugins, including data storage.

Thorsten Kukuk maintains a pwdutils package that includes LDAP-capable useradd, usermod, chage, etc. for SUSE.

People are begging Red Hat to integrate Thorsten's code into RH Enterprise Linux here. Join the throng and maybe Red Hat will get the thumb out.

You could also consider cpu which includes usermod/useradd functionality.

A lot of sites just use cgi-perl and Graham Barr's perl-LDAP to create a custom web app for this sort of thing. Once you've got an LDAP backend that seamlessly manages password transparency between apache, Active Directory, *nix, and Novell it becomes incredibly easy to set up secure web apps and push low-level system management functions down to people without advanced computer knowledge (like the HR department for example).

All source code is open source, not just the core DS engine

Heh, you severly underestimate Red Hat's contribution to the community:) Read this for a truncated list of contributions they've made. Some other products they've purchased and released include GFS, Cygwin, and eCos. They also contribute more code to the kernel than any other entity and in large part maintain and extend glib and GCC (they have a few people on the GCC board and contribute huge amounts of code, in fact many of the newest features in GCC 4.0.x you can thank Red Hat for). Here is another list, but that list is only for projects hosted from that site, so its not complete either, but suffice it to say that Red Hat does a staggering amount for the community, its kind of a shame when people bash them.
Regards,
Steve

The example they used in the screenshots is the same one used here! There must be a deeper meaning to this blatant plagiarism. I mean, even the phone number is the same... Yep, definitely a terrorist plot in the making somewhere here...

A fancy GUI is all very well, but does this come with some decent command line tools to scriptify adding and removing users and the like? One of the things that's kept my department on NIS for so long is that absolute hideous unfriendliness of the OpenLDAP tools vs useradd, usermod and friends.

Eh?

The SEC Safe Harbour statement and disclosure is pretty much boilerplate that appears almost everywhere.

Note that one of the packages is Sun Directory Server, which is very, very similar to Fedora Directory Server (http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/), which has been open source for several months now (and as of today, the admin server and management console). Perhaps they want to open the source code under that project? We're ready to talk - rmeggins@redhat.com

It's great that RH bought the Netscape stuff and have released the source for Directory Server... but when that deal was first announced, it was reported that RH was going to open-source Certificate Server as well... they now appear to be back-pedalling on that plan. Any idea if/when that will happen?

Note that one of the packages is Sun Directory Server, which is very, very similar to Fedora Directory Server (http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/), which has been open source for several months now (and as of today, the admin server and management console). Perhaps they want to open the source code under that project? We're ready to talk - rmeggins@redhat.com

I wouldn't trust an M$ application to report on M$ operating system and other flaws even if I were offered large sums of money to do so.

It all depends on how large a sum of money. If they give me a check for say $2 million dollars, then no problem, Microsoft is the answer. Of course I would retire at the end of the week. :)

A real fix would be for Microsoft to use this http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp or even this http://www.redhat.com/. Of course this would cut into their revenue stream but these are real fixes for the problem not bandaids like anti-virus software and spyware removal tools. I am sure an OEM branding deal could be setup for Microsoft to use either of those options. They just need to port some of their other applications to either of those choices. Of course they would then be competing against the likes of Apache, postgresql, mysql, and Openoffice/Staroffice.

In the long run that is what is going to happen anyway. Real alternatives are available today for most things running on Microsofts OS. As more and more companies and governments learn they can reap significant savings by moving away from Windows products Microsoft will either have to adapt or slowly become irrelevant. (I am sure some on /. would argue that is already the case)

I've said it before and I will keep saying it, Microsoft is in a downward spiral. They will continue to lose customers at an increasing rate. Today there are viable alternatives to all of their products. A year or two ago that was not really true. Today things are much different. And now that Sun is releasing their development tools for free there are even more alternatives. We have reached a tipping point, expect to see over the next two years a steady increase in developers moving to one of the many alternative systems available. As that happens the third party products available for Solaris and Linux will explode which will in turn have users demanding to run something other than Windows.

And watch Microsoft continue to try and reinvent themselves. I expect any day to read where Microsoft will release their OS in a form that is zero cost, probably not as open source but using a license scheme where they can claim they compete directly with Solaris and Linux. They may even claim to have invented open source at some point, assuming they fail to attack it successfully in the courts.

Their's no support, so you can't hold anyone responsible if your decision to use this software creates a problem.

Actually, quite a few people offer support for open source programs for a price; Red Hat, for example, offers a supported Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

And to the best of my knowledge, it is impossible to hold others legally or morally responsible for the consequences of your decisions, whether you are receiving support from them or not - they are, after all, your decisions, not theirs. Proprietary software vendors certainly disclaim any and all responsibility in their EULA.

If a run into a problem 4 months in on my own expensive business venture and my software isn't fixed right away, I'm screwed, and if it's open source, I can't demand it be fixed, and therefor businesses have a lot of trouble being interested in unsuported open source.

No, you can't demand it to be fixed. You can, however, fix it yourself or hire someone to fix it for you right away. With proprietary software you cannot neither demand it be fixed, fix it by yourself, nor hire any third parties to fix it, and are therefore screwed.

Their's no support, so you can't hold anyone responsible if your decision to use this software creates a problem.

Actually, quite a few people offer support for open source programs for a price; Red Hat, for example, offers a supported Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

And to the best of my knowledge, it is impossible to hold others legally or morally responsible for the consequences of your decisions, whether you are receiving support from them or not - they are, after all, your decisions, not theirs. Proprietary software vendors certainly disclaim any and all responsibility in their EULA.

If a run into a problem 4 months in on my own expensive business venture and my software isn't fixed right away, I'm screwed, and if it's open source, I can't demand it be fixed, and therefor businesses have a lot of trouble being interested in unsuported open source.

No, you can't demand it to be fixed. You can, however, fix it yourself or hire someone to fix it for you right away. With proprietary software you cannot neither demand it be fixed, fix it by yourself, nor hire any third parties to fix it, and are therefore screwed.

http://www.redhat.com/en_us/USA/rhn/

This product from redhat will allow you to do that.

For starters, run an ssh-agent on your machine, and then use public key authentication when you authenticate to ssh sessions. That's one of my favorite time savers, prevents needing to enter a password with each log in.

Here's a decent resource on how to set up pub key authentication:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-8.0-M anual/custom-guide/s1-openssh-client-config.html

Face it, linux sucks. If everyone used linux, things wouldn't go as smoothly as they do with Windows. One word: Reliability. linux just doesn't cut it. Never has and never will. As with the current line and stage of kernel development (2.0.40), linux is slow and not as powerful as Windows. Also, with the advent of Apple being based on linux, apple has slowed down. DONT blame it on the intel chips either because Dell has gone to amd because amd is cheaper(dell buys cheap parts), so the intel chips are keeping up with making the kernel/os and root run faster.
 
Thus, the current development branch is slow and should be as underutilized as it currently is. The hardware support is extremely poor. I could not get my copy of Mandarin Linux to boot on my 64-bit dual core Thoroughbred-B. However, Winxpcorp ran FLAWLESS. No problems with the 64 bit architecture support. What's interesting about linux is that sooner or later, Microsoft will buy out linux and the linux issues will be solved......at least for the time being
 
If I remember correctly, Microsoft is in trial with OpenBSD for stealing their source code and integrading it into the Windows Kernel Architecture (WKA). This may be trouble for Microsoft, but it is indiscernable that Theo De Raadt cannot afford to succumb to Microsoft's legal team and will probably also sell out to Microsoft.

Hey I found a copy of the old EULA, it's still up, just buried:

Old EULA

Here's some more text from it regarding running unsupported RHEL installations:

The amount of the payment deficiency will be determined by multiplying the number of underreported Installed Systems or Services by the annual fee for such item. If Customer is found to have underreported the number of Installed Systems or amount of Services by more than five percent (5%),

So you can't have "underreported installed systems" by running them without services, under this old EULA.

They've silently changed the EULA it seems. My information is old. The new one is much better. There was much controversy over the old EULA.

There used to be one big EULA for RHEL, and it did state that you must not have any RHEL servers installed without RHN. It didn't give you the option to run unsupported copies, period. If you bought one copy, you were bound by the EULA automatically since it came with services. If you wanted to install RHEL on another computer, the only way you could do it without violating the EULA was to buy another seat from them.

Here's some text from the old EULA:

"If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed Servers, then
Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each
additional Installed Server."

"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"

Link
Another Link
Yet another

You can see there was plenty of talk about this questionable EULA, I'm not making it up.

I'm glad to see they have a much better set of EULAs in place now. They are still pretty pricey for what you get.

Once you are up and running, you are on your own.

And you have to pay $349 again in 1 year, or you have violated the EULA and must remove all copies of RHEL from your server.

how exactly did redhat "fuck" small to medium businesses?

also, rhel is $349. not $500+. and for what you pay, you get miles better support SLA than microsoft.

For one: I keep hearing people say that redhat contributes "Millions" to the open source community. Where?

And is it significant compared to the return they get on it?

Are they only doing it because it benifits them?

I know they pay the salaries of several people who are "RedHat employees", but really just kernel hack, but Millions?

Really?

For two: They DIDN'T EVEN WRITE THEIR DAMN SOFTWARE.

For one: I keep hearing people say that redhat contributes "Millions" to the open source community. Where?

And is it significant compared to the return they get on it?

Are they only doing it because it benifits them?

I know they pay the salaries of several people who are "RedHat employees", but really just kernel hack, but Millions?

Really?

For two: They DIDN'T EVEN WRITE THEIR DAMN SOFTWARE.

For one: I keep hearing people say that redhat contributes "Millions" to the open source community. Where?

And is it significant compared to the return they get on it?

Are they only doing it because it benifits them?

I know they pay the salaries of several people who are "RedHat employees", but really just kernel hack, but Millions?

Really?

For two: They DIDN'T EVEN WRITE THEIR DAMN SOFTWARE.

http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/
FC5 final release is currently scheduled for late February. It may be delayed a week or two in order to get GNOME 2.12 into the release.

Thanks,
Warren Togami
wtogami@redhat.com

A common myth regarding Fedora. From http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraMyths [fedoraproject.org]

MYTH - Fedora is unstable and unreliable, just a testbed for bleeding-edge software

FACT - This misconception comes from two things:

From http://fedora.redhat.com/ [redhat.com]: "It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products."

Fedora has rapid releases, a short life-cycle, and a lot of new code.