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Fedora is free, RHEL is not
  https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/
  http://www.redhat.com/resourcelibrary/articles/articles-red-hat-enterprise-linux-purchasing-guide

... to their entry into the fortune 500.

The S&P 500 is *not* the same thing as the Fortune 500.
Redhat would need 40X their current revenue to have a crack at the Fortune 500.

That's great that RH finally passed that mark... that's on top of the good news they've been announcing for the past few years.. from their revenue growth through the recession (thanks to the subscription model), to their entry into the fortune 500.

But does anyone here think Bill Gates or Microsoft stays awake worried about RH? They pulled in 72x more revenue, 159x more profits, and have 63x more cash on hand (50.69b vs 808m) than Red Hat. Microsoft even has a better profit margin than RH (32.5% vs 13.3%).

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=RHT+Key+Statistics

Trending: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/3/A-billion-thanks-to-the-open-source-community-from-Red-Hat?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook

Thanks to both RedHat and OpenSource communities!

Funny how these guys keep growing without being evil:

http://www.redhat.com/

But what they don't tell you is the hat is red because... it's dipped in the blood of emacs users! BOOOOOoooooOOOooOoOOOO!

Funny how these guys keep growing without being evil:

http://www.redhat.com/

I posted this just above, but as this is a thread purely about linux on SB, I'll place it here also:

Be careful. You may get bitten by this bug. The tl;dr version: If your apps use dynamic loading on Sandy Bridge, you may get segmentation faults cause by a bug in glibc.

RHEL should have this fixed by release 6.3. Other clones of EL will get the fix via the update to 6.3 after RH has released it.

We run a large number of XenApp servers as VM's and while total system throughput is important so is single threaded performance. Right now we use x5670's with 2.93 GHz clock speeds and a 95W TDP. I'm wondering if the E5-2660 would be as powerful for single threaded workloads which would get us 33% more total throughput for the same power budget but I'm not sure that a 2.2GHz base clock with a 500MHz turbo boost using the SB core is going to be as fast as a 2.93GHz Westmere core.

Be careful. You may get bitten by this bug. The tl;dr version: If your apps use dynamic loading on Sandy Bridge, you may get segmentation faults cause by a bug in glibc.

RHEL should have this fixed by release 6.3. Other clones of EL will get the fix via the update to 6.3 after RH has released it.

Sure, most hackers don't have a personal cluster at their disposal to really test the limits of their BigData, web-scale and - insert buzzword here - deployment. There are however a some free 'cloud' alternatives (PaaS) (OpenShift by Red-Hat for example: http://openshift.redhat.com/ that give you the opportunity to play around a bit.

Argh! Careful! It's that choice thing again! Kill it with fire!

Seriously: I never used WindowMaker. Still: my sincere and cheerful "welcome back".

To bad, Window Maker, AfterStep and E16 are really the only unix like window managers left in the linux world. What with KDE and Gnome having jumped off the cliff in the stupid dream of catching "windows" users.

All hail to virtual desktops and focus follows mouse !!!!

Argh! Careful! It's that choice thing again! Kill it with fire!

Seriously: I never used WindowMaker. Still: my sincere and cheerful "welcome back".

For Canonical (primary sponsor of Ubuntu) : http://www.canonical.com/about-canonical/careers
For Red Hat : http://www.redhat.com/about/work/

( as said elsehwere, I am working for Red Hat, and I can say that's a great place to work, and we are hiring a lot for cloud related stuff, or to fill position of people who have decided to be moved internally to cloud related thing , see the url ).

I would also take a look at the various others companies listed around Openstack, etc, as I know several of them are hiring ( like Puppetlabs, Opscode, etc )

http://careers.redhat.com/.

Sorry, I missed your reply comment before! Yes, the RHCT for V5 is still valid, but to take the RHCE for V6 I had to pass the RHCSA for V6 first.

Also, they have re-vamped the valid period and V6 certs are valid for three calendar years from the date of the exam. The date is extended if you pass one of the Expertise exams.
http://www.redhat.com/training/certifications/recertification.html

Red Hat exams involve configuring, testing and repairing live systems.

http://www.redhat.com/training/certifications/rhce/
http://www.redhat.com/training/certifications/expertise/

Red Hat exams involve configuring, testing and repairing live systems.

http://www.redhat.com/training/certifications/rhce/
http://www.redhat.com/training/certifications/expertise/

even Red Hat is struggling

Perhaps you could explain to us how this:

http://investors.redhat.com/financials-statements.cfm

shows a 'struggling' company?

To my untrained eye this looks like a healthy fast-growing company, but I'm sure you can correct this impression...

Better business model may eventually equate to a different way of making money may eventually equate to people just giving up and not producing.

I doubt that anyone will give up. At one time there were no copyrights on music, yet people still sang songs and created music instruments. At one time there were no copyrights on written works, but people still wrote books, to the point where huge libraries could be filled. Immensely complex and useful software is released under the terms of the GPL and other free software licenses, which encourage people to make copies with or without payment.

It is not a question of whether or not people will do creative work, it is a question of whether or not we have a system that ensures the public has access to creative works (which means more than simply ensuring that creative work is done -- what use is a painting that remains locked in a cellar somewhere?).

And yet look at how many utilities or applications come from tiny little companies

Look at how many software utilities are being given away at no cost, and look at how this company has made its way to the S&P 500 list by monetizing GPL'd software:

http://www.redhat.com/

People here will never get it,

No, we "get it" just fine -- people like you want to make money by forbidding other people from using their computers / tape recorders / etc. in certain ways. At one time, that was nothing more than a regulation on industry, because nobody could make good copies of creative works without industrial equipment. Now everyone has the necessary equipment in their homes, but there is no way that an average American is going to take the time to ask whether or not they are violating a copyright or engaging in fair use, and it is absurd to think that a typical American will have the resources needed to dispute such things in court.

The point of SOPA is to attack, head-on, one of the greatest steps forward in communication in the history of the human race. Computers and the Internet are as important as writing and the printing press were. The Internet threatens the current distribution model and regulations, much in the same way that the printing press and the ability to write did, and just as happened then, people whose incomes depended on the previous distribution model found themselves facing the loss of their jobs.

At one time, laws, entertainment, and history were not written down, but passed down orally. Communities would have people whose job was to remember things and pass that knowledge on to future generations. One day, a new technology emerged: writing. Suddenly, instead of relying on people to remember laws and stories, societies were wage to record things. The old profession died, and new professions emerged: scribes and scholars. Had you been around back then, you would have been pushing for a law that restricted writing in order to protect your job as a storyteller, and you would have insisted that all the people who said that writing should not be restricted did not "get it."

Centuries after scribes established themselves as one of the most important classes in society, a new technology emerged that threatened their profession: printing presses. The same pattern emerged: scribes lost their jobs, and new professions developed. Had you lived back then, you would have demanded a law that restricted printing presses so that you could keep your job as a scribe.

So here we are, in the 21st century, and we see the same pattern once again. Centuries after the press became fundamental to society and we built laws and businesses around it, a new technology has emerged: computer networks. Now people do not need to wait for industrial printers to produce copies of books, they can just have a copy sent to them over a computer network. You do, in fact, live in this age, and you are pushing for la

It (libpcap-devel-1.0.0-6.20091201git117cb5.el6.x86_64.rpm) is there, in the RHEL Server Optional channel.

It (libpcap-devel-1.0.0-6.20091201git117cb5.el6.x86_64.rpm) is there, in the RHEL Server Optional channel.

Question: Do you thus consider the Linux Kernel to be the BIOS? Or Linux utils such as the microcode_ctl tool?

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/5.6_Technical_Notes/microcode_ctl.html

And ICC can do both.

It just doesn't generate microcode with standard flags.

But in general .. most of the really valuable companies have really valuable software they keep under lock and key.

Even those Open Source companies you listed derive most of their real value from the bits they keep under lock and key.

They should keep _something_ close to their chest, because anyone can sell support... "official" support is delegated all the time to resellers, all they have to do is keep X number of people certified each year and make customers jump through enough hoops before escalating to the first party.

A reseller with sufficient sales channels can just take your product and cut their ties with you. See Oracle Enterprise Linux. What can RedHat do, they hardly have any control over their own product. For example, they can't promise sysfs stability between dot releases for Christ's sake. Sysfs is a _major_ gateway between the OS kernel and userland, it's the new /proc... but it's not like they have any better control over libc & sysctls.
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Online_Storage_Reconfiguration_Guide/index.html#Online_Storage_Reconfiguration_Guide-Preface
Go ahead and follow the finger pointing to Documentation/sysfs-rules.txt like it suggests. Look up an example of Solaris 10's fcinfo, which is a very basic Fibre Channel reporting tool, and figure out how to implement that without breaking any rules. (it were easy, where are Linux's FC userland utilities?) That's where I'm at, expecting a yum update one day to break my scripts. Woo.

Anyways, my point there was they don't have control over their own product, and it does affect their customers.

Open Source ideals, while cool and all, just don't make good business sense.
Unless software is completely tangental to your business, but then why would you be employing software developers? Ugh... I don't get it folks.

Thanks! https://openshift.redhat.com/app/

While not an issue right NOW, the original EM64T did have an issue with pointers. The issue was that there was no hardware IOMMU for them. Thus, in order to DMA memory above 32bit allocation, they had to use pointers.

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/3/html/Release_Notes/as-amd64/RELEASE-NOTES-U2-x86_64-en.html

Software IOTLB — Intel® EM64T does not support an IOMMU in hardware while AMD64 processors do. This means that physical addresses above 4GB (32 bits) cannot reliably be the source or destination of DMA operations. Therefore, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 2 kernel "bounces" all DMA operations to or from physical addresses above 4GB to buffers that the kernel pre-allocated below 4GB at boot time. This is likely to result in lower performance for IO-intensive workloads for Intel® EM64T as compared to AMD64 processors

companies like Red Hat (who doesn't even have a desktop distro, only a server one)

Not true..

That's https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=737508 .

Frankly, we rather feel grub2 is something of a downgrade too. Or at least an unnecessary pain in the ass. Fedora isn't going to grub2 because we think it's way better than grub - we don't. Fedora's going to grub2 because it's what upstream supports, and we're tired of having an entire person who does nothing but keep grub-legacy working now upstream doesn't care about it any more.

First, this story is months old and dates back to late August. Second, contrary to the headline, they're not threatening over the "AppleADay" name but the logo.

Third, as is pointed out every time an incident like this occurs, trademark owners have to take no chances and must enforce perceived violations or risk losing their right to it. There is always the risk that a court somewhere in the world might cite the lack of action in some particular case. But, since it's a "David v. Goliath" article, as the summary put it, it's an excellent story to submit to Slashdot and rile up the natives.

Since the two logos only resemble each other to the extent that they both depict apples, why isn't Apple suing Fruit of the Loom or Vic Fruit. Using the same logic, Red Hat would have to sue Arby's to maintain their trademark.

Having just checked the redhat ftp sever, your rep is wrong. There is nothing stpping you, not even a licensing issue, from downloading and running RHEL. Its the support that isn't free, and if I'm not mistaken, anything downloaded from the redhat ftp server is specifically unsupported. As another poster pointed out, the major issue running RHEL without support is, basically, the lack of patches or updates.

I don't think having source or not makes any difference.

Arguably the inventors should also indicate the best mode for carrying out the invention to the extent of the inventor's knowledge, and IMHO that includes not only the detailed description but also the source and the necessary steps to compile it.

Mathematical algorithms simply should not qualify as patentable. It's bad for innovation, as he original patent system creators understood.

Mathematical algorithms are processes, and as such they should be qualified as patentable as long as they are novel, non-obvious and capable of industrial application. In that sense they are no different from the process to build an automobile (a patent that expired).

Mathematical algorithms simply should not qualify as patentable. It's bad for innovation, as he original patent system creators understood.

It's not a black-and-white situation. A FOSS company can decide to patent their software and allow selected partners, with a commitment to FOSS, to infringe them, precisely to prevent megacorporations from stalling innovation. Like Red Hat does.

Your product requires or will benefit from an improvement in RHEL 6.1 or even better 6.2.

CentOS 6.1 isn't out yet and probably won't be out for quite a while.

Your product requires or will benefit from an improvement in RHEL 6.1 or even better 6.2.

CentOS 6.1 isn't out yet and probably won't be out for quite a while.

We moved away from RedHat in favor of CentOS a few years ago, on price lines and RedHat's unwillingness to negotiate (and frankly unprofessional sales folk who blew off scheduled meetings), and an extremely irritating experience wherein their licensing team tried to hit us up for 1300 servers worth of licenses because we licensed ONE machine, simply so we could get per-incident support (which they do not sell).

I believe in supporting RedHat, as I know the contributions they have made and continue to make to the community and to many packages. RedHat Satellite was extremely useful. When working in the US public sector, RedHat has the added advantage of being an approved distro.

However - in the past few years, they've adopted detestable per-CPU and per-guest licensing requirements that remove much of the reason Linux is as popular as it is (free beer). This is simply ridiculous for large server installations - and then they have the balls to try and incrementally charge for HA and load-balancing, again, on a per-CPU basis.

Per their support - we are generally a very self-sufficient shop, but we did run into stuttering and intermittent performance problems that we needed some help isolating (hence purchasing premium support on one server). After a week of back-and-forth nonsense, I finally gave up when the Tier 2 support person asked me what I meant by "system time".

Red Hat has differing levels of support at different price levels.

e.g. for a very basic 2-socket x86 server:

• Self-supported: $349
• Standard support: $799
• Premium support: $1299

So the OP could save significant money by continuing to purchase Red Hat, but dropping support.

> The patches is perhaps the most important part, and RHN does sell
> a non-support subscription (just patches) for a ridiculously low price.

Got more info on that option? Can't see it here:

https://www.redhat.com/rhel/purchasing_guide.html

The captcha got appended to the link. The right link is: http://www.redhat.com/solutions/government/certifications/

Things like FIPS, if that matters.

http://www.redhat.com/solutions/government/certifications/egotist

There are good and valid reasons why Centos is currently falling behind RHEL in doing updates. Red Hat is making it more difficult for Centos to keep up. This may not be intended to target Centos, but rather Oracle who has been using Red Hat's own work to sell a competing tech support service.

However, Centos gets caught in the crossfire. This email from Johnny Hughes lays out some of the issues that Centos now has to deal with that were never an issue before.

Here is what he has to say:

QUOTE:
Yes, and NOW the release process is MUCH harder.

Red Hat used to have an AS release that contained everything ... we build that and we get everything. Nice and simple. Build all the packages, look at it against the AS iso set ... done. Two weeks was about as long as it took.

Now, for version 6, they have:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux HPC Node (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation FasTrack (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server FasTrack (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop FasTrack (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Scalable File System (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Resilient Storage (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Load Balancer (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux HPC Node FasTrack (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Performance Network (v. 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

They have the same install groups with different packages based on the above groupings, so we have to do some kind of custom generation of the comps files to things work.

They have created an optional channel in several of those groupings that is only accessible via RHN and they do not put those RPMS on any ISOs ... and they have completely changed their "Authorized Use Policy" so that we can NOT login to RHN and use anything that is not on a public
FTP server or on an ISO set ... effectively cutting us off from the ability to check anything on the optional channel.

Now we have to engineer a compilation of all those groupings, we have to figure out what parts of the optional channels go at the point release and which ones do not (the ones that are upgrades). Sometimes the only way to tell is when something does not build correctly and you have reverse an optional package to a previous version for the build, etc.

We have to use anaconda to build our ISOs and upstream is using "something else" to build theirs .. so anaconda NEVER works anymore out of the box. We get ISOs (or usb images) that do not work and have to basically redesign anaconda.

We can't look at upstream build logs, we can't get all the binary RPMs for testing and be within the Terms of Service.

And with the new release, it seems that they have purposely broken the rpmmacros, and do not care to fix it:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=743229

So, trust me, it is MUCH more complicated now than it was with previous releases to build.

With the 5.7 release, there were several SRPMS that did not make it to the public FTP server without much prompting from us. And with the Authorized Use Policy, I can not just go to RHN and grab that SRPM and use it. If it is not public, we can no longer release it.

So, the short answer is, it now takes longer.
END OF QUOTE

"The only thing it lacks is support, which the CIO doesn't want"
There's more than that it lacks, even for the basic customer. Something more important (to me, at least) that it lacks - RHN. RHN is great. Yeah yeah, one can set up a spacewalk server and update locally. I know. But...why?
Another thing CentOS lacks which is extremely important in the industrys I tend to work in: certifications. Has CentOS been EAL certified at any level? No. Will the DoD let you use RedHat over CentOS? No. Will a PCI auditor be a fan of your use of CentOS for your externally-facing website that processes credit cards? No. Does CentOS have enterprise-level QA processes for each and every thing that they are (because they are...) modifying? No. Would the FDA be happy with an OS vendor with no QA process? No. What's the indemnification that CentOS will give you in suits against Microsoft?
It's not as though the options are "CentOS" versus "Redhat with full support" after all. There's the self-support option, which just gets you access to allllllll the other things. And you can even be "that place" that has 500 servers but only bothers getting 50 seats...eh, whichever, won't really matter except for the indemnification part.
I mean, what industry are you in that the question is even worth pondering? If you handle money, sensitive material, or PHI you'll spend WAY more than that tiny self-support price in the bribes and obfuscation necessary to get ok'd with CentOS. I mean hell, Fedora has a more extensive QA process than CentOS. Maybe you should just tell your boss you agree with him so much you think you should use Fedora!

has been for a long time

...or stored in the TPM module.

Exactly. There are functions available to load the keys into the TPM module upon initialization. https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2008-0391.html

It's important to check 3 sites: http://community.jboss.org/wiki/SecureTheJmxConsole --> Wiki site on Jboss http://community.jboss.org/wiki/SecureTheJmxConsole/diff?secondVersionNumber=47 --> This is important because the Wiki site has some missing info that you can see in this diff https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-30741 --> Another related security problem Check your Jboss config!!

In which case, Red Hat has an excellent writeup of a manual / non-code workaround via update of the web.xml file if you are version-locked:
https://access.redhat.com/kb/docs/DOC-30741

Cheers.

Get a powerful 8-core workstation with plenty of RAM. You can pick up a used one with warranty quite cheaply. Ditch Windows and run CentOS 6 on the bare metal and use KVM for virtualisation. The RedHat docs are a great read to get you started and as a bonus you'll pick up some very useful Linux administration skills and you will learn to think outside the box when it comes to virtualisation strategy.

Being a responsible open-source developer means you confirm the bug lies elsewhere before assuming so. The "mark tainted" approach does no such thing. Hmm, I wonder does redhat have a hypervisor of choice?

https://www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/desktop/hypervisor/

Well call me Uncle Eddit they do. And it's not Virtualbox. Try FreeBSD as your host, it and Virtualbox will be rock solid and and faster networking.

I am pretty sure that, for example, Condor started as an academic project, but now it is Red Hat's grid computing platform:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/
http://www.redhat.com/mrg/grid/condor/

I'm a long-time RedHat distro family user (since '99 with Red Hat Linux 5.2).

For the non-technical, I would not recommend Fedora. Fedora installs systems go End of Life (EOL) every 13 months, and that's if you install right after a release. Current supported Fedora 14 will EOL ~Dec, 2011. Latest Fedora 15 release will EOL ~June, 2012. Fine for a desktop user who likes to do fresh installs once or twice a year and play with the latest thing. Not wise for a server install (unless you want to reinstall every year and troubleshoot breakage/incompatibilities each time).

RHEL self-support Server is $349/year, but you want this so you get all the security updates in a timely fashion (hours, worst case within the day). I would recommend this method. Ask folks to chip in $5/year. Most won't, some will (you just need 70), bank the extra for the next year subscription renewal. The advantage is that if you install RHEL6 now, you're good on support until at least 2016 with support.

The free version of RHEL, CentOS, is constantly out of date with Security updates. The team works for free, but it's a closed development process ("" CentOS is a Community distribution for download and install, not community for development processes). I would not recommend CentOS to anyone who can't manually chase down security fixes.

Frankly, assuming you're on a free-lunch budget, I would find a LTS version of Ubuntu or something where you can install it and follow some best-practice hardening guides and basically forget it for 5 years. I'm tempted to go that direction as well for my personal stuff, but as I maintain RHEL at work, not sure I want to have to learn/maintain two different knowledge sets of "how to do things."

As the law provides, patents "grant to the patentee ... right to exclude others from making, using, ... the invention throughout the United States"
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/35/154(a)(1).html

If you are using FFMPEG in the US to encode or decode patent encumbered codecs, you are violating the law. Individuals could certainly be sued. However, if MPEG-LA were to sue an individual, it would make them very unpopular. For example Linus Torvalds has publicly stated that he uses the patent encumbered gstreamer plugins-ugly, and has yet to be sued:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439858#c19

They predict that by 2013 non-OS software will grown to almost half the revenue.

Source.

Middleware (likely JBoss) will be the majority of the non-OS software.

Have to agree.

And the support fees are mandatory- no way to download a copy of RHEL from them without signing up to pay.

You can download a 60-day trial of RHEL here, just make a free RHN account first.
https://www.redhat.com/wapps/eval/index.html?evaluation_id=1008

It doesn't time out and you can use it forever you just won't receive updates after 60 days. You can also compile your own updates from the freely available SRC rpms like all the other RHEL clones do should you choose.

Biggest problem you're going to have, and the reason I think some of the people suggesting renting outside resources rather than purchasing may be on target, is storage (both physical and logical). You can get a machines with 4-8 cores, and 4-8 GB of memory for around $1000 in a rack mount case, so around 6 boxes with your budget (since you don't have VAT on .edu gear I'm assuming around 1/1.5 dollar/pound ratio). That doesn't get you a rack to mount them in and doesn't get you any storage beyond the hard drives in the boxes. Realistically, something approaching a quarter to a half of your budget will go to incidentals. You'll need a at least one, preferably two ten port Gig-e network switches, some kind of low end shared storage, at least a half height rack, cables, a multiport KVM, the monitor/KB/mouse (ideally rack mount, but you could save some dough by getting regular ones or using spare hardware)... Individually none of those things is horribly expensive, but together I'd guess 1-2K pounds.

If you've got all that stuff, then your goals are a lot more reasonable... if you don't, you're taking a shoe string budget and making it one of those shoe strings that has been pulled through the metal trivet on your boots a few to many times. If you absolutely must have dedicated hardware, one way to save on storage might be something like gfs. It's a shared cluster file system that allows you to create one file system from disks on multiple computers. In theory this could allow you to use the spare space on each node to create a large shared storage... in practice I'm not sure how well it scales when the "servers" are also the "clients". I've only ever used it with separate server boxes.