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If you need to use TeX, BLAS or other things normally used in a research environment, it makes a lot of sense.

As a company, it serves its own best interests. It has always been honorable in doing so.

You will not find Red Hat "stealing" OSS code, compiling it into proprietary work, and not telling anybody. You won't find them attempting to "extend" open code with proprietary extensions without releasing those extensions, too.

They pay for a good, healthy staff of developers that work almost solely on GPL and otherwise released code. They release source binaries as though all their stuff was GPL, even with projects that are BSD-ish licensed.

It's not that difficult to take their source RPMs and create your own "Enterprise Linux", as done by Scientific Linux, Cent O/S, and (my favorite) Whitebox Linux.

I don't like that they don't support good old "RedHat Linux" like they used to, but as a company, RedHat has been nothing but good for the community. If you choose to have a hissy, then enjoy your hissy, and move on to Debian/Gentoo/LFS/Ubuntu/Mandrake/Whatever/YALD (Yet Another Linux Distro) to your heart's content.

But, I see no sign that RedHat is doing anything evil at all.

*sigh* Sorry about that. It's http://scientificlinux.org. --M

Note that the source rpm packages for all the Redhat Enterprise editions are still publicaly available - as per GPL requirements. While Redhat won't give you free binaries, there are plenty of places that will. If you're looking for Redhat Enterprise 3 or 4, try: Scientific Linux. It's basically just a recompile of all the Redhat packages with some bundled scientific software (which you can easily remove). I've got SL3 deployed on about a hundred and fifty desktop hosts and it's rock solid. --M

I second this recommendation. In fact, I thought I had submitted a similar post, but apparently I had a brain fart or something.

Not only is SL maintained by people from several of the USA national labs, but their mailing lists are excellent for support.

They track pretty quickly on RH's heels, and try to be 100% compatible with RHEL. They've complied with RH's terms (replaced copyrighted images and trademarked logos), and don't even mention RH on their site.

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

We expect to have a mix of RHEL and SL. That way we pay RedHat, who after all has done most of the work here, but at the same time we won't go broke as we would if we were a shop running an OS where we had no choice but to pay high per seat licenses.

As others have noted, Fedora is not the answer for RHEL compatibility, and a tool vendor supporting RHEL will almost certainly not cut you any slack with Fedora, just as they won't cut us any with RH8. Even though the tools run just fine on RH8 for us.

Try Scientific Linux:

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Maintained by one or more of the US National Labs, they track RHEL and build new distros and bugfix packages as quickly as possible. So far we've moved several production compute servers to this with excellent results. We originally picked them for their 64 bit Opteron support; SL3 runs as well there as it does on 32 bit systems.

And yes, our requirement for RHEL3 or equivalent is also driven by CAD tool vendors. The CAD tools we buy licenses for are happy on SL3, and so are our own tools.

CentOS is one of several projects that took the source rpms from Redhat and recompiled them into a working set of isos (minus Redhat copyrighted material). Whitebox Linux, Tao Linux, and Scientific Linux are some others.

They were basically all started independantly of each other.

Whitebox (being the only one I have really used extensively) is run out of Beauregard Parish Public Library by a a JMorris. He rules with a tyranical fist and has no desire to offer anything other than the bare minimum of changes needed to make the rebuild possible. Now I like this hard-line leadership, but it has caused some friction as to the timelyness of updates.

I did recently convert a machine that was Whitebox Linux to Tao Linux to verify that it could be done. I followed this basic procedure. With this basic procedure, picking one of the projects over another isn't that much of a life or death decision. It is relatively easy to move between this projects.

As far as I can tell (not having seen an actual RHEL box) both Whitebox and Tao are very accurate representations of RHEL. I have yet to see an instance where a package desigend for RHEL didn't work with Whitebox and Tao. I have installed Oracle, vmware, various rpm's that were packaged for RHEL without much troubles.

• Lineox released 4.0 on 2/25.
• Piebox released 4.0 on 2/28. No free binary downloads.
• White Box, no 4.0 yet.
• Scientific Linux, no 4.0 yet.

linkified for the robots:

Although those looking for a FREE ALTERNATIVE to RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX should also consider Scientific Linux, Taolinux, and Whitebox Linux.

FREE ALTERNATIVE to RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX
FREE ALTERNATIVE to RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX

linkified for the robots:

Although those looking for a FREE ALTERNATIVE to RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX should also consider Scientific Linux, Taolinux, and Whitebox Linux.

FREE ALTERNATIVE to RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX
FREE ALTERNATIVE to RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX

I work for a high tech startup. We have a compute farm with over 150 systems, 50 or so desktop workstations, and a dozen or so infrastructure systems, all running Linux. Right now these are all on RH8. Sooner or later, we'll probably have to switch to RHEL because that's what a lot of the software we use is migrating to.

But that's a whole lotta beans to suddenly pony up. I haven't checked in a few months, but when I did ask RH for pricing, I think we got a 25% discount for that many systems. That's still a lot of beans.

So more than likely, when it comes time to upgrade, we'll buy one each of ES and WS (and possibly AS, we'll see). And install Scientific Linux https://www.scientificlinux.org/ on all the rest.

I want to support RH, who (IMO) has done a great deal both to advance the public awareness of Linux and to improve Linux. But they're asking for absurd amounts of money. There's no way it's going to cost them anywhere near 200X (less 25%) the cost of supporting one system to support 200 systems here. There's a very short list (4) of people here who would contact them, and they wouldn't be contacted until we'd done everything possible. There have been only 3 times in the past two years we would have contacted them had we had support in place. They could charge somewhere between $10 and $50 for each additional system, and we would consider it. But right now they'd be charging us more than the hardware is worth.

They really need to rethink their pricing, especially for sites with more than a very few systems.

Then try out Scientific Linux - https://www.scientificlinux.org/ . I've tried out all other RHEL alternatives, but SL 3.03 is one the cleanest and nicest alternatives.

L is a Linux release put together by various labs and universities around the world. It's primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimentors.

The base SL distribution is basically Enterprise Linux, recompiled from source.

Our main goal for the base distribution is to have everything compatible with Enterprise, with only a few minor additions or changes. An example of of items that were added are Pine, and OpenAFS.

Our secondary goal is to allow easy customization for a site, without disturbing the Scientific Linux base. The various labs are able to add their own modifications to their own site areas. By the magic of scripts, and the anaconda installer, each site is be able to create their own distributions with minimal effort. Or, if a users wishes, they can simply install the base SL release.

Yes Red Hat is propriatary according to:
Whitebox
SCI-Linux
CentOS
Lineox
Taolinux
Those are the RHEL builds feel free to ask Mandrake, or RedFlag, or Fedora how propriatary other builds are.
Can I have more FUD please? mmmmm thank you.