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I use Gentoo at home as well as an enterprise (someone please define) server. Gentoo is uniquely qualified as a single or finite purpose server. I have several Gentoo boxes providing a range of services from firewall to mail and one central portage host.

But, alas, it's not your fathers Olsmobile. When my mother inlaw asked me to put linux on her machine, WhiteBox was the obvious choice.

Right Tool for Right Job!

'tsallinux, 'tsalgood.

You can rebuild a complete RHEL3 (minus the few bits of proprietary stuff I haven't noticed yet) from the public source, so long as you change the name and remove any Red Hat trademarks.

Some RHEL3 based distributions:
http://www.centos.org/
http://whiteboxlinux.org/
http://taolinux.org/

The main difference with Linux/*BSD and other OSS software is that _all_ user contributions such as coding, graphical work, documentation, etc goes back to the community so that _anyone_ can use it. With MS, any work you do for them is just working for free since MS will keep all rights to the work and just resell it. If I am going to spend my time to help others for free, I want to help a community and not a corporation. I get paid for my work by a corporation.

Look at these two open source projects from MS so far. They are both very outdated and not very useful. VC++ is not the MS development platform of the week. It is now .Net. Why release VC++ stuff and not some .Net stuff under a real FreeSoftware license? How useful is that WIC installer? There are tons of good installer out there including commercial and free such as Inno Setup.

If MS wants to win the trust of the OSS community, they will need to put out something more significant and not some old unimportant code.

At the end of the day, MS is a closed/proprietary company. They are not going to do anything significant within the Free/OSS communities. The most I would ever expect from MS is Open-but-not-Free software such as Java. You can look at the code, but you cannot do anything with it. That type of code doesn't build a community of contributors.

I'm glad to hear that SuSE has taken the lead in deploying the 2.6 kernel in an enterprise environment. We use White Box Enterprise Linux (www.whiteboxlinux.org; it's an open-source, free clone of RHEL3) in production, and I'm anxiously awaiting the day when Red Hat (and thus White Box) will support 2.6. I know I could compile my own, but I'd rather wait for it to be official.

I last read that RH planned to support 2.6 in 2005. Here's hoping that will be "late 2004" instead.

I havan't seen anyone redistributing Enterprise Linux 3.0 ISOs.

Now you have.

Since RedHat still provides its source code for RHEL, there are some alternatives other than the cutting edge Fedora distribution: Tao Linux, CentOS-3 and White Box Entreprise Linux. These distributions are build from the source packages of RHEL 3 and are almost identical to RHEL except for some artwork and logos.

For those who appreciate stability, reliability and long-term availability (4-5 years lifecycle), those distributions are made for you. Personnaly, I prefer Tao Linux because it has a rather large user base. The Tao logo looks great too!

It's actually a pretty good model, but not one my company can afford, so we are in the process of switching to Mandrake.

Why? You could have chosen just to use RHEL without support subscription.

RHEL still GPL'd, after all. And as WBL is still RHEL compatible, you can still subscribe later and just upgrade WBL to "real" RHEL, if you wish.

Or this: White Box Linux

I installed RedHat on a machine today, but to get their updates I'm gracefully guided to a page where I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice. But until either Slackware comes up with an x86_64 distro, or I roll my own (that'll be a while), I'm stuck using one someone else has already thrown together.

Since you mention having far more servers than workstations, I'll assume that Fedora isn't what you're looking for. (x86_64 support, free updates, but sometimes a wee bit too much on the bleeding edge.)

If you want the stability of Red Hat Enterprise software on an x86_64 but don't want (or simply don't need) a support contract, you might want to check out:

• Tao Linux
• White Box Enterprise Linux

Both of these distros are based on the Red Hat Enterprise SRPMs (legally they can't say that they are Red Hat Enterprise), and provide updates for free.

FWIW, I'm currently using Tao on a dual Opteron system. (Back when I was setting the box up, White Box hadn't quite finished their x86_64 release). Installed without any problems. If you've got a spare x86_64 machine to test with, you might want to take a look at these distributions.

We use Fedora for both our dedicated servers (to be leased/rented to clients) and for internal use. We theoretically offer FreeBSD installs as well, but no one has ever taken us up on that offer (I wonder why)...

Yeah, Fedora is great: cutting edge features along side the familiar Red Hat environment. But I would have a hard time implementing it in a "stable" role with its 6 month product cycle and all. It's great for my laptop and at home, but we have a little under two dozen odd machines in the data center and around the ranch. I just don't have the hours in the day to maintain those upgrades two times a year.

RHEL is seemingly the way to go if you want the high end service and support that comes with its high price tag. No doubt, the support it top notch, but my .org doesn't have that kind of cash. Fortunately, we've found a couple of great alternatives.

White Box Linux and CentOS are effectively the poor man's RHEL. Built from Red Hat source, and blessed by the GPL, they're both testament to the fact that free speech can still mean free beer if you're willing to corral the liability square in your own corner (in other words, I'm the support, and if I screw it up, my ass is on the line).

In order to get updates we had to move as Redhat 8/9 are no longer supported...

If RH 8 and 9 were working, why bother upgrading? Keep a couple test boxes on the side with the same kickstart setup as production and try out new packages from there.

If you really must upgrade, the cheap way is White Box Linux which is a fork from RHEL. Same warm fuzzy feeling as good ol' Red Hat, sans licensing fees. Unfortunately, you'll be in the same boat as with RH 8 and 9 since it's a fork. SuSE is probably the only RH replacement I'd consider since now it has Novell's backing, although I must admit that I've never tried Mandrake, and Debian is way too outdated^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstable for my taste.

There are a number of interesting Library projects using Linux. Beauregard Parish Public Library helped develop its own distro of linux called Whitebox . There's also oss4lib which focuses on Open Source Projects in libraries.

I know at least four projects of this kind, namely CentOS, White Box Linux, Tao Linux and Fermi Linux LTS from Fermilab.

As they are all based on RHEL 3 we will factor lots of stuff, the admin will be very similar, so will the automated install using kickstart.

And to boot we will not have to worry about some critical components like a JVM being only available on RHEL for example, if it runs on RHEL it has a 0.9999999 probability of doing so too on one of the clones.

And for some apps like Oracle we will go with RHEL since they impose it to us. But in the end we will not get commercial supports for the 70 or so servers we've been running on 6.1, 6.2 and 7.3 without support for all those years.

Initially I'd hoped to take advantage of the Fedora Legacy project, but they just don't seem serious. For example, one of their primary modes of distribution is via yum. They released packages for 7.2 and 7.3, but never for 8.0. I opened this bugzilla report on it nearly two months ago. They're just ignoring it. Hardly the response you want to see from someone you're trusting for security patches.... Maybe someone will mod this up enough that they'll take note.

As a side note, I'm keeping White Box Linux in the back of my mind as an option if FC2 flops. The legal issues are still a little disturbing, though.

Check it out at: White Box Linux

So remove the offending parts. Whitebox does the same thing for RHEL, which also is not a free product, can not be distibuted as is, but still contains GPL code.

Perhaps the folks at the Beauregard Parish Public Library could help out. Check out Whitebox Linux" to see what they're doing.

I asked, and there is apparently no restriction on reverse engineering of the distribution, so you could buy one copy, download the corresponding source code, and make an exact copy of each of the programs in the distribution, and put those files on all of your machines.

My personal opinion is that if you removed RedHat trade marked packages, in accordance with appendix 1 sections 1 and 2 of the RHEL licence, replaced them with your own image packages and called it "My Personal Advanced Linux" you could then install that on other machines without breaching the RHEL subscription agreement. But ask a solicitor first.

There's also White Box. Someone explain to me why there are THREE separate RHEL clone projects? Shouldn't these merge? Since they're pretty much doing exactly the same thing?

Not quite. Each release is going to be supported for five years, and upgrades are free with your support contract. Of course, you're always free to download the source and build like WhiteBox does.

Based on RedHat's current and past behavior, I really don't see a problem. I'd be much more concerned about Novell taking this path based on their track record of using closed components in their products.

Actually, you can. You'll have to compile your own copy, though.

White Box Enterprise Linux is doing just that.

'Cause the EULA is only to impress PHBs. Anyone who knows their salt doesn't have to abide by that EULA in any meaningful way.

You misunderstand it slightly. If you buy one copy and install it on a zillion machines, not only can you not expect zillion-machine level support, but you can't expect *any* support.

Their support contract says that if you want support on any one machine, you must buy support for all machines you have running RHEL. In order to get support for a machine, you must give them the right to inspect your facilities to make sure you have a support contract for all machines running RHEL. That is what everyone is in an uproar over.

Red Hat's reason for doing this is to prevent people from buying support for one machine, installing RHEL on 100 machines, then switching which machine is "supported" to the one machine having a problem every time there is a problem. This was a common practice where I worked (and I suspect in a lot of other places too) prior to their support contract change.

This policy is not technically a violation of the GPL, as the per-machine fee relates to support, not to software. If you forego the right to support, you can install on as many machines as you want. Of course, if you don't want Red Hat's support, you might as well go with another distro, such as White Box, Mandrake, or Debian.

Yep. If you want RedHat but don't want to pay the price, look at WhiteBox Linux

This project takes the SRPMS from RHEL, and compiles them into a completely unsupported distro :)

click here to see that you are right

There's nothing wring with Mandrake, or any of the other major Linux distros. I've found them all to be of top quality. But with the myriad of RH options available now, I don't understand why anyone who has been using RH for a while would ever want to change.

Just doesn't make sense.

I'll throw a plug in for whitebox linux.

It's RHE3 isos without the support (and with different brand graphics).

Not sure what the differences between Fedora (RH9) and whitebox (RHE3) are. Sure would appreciate enlightenment though.

For those that are used to RH and don't want a big change, there are many distributions that are compiling the RHEL source and making their own distro. Thank you GPL!

Whitebox Enterprise Linux
cAos
Tao
just to name a few

If we're going to be starting another distro war, I think everyone should take a look at these three projects which aim to release a free edition of RedHat Enterprise Linux. Once you've got one of these running, even if these distro go under, you can still get SRPMS security updates from RH and build them yourself through 2008.

Tao Linux
White Box Linux
cAos

I am not a lawyer, but I will try to answer this in that I have spoken with Red Hat directly before regarding most of this stuff.

Now that RedHat no longer offers a free desktop version of their product, would it be possible that a Linux-running site could be sued by RedHat for illegally running a 'pirated' copy of Red Hat Advanced Server?

Only if you actually purchased a license do you give Red Hat permission to audit your facilities for license violations. Installing Linux is allowed by the GPL, as many times over as you would like. But you are only entitled to Red Hat services on the machine you paid for. IE NO UPDATES/BUG FIXES.

Would this be any different to Microsoft calling in the BSA to investigate a site running unlicensed copies of Windows?

Not really, you can always get Red Hat workalikes built from the source code available to us all. For Free!
White box Linux
Tao Linux
CentOS
Just to name a few.

What if the RedHat site was running a hybrid type of installation, with portions of the distro taken from the unlicensed 'illegally obtained' version of RHAS, but others, such as package management (apt-get, for example), taken from the free GNU/Debian distro?

Depends on whether the machine is licensed or not. I assume a jacked up installation (debian packages on rh system) would void any warranty or compatability assurances that come with Red Hat.

Depending on what you are using it for, you may be interested in trying out White Box Linux for your needs. It is a community produced distribution that is forked from the source of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3. While there is no support for from Red Hat, you do get essentially the same product, which should be compatible with Oracle (although I do not know this personally).

If the KDE developers think KDE is so much better for business users, then why don't THEY create a KDE/Linux distro? Shucks, they could even wait for Bruce to release UserLinux, take his code, and replace GNOME with KDE. Just like that guy creating "White Box" Linux based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

But the software is GPL, so I would like to hear a RedHat person comment on this:

http://whiteboxlinux.org/

This is Redhat ES recompiled with all the redhat copy righted logos and stuff removed. It's almost done (release candidate #2). And it's free.

I haven't found any interviews where Redhat comments on the possibility/inevibility of people doing this. I remember a reference made some time ago (that I can't seem to find now) by some RedHat officer about the UnitedLinux people being able to just download the sources to RedHat Linux and they would have their widely adopted Linux standard. So I suspect they must have anticipated something like this.

I know I have.

It's worth noting that aside from the only 5 CAL your Windows xxxx Server license comes with, it also doesn't come with support (at least not with a SLA). That's extra, and not cheap. The $799/year from RH is the support contract, the software is free. Yes, I understand it might appear to be a bit of a technicality.

To answer your question, legally speaking, nobody. But then again, legally speaking, if you read your MS EULA you'll notice that they legally have no responsibility whatsoever to do anything, and have no responsibility if anything bad happens to you as a result of using their products. Of course, I suppose you could sue MS in case of problems (good luck with that).

Don't get me wrong, I am not happy that the "regular" RHL went away, I will miss it, and I will change to another Linux distributor, both at home and at work. I was just addressing the technicality. RHEL is still GPL, and is therefore still free. The fact that this project exists illustrate the point.

But again, I was originally just addressing your rant about RHN and the free entitlement.

Then whiteboxlinux.org might be for you. It's RHEL with all of the trademarks etc removed, currently being sponsored by a public library in the US. It's available free of charge.