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No More Free Updates For Red Hat
An anonymous user wrote in to tell us (and Timothy called RH and confirmed, this change was made a few weeks ago) that you no longer can Freely and Anonymously use Red Hat's Update Agent to download updated package DBs, and update packages. You must register, and pay $9.95 for the service. Of course you can still update manually, but how long before other services pop up to take its place? And Debian still does apt without me having to tell them where I live. This is unfortunate, but not unsurprising. I want RH to make a buck too, but this seems like a pretty crappy way to do it. Update: 03/19 03:21 PM by T : An unnamed reader points to this FAQ on the change, too.
Many would find it ethically questionable for Red Hat, or any other software manufacturer, to deliberately withhold known-good security updates from the majority of its users for any length of time. Red Hat, of course, has no financial or legal obligation to non-paying users; the question is one of good will. Red Hat receives updates from upstream software maintainers at no cost, because the upstream maintainers want their products to be secure and useful. To refrain from passing along the good will, in order to maintain the value of a paid service, seems inherently to be an act of questionable, if not ill, motive.
Furthermore, there is the matter of reputation. Many security-conscious users and sysadmins already hold Red Hat in less than the highest esteem -- because Red Hat's releases have a history of installing unnecessary and potentially risky software by default; and because Red Hat appears to trade off security for ease-of-use for the novice, when novices are the users in greatest need of help with security. Some outside the Linux user base take these problems to be marks on the reputation of Linux at large. Any move on Red Hat's part which further worsens the security of Red Hat systems on the Net -- even poorly-maintained ones operated by novices -- will do Red Hat's reputation, and Linux's, more harm.
All in all, I suspect that Red Hat would do more good for its product's reputation, its users, and for the Internet at large, by making it as easy as possible for all its users to make and keep their systems secure. So far, Red Hat has not -- I repeat, has not -- withheld security updates from non-paying users in order to promote a paid service. That is a good state of affairs; not the best possible, but certainly not a bad one. Let's hope things get better, not worse.
$9.95 is considerably less than I charge for one hour's time. Pretending that downloads of files over either their network service or plain ol' FTP, then a single weekly invocation of this program is far, far, far cheaper than having me do the work by hand.
I would never *personally* use this, as I prefer to do things "my way" but you can bet in a minute I would reccomend this to clients. If there's a problem, they're going to have to call me anyway, but why bother if it works? I set up a cron job and let it be.
I say, good for Red Hat. Let's give this a fair shake.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
This is what's called a SERVICE.
They are *not* charging you for updates, new versions, etc. THat's still free.
They are charging for a specific SERVICE they are providing to keep your systems updated automatically. If that service isn't worth money to you, and you'd rather do it your own way, that's absolutely fine.
It was free during the trial period while they worked the bugs out. It was never going to be a free server. I knew it was going to be $10/month ages ago.
But, each person gets one free system on the network. So if all you run is a Red Hat workstation you don't have to spend anything. Only people with multiple systems do.
I can see the benefits of RHN. I like the single console view, and I like being able to push updates to clients, but at $10/month/workstation that can get pricey if you have a lot. Then again, I'm sure if you have 500 or 1000 workstations you can work a better deal with them.
They are selling a support service. You can either get the updates yourself and apply them to your systems, or use the easy push method from Red Hat Network.
What's the problem? They have to make money somehow, and supposedly support is the way it should be done with open source. Support them.
Exactly right. Unfortunately, from what I read, a lot of people only pay lip service to the different OSS philosophies and the ideal "business models" suggested or tried by the linux world...underneath all they care about is getting everything for free. It IS sad, especially (it has been said before in this discussion) when you can just download and apply the updates yourself at no cost still.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
The choice is difficult: beer, update redhat, beer, update redhat, beer, mmm... Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
--
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Since the poster doesn't like the charge for update agent, what other ways would he/she have them make money? Look, the redhat update agent is the very definition of "Value Added Service" and it seems very reasonable to charge for it. They noted in the post that the old way of getting the files and applying updates still works just fine. Why not charge a (in my mind) paltry 10 bucks to make it easier? Look, not everyone has their linux server hacked together from 486 parts and hooked to a cable service. Some folks are trying to push it into the enterprise and services like this are great for that.
What kind of a Unix guru doesn't script this process? It's really just a matter of grabbing any updates in Redhat's 'updates/(versionnumber)/(arch)' and 'updates/(versionnumber)/noarch' directories and then applying an 'rpm -F (downloaded rpms)'. Not necessarily doable by the stereotypical RedHat user, but certainly not a problem for a Unix guru.
I've even got my own ugly, ugly, homebrew, hacked-up solution that, while not 100% automated, lets me do an update (for my desktop machine and all 3 servers) in the background with only ~30 seconds of manual intervention. Automating the last little bit wouldn't be too much harder.
The fact that RedHat's charging money for such a service amazes me. I understand that they provide value, I understand that it costs them money to provide this value, and I wish them the best of luck at making a buck, but it seems that their business model in this case can be devasted by someone willing to do a bit of scripting. Even Kirk Bauer's autorpm provides a free alternative (that has existed since before RedHat's update agent.
There're two things that I can think of that make RedHat's business model potentially viable:
But aren't this kind of extra-value services (packaging, customization, documentation, etc.) just how free software / open source is supposed to make money. Even if you ask RMS.
you mean, after spending thousands and thousands of dollars for developing updates..they're going to charge?? How dare they follow economic reality!
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