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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.
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.
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: