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Red Hat Announces Product EOL Calendar
BrunoC writes "Looks like Red Hat is getting a little Microsoftish and is quietly introducing its brand new 12-month-only Errata. Quoting The Reg: 'Red Hat's current death list EOLs RH 7.1-8.0 at the end of this year, while 6.2 and 7.0 get theirs as of the end of March.' You can read the whole article here." I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)
They are a company afterall. You can't expect them to support all their products for an indefinite amount of time. They would go bankrupt!
Pardon me, but if using short product support policies is "microsoftish", then Redhat is more microsoftish than Microsoft itself. Last time I checked, support for Windows 95 was dropped on December 31 and support for Win2000 will be dropped in 2008. That's 8 YEARS per product with a possibility of extening support for corporate customers.
I do not recall Redhat supporting any of their distro releases for 8 years.
It isn't like anyone was paying for their distros anyway.
The whole concept behind Open Source is that selling service is the way to make money. However, when no one is paying you and demanding your services even still, there's got to come a point where you realize that your "customers" are simply taking advantage of you.
Bravo, Redhat. For finally realizing that money doesn't come from beggars. Now maybe my RHAT shares will be a shit.
I have been pwned because my
One of the virtues of free software is its rapid development/update cycle. Why would should a company based on this development model sell software as if it were never updated?
I don't see how this is "Microsoftish"
Maybe that's because you don't have to admin anything important. An annual upgrade treadmill is a huge burden on IT staffs that have to prototype and test rollouts for upgrades. There is a reasonable support timeframe between zero and indefinite and one year is not it.
Come on, Timothy, that was cheap :-) Of course it's "Microsoft-ish" because it forces companies who want support to upgrade. Yeah, sure, you still have the source code, but in a company that doesn't mean anything if you're not getting support. Half the reason why Red Hat is so popular (over the "free beer" Linuxes like Debian) is because when a company puts it on their systems, they can be assured of getting professional support. This is really important for the PHBs of the world - they don't want to hire some in-house hacker with tattoos and spikey hair to "support" their installation.
Of course, even though it is Microsoft-ish, i don't think that's a bad thing. Forcing your clients to upgrade is better all round - it's better for the economy because it's creating sales which lead to more R&D spending, plus you can ensure your clients are running the latest version which should cut down on the bugginess or flakiness of their software. If Microsoft had had a more aggressive "push upgrades onto the client" scheme, all the internet problems we saw last week wouldn't've happened, because everyone would've been running patched SQL Servers anyway.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
Maybe the word 'quietly' is what's microsoftish. But actually Microsoft is quite vocal about end-of-life announcements hoping to spur new sales of the latest product suites. Actually, the poster really should reference Oracle, whom is the master of desupport notices; often on the order of 'this product will self-destruct in ten..nine..'.
I guess Red Hat is being microsoftish by trying to make a profit (maybe someday), or trying to keep the majority of it's users somewhere in the middle of the bell-curve (you spend 90% of your time supporting 10% of your users who refuse to upgrade), or maybe it's the windowsupdate.com like ability to patch over the web.
I think they're more Microsoftish than you may think, and I say 'right on!'.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
One of the major reasons to choose RedHat is their reliability. Thouroughly tested software you can rely to have on your server for at least a year without having to worry about it except for bug- and securityfixes.
Ok, 7.1 is rather old, but discontinuing support for 8.0?
IMO professional distros should always support their latest, and their last major release, so in RedHats case 8.x and 7.3, and not drop support for 7.3 until 9.0 is out.
After all, support is, like, the thing theiy make money in the first place!
my
I think that one of the major beefs against Microsoft is that they require you to PAY to upgrade to the latest version. I don't see that dropping errata support for something that will cost you a grand total of $0 (if you have fast net access) or a few bucks to get new discs from one of the cheapbytes-type places out there.
Personally, I'd rather see them drop the old support in favor of providing a higher level of service to the paying customers. (This isn't a dig on their service, which I think is great - we're paying customers at work, and RHN is a tremendous tool.)
It becomes microsoftish when an upgrade is not a free download away.
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That would make sense except for the fact that it invalidates the very reason for RH's existence, which is to provide precisely that sort of service. People who buy RH are the ones least likely to maintain the code.
"I don't see how this is "Microsoftish" -- the code Red Hat creates or includes is still GPL, and you can pay anyone willing to fix it. They're not required to support it forever :)"
But isn't that what you're paying RedHat for when you buy support from RedHat? By cutting their support, they're cutting the one service that paying customers actually want (unless they buy the software as a donation). MS just patched NT4, which has been out since '95 or so, and you're criticizing MS and excusing RedHat. Give me a break.
Vote for Pedro
Yeah, as the product responsible for Linux I can sure see myself explaining this to my boss (who is very pro-free software): Er, yeah mate. We just hire a bunch of hippies if Red Hat support runs out on the server products we run. I'm sure Oracle will be more then happy to support our home modified kernel sources. Sure a great career move on my side.
Sorry, this is just plain dumb and makes me wonder if Red Hat indeed is a good choice for this company. We are talking of a major divison of one of the biggest logistics companies worldwide.
A one year time frame is just plain unacceptable in a corporate environment.
I think it very much depends how Red Hat handles this on their enterprise level support contracts.
(I read the part about the three year life cycle for their "advanced server" products. Which ,imo are just a scam in the first place).
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Different things.
MS requiring an upgrade is forced because no one else can support or fix bugs or security issues on old Windows or MS-DOS versions.
Red Hat is just stopping their own support for old versions, but anyone else can fix their bugs or security issues, and support it, because they have the source code to it.
No one's forcing an upgrade on Red Hat's half.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
I know some sites are still running Solaris 5.2 (which was de-emphasised about 5 years ago). It takes some companies almost a year to get their software really stable. Forcing them to replace their OS on a yearly basis is going to discourage movement to redhat
From a marketing (as well as technical) point of view, theis seem s like a really bad idea(tm).
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
how about: 8/0 is obsolete in less than a year, but 8.1 isn't even out of beta yet!
Unlike Windows, Unix people are often used to running their machine for more than a year without a reboot. When you have to upgrade your OS more often than you would (otherwise) have to reboot it, there's something wrong with the EOL calendar.
My roommate (along with lots of other MS-bound friends) is still running win98. My box dual boots to '95. If this were done on the RH calendar, our OSs would have been EOL'd 5-7 years ago.
NOT going to replace their OS every year. OS boasts aside, things still break in the move. If I weren't a geek I'd have absolutely no interest in going through migration sickness every 10-14 months. As long as this calendar stands, there's no way that I can realisticly encourage friends and clients to move to RedHat. For some of them, it's going to take more than a year to convince them to change over. Providing a moving target simply makes things that much harder.
Can you understand the consternation of a non-geek friend running 7.1 being forced to move to 8.0 (the 8.1 beta refused to recognize his new HD) -- knowing that the OS is going to be obsolete by the end of the year? good reason to go ballistic.
This is one big step away from getting a solid foothold on the desktop.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Real businesses, with thousands of servers, can not upgrade every year. Besides the actual time to do the work of upgrading, there is testing that must be done when you have real money at stake, downtime caused by the upgrade, etc.
I work for a real company. I can't use an unsupported operating system. I can't upgrade every machine every year. I can't even upgrade to the latest and greatest (e.g. RedHat 8 and Solaris 9 are out of the question), because it is too untested. These are the business realities, not factors that I or any other individual have control over. A single incident (e.g. a server crashes and whatever sort of failover is in place does not work) can cost more money than my yearly salary. A single hiccup (e.g. a 1 second network outage for a single machine) can cost more than my paycheck.
Sun at least makes guarantees that binaries that worked on previous versions of Solaris will work on new versions. (If they pass a test suite). RedHat makes no such guarantee.
I thought I was making real progress to replacing Solaris servers with Linux servers. But with this announcement, I don't know what to do. If I deploy RedHat, I am adding a substantial (and mostly hidden) cost and risk. RedHat seemed like the logical choice, but my next course of action is going to be to investigate alternate supported Linux distros (IBM, Sun).
If you're trying to purchase a few dozen (much less a hundred or a thousand) desktop machines for corporate rollout, it's going to take you a few months to get the budget approved. Then you spend a month or two on the RFQ and RFPs, another month or so going through them, and another month or so finalizing the decision. Add on the order time, receiving time, and software installation/configuration time, and you're hitting 9-12 months before they're even hitting a user's desktop.
So you've got a good chance that by the time your users first turn on a RedHat desktop, the support has been dropped.
Congratulations, RedHat, you just knocked yourself out of competition for the corporate desktop. With Mandrake dead, that leaves SuSE as the only real contender for a corporate solution on the desktop.
On the server side, consider that it typically takes at least a year for third-party vendors to certify a distro as "supported" for their products. Sometimes it even matters -- Sybase 12.5 would only run on a certain patch level of RedHat 7.1 last time I tried it (Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, and SuSE 8.0 could not even prepare the storage space for the database without crashing, much less run a server.)
I know that most corps are going to have special contracts set up for support, but that doesn't help those of us on the development or consulting side of things who don't have the budget to pay for full AS licenses just to get a system that doesn't need to be rebuilt annually.
If I want to rebuild systems annually, I'll go back to Microsoft-based development -- there's more work supporting that junk anyhow.
I do buy full distros to support the vendors -- and end up spending far more on Linux distros per year than I ever did on Microsoft products as a result. I have RH 5.2, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, 8.1, SuSE 8.0 and 8.1 -- all full box sets at $75-100 each. Even when I don't install them, I buy kits just to help keep the companies I believe in afloat.
I sure don't appreciate RH trying to rip me off as payback. Even with RH normal pricing, who in their right mind is going to pay $150 for a full current release of RH, for which you only get a few months update support, vs. buying a generic copy of the disks for $20 plus shipping and paying less than $150 for a full year of RH update support? Such nonsense would be why RH 7.1 was the last distro of theirs I bought or installed -- I don't believe in their model anymore.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You're a fool. You've been bamboozled into believing that everything has to be a commercial solution or it's worthless, dead, or unsuccessful. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: (sing along, kids!)
/. are not buying music and movies. thats why we would rather run anything at all but MS operating systems. And that is why we would rather code opensource than closed. The playing field is a place of crossfire and even friendly fire, so no matter what position you take, somebody will believe (not just think, believe) you to be wrong. Trust me.
Communism sucks for governments, but it works great for groups of people with a common goal!
That's right, kids...opensource is good for you. It lets you give your time to the group, or COMMUNE, and give back the results of your productivity to the masses for equal division! and the great thing about software is, that unlike the finite products that software corporations wish it to be, can be copied effortlessly countless times, with little distribution cost to anyone!
So let's all try a nice big glass of Communism today, and stop worrying about whether Capitalism is going to benefit from our pinko operating system!
but seriously, this whole copyright and software thing is just like the cold war all over again, except this time everyone who has actually researched their stuff realizes that there's far more atrocities on the pro-IP side than the commie rat bastards they want you all to think us OSS people are. I could say generic "when you support..." joke, but its no joke. thats why so many of us here on
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