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 :)

Comments

That's correct..

[leerpm]

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!

Re:That's correct..

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree. I have yet to install a distro from any Un*x company that I haven't paid for. Yeah, I'm sure plenty of people are saying "sucker", but I don't see it that way at all. I've been running RH for my mail/web/cvs server for a few years now (starting with 6.2) and really can't complain. Okay, I suppose my $$$ helps a bunch of lifer deadbeats that don't want to pay for anything....but I'll risk that whopping $180/yr (or so; whenever I decide to upgrade) to help a company that actually tries to do a good job. As far as I'm concerned, they have a good business model and the money I pay is certainly worth keeping them around... So God forbid they'd want to stay in business...that's so terrible :-P

When the OS is free, what can you complain about?

[ObviousGuy]

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.

Re:Microsoftish ?

[weave]

Redhat 6.2 is currently supported. That's been out for quite a few years... But yeah, certainly no one is expecting 8 years, but just one year is way too short.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I spy a troll!

[Anonymous Hack]

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.

Not true.

[intermodal]

It becomes microsoftish when an upgrade is not a free download away.

Right

[CaptainZapp]

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 :)

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).