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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!
noob - "I am having a problem with USB..."
RH person - "What version are you using?"
noob - "Uhh... version 5.0 I think..."
RH person - "FUCK OFF AND UPDATE YOUR SHIT MAN!!! IT IS FREE!!!"
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
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.
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.
This ISN'T microsoft-ish. Microsoft atleast supports their products for a little while. What this is, is a company screwing the living hell out of the community that's supported it. I've sat here and sold personal version after personal version alot with errata accounts to clients because a) cheaper b) would be supported for quite some time with good security updates and wouldn't always require upgrades to continue to use their other products.
/. apparently didn't like). I've started installing Gentoo on my workstations here already and within the next 4 weeks my redhat boxes will be gone as well.
Now I have to turn around and tell them that Redhat changed it's game plan and convert each one of these clients over, or let them continue to pay me to constantly upgrade their network just to keep them within their errata entitlements. I for one....basically said to hell with redhat about 5 hours ago (incidently right after I submitted my story that
Face it people, the people like "us" have made redhat and they just turned their back on us for the corperate world.
Don't get me wrong, I have NO problem with end of life, but 1 year for what's there now. The woman I spoke with at Redhat (yes I did research it directly with the company not just reading what nimrods say) she said that after this first round, there's going to be another change. Anyone using personal or the "free" version (and probably the professional) will ONLY be eligable for errata during the time that the release they are using is current. As soon as they release another version, errata for the older is gone. In other words, since redhat releases usually twice a year....that would me 2 upgrades a year just to keep yourself up2date. Screw that.
It becomes microsoftish when an upgrade is not a free download away.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
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
You mean we can't download a free product and suck down bandwith from the company for the rest of our lives?! REVOLUTION! Maybe some people haven't noticed but Mandrake who we thought was doing great is all but dead, how Redhat pays thier bills I have no idea. Look people, It's time we allow some of these open source companies to ern some money, they have done alot for us and are still doing more than just about any other company. The only companys I can think of off the top of my head that do more for the people are charitys and ones funded by tax dollars. The only thing I would ask is that, when I buy redhat 7.3 the errata will last untill redhat 8.3. I look at everything inbetween as a sort of beta software, I have no problem spending $50 every year and a half, but not every 6 months.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
It was the availability of a cheap base price and an affordable RHN subscription that got me the green light to replace our NT servers with Red Hat servers. I expended a lot of political capital making arguments about savings in maintenance and deploring the Microsoft upgrade treadmill. Management was suspicious but in the end trusted my judgement as the "expert" opinion.
I'm going to look like a fucking asshole if red hat puts us on the same high cost / upgrade treadmill program that I convinced everyone we were getting out of.
Note to red hat: continue to provide an affordable RHN subscription and don't force us to upgrade our servers every 12 months. If you do, during one of those upgrade cycles, you will find yourselves alongside MS in the dustbin, and we'll move to another distro. Or, worst case scenario, management will no longer see the monetary benefit and decide to return to the comforting familiarity of Microsoft's eager clutches, and I'll be "that dick with no sense of judgement" for the rest of my career.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.