Slashdot Mirror
The Increasing Cost of Red Hat Linux?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I work at a company with a large number of Linux servers in the data center. We're currently evaluating what distribution we want to use moving forward. Upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise from 7.2 would cost ~$350k just for the systems we already have deployed. Due to the change in Red Hat's release policy, we either have to move to Enterprise, or change distributions. Also, we don't have Oracle on any of these systems, but we will need it in the future. This leaves us with rather limited options. I'm interested hearing what other Slashdot readers are running, and planning?"
On the other hand, if some of the above made you think - I can promise you that Debian certainly is a viable alternative at least for the machines I've dealt with so far. Unless you want to run Oracle reliably, and have someone to pass the buck to if it doesn't work.
Looks like Redhat wants to charge like Microsoft for their software.
Switching over to FreeBSD as we speak...
Frank Madison
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I can not STAND people that say "Oh, well, it won't run on anything but Red Hat". Give me a break. The operating system is called Linux, not Red Hat (OK, maybe GNU/Linux). Linux defines the API and the application interfaces (ditto GNUification), and quite simply, everything that runs on Red Hat will run on Debian.
Huh? Each distribution is a seperate operating system. Just because the kernel has the same name doesn't make it the same OS. (That's why we have the distinction between the two, folks.) You might have a point that the "Red Hat + x package" distributions could all be considered a single OS, but Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Gentoo, and all the big ones are most definitely different OSes.
There are fundamental differences between the ways that the different operating systems work. You're (for the most part) right that most programs that will work on one distribution will work on another (or can be made to work), but to state "There is nothing that runs under Red Hat that can't run under Debian" is just displaying your ignorance.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?