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Questions for Red Hat Co-Founder?
ConceptDog asks: "Co-Founder and current Director of Red Hat, Bob Young, is going to be conducting a presentation at my school. In addition to his presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Considering that my school is rather small (less than 3000 students at my campus), there is a good chance that I might be able to ask a question of Mr. Young. So I'd really like the Slashdot community's help in coming up with a good question to ask. If I get an answer, I'll post what it is, here."
Currently there's no plans to support older versions of Fedora core with errata and security updates, longer than 3 months or so after the next release is out. By the time a Fedora core is stable, the new one will be out, and you either upgrade or start patching everything by hand. It's deliberately not suitable for production use.
Many of us don't need "support" in the sense of calling someone to help me do something. We are the support. Any company with in-house sysadmins that are competent is in the same position.
What is of some value is errata and security backports and patches. That's what my company pays a good deal of money to Red Hat for several RHN seats for the standard Red Hat Linux. We can afford to have lots of servers, because the seats are a reasonable price.
RHEL is not an option. My company is not going to pay $350 per year per server, and be subject to an EULA that is as bad as Microsoft's, that gives Red Hat the right to audit us for license compliance, to make sure we purchased support seats for every server/desktop, just to get security errata, something every other operating system (including most other Linux distros) give for free.
Our other option is to consolidate servers, which presents technical compromises, and reduces the value of running Linux in the first place. One of the key benefits to free software is that we were free to pop it on a server without the license hassle, and fear of audit. If that server became a permanant addition, we could buy another seat for it.
So it looks like we will be slowly moving to Debian on all Red Hat servers. After April, we'll have no reason to subscribe to RHN any longer. I really didn't want to do this. I really like a lot of things Red Hat has done. They have been a big help to the open source community, and with the Fedora project, it looks like they will continue to support the community. I admire them for that.
Red Hat has just left people like me, who work for and consult for small to medium businesses, with no other viable options.
Red Hat has made a liar out of me when I told consulting clients and my employer that a Red Hat 7.3 server would not need to be upgraded for at least a couple years. I do resent that also.
Microsoft doesn't even treat their customers quite this bad. They at least have an EOL cycle that works for businesses, and don't stop providing security updates suddenly on a OS versions that are less than 2 years old with a huge install bases. TCO for Red Hat just shot through the roof.
It's a testament to the value of open source, that I can drop in a replacement from Debian with very few issues. At least free software still beats the pants off MS, even if RH can't anymore.
What are Red Hat's plans here? Why is Red Hat leaving small to medium businesses with so few option?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It was announced on the Toronto Linux Users Group as an open talk, so anyone is free to attend AFAIK.
n ux.tolug/865/match=young
See here for details including where it's happening, etc: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.li