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Red Hat Linux Support To End
Orbital Sander writes "Received a missive this morning from the Red Hat Network, stating that they will discontinue maintenance on Red Hat Linux 7.x and 8.0 by the end of 2003, and on Red Hat 9.0 by the end of April, 2004. And, more ominously: 'Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.' [The full text of the email is on Newsforge.] Kind of the end of an era, and the new king has already been appointed: Red Hat Linux is dead! Long live Red Hat Enterprise Linux! Looks like they realized that only their support contract-based version of the product was making them any money." Readers also note that Red Hat is pointing users to the free Fedora Project.
so long, and thanks for all the RPMs.
Are you secure enough in your masculinity to run 'man touch'?
By far my favorite desktop. Redhat + Ximian Gnome = Goodness.
Hopefully Fedora will keep pace with things.
The more you know, the less you understand.
I'm using Mandrake ;)
Guess it's bout time I figured out how to use the debian installer.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
From where I'm standing this looks like a very silly step on Redhat's behalf.
I have two Redhat boxes at the moment, one running 7.1 which handles mail and DNS for me a half a dozen friends/family, the other running 9.0 which is purely a remote backup server (rsync copies data to it daily).
I use Redhat because despite the fact that I installed 7.1 a couple of years ago I pay my $60 a year so that I can run "up2date" once a day to keep my security patches up to date. I pay my $60 for both systems.
I also buy a copy of Redhat every 18 months or so.
Now that they have decided to stop updating 7, 8 and 9 they are forcing me to migrate both boxes. I don't have time to scan the web looking for security updates for hundreds of packages, so I need an update service. Hell, I only installed the 9.0 box 4 months ago and come next April updates stop !
So it looks like they are forcing me to either move to Redhat Enterprise to get security updates from them. It looks like I would have to stump up two lots of $379 just to get a two copies of Enterprise and 12 months of update for my two boxes.
I obviously don't want to pay that much...
So I guess I'm going to have to migrate to Debian or something instead ?
The end result for Redhat, no more income from me.
what does this mean for linux and all the distros based on red hat?
I hate to say it, but even Microsoft gives better support guarantees than that. On the plus side, however, I never needed support from RedHat when I did use their products, and now that I've switched to Gentoo, I don't have to worry about it at all!
Best of luck to you, RedHat; hopefully this move won't anger too many large clients of yours...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hey, there are other companies distributing Linux. Who needs Red Hat? Sure Linux has a little less supporter now. But we still got several supporters backing us.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Oh noes, only 59818932 distros left! What will we do?
RedHat finally realized that most IT departments don't like upgrading every 9 months to the next batch of bleeding-edge sofware. Enterprise linux focuses on stability and has an 18-month release cycle.
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
(2) Fedora is still going to be around, which will most likely fill the gap left by the death of non-enterprise RedHat
Who do I know that uses Redhat? No one, really, except maybe a couple of people who have dualboots and claim that "the computer is running linux version 9! what kernel? version 9 of course!"
Everyone seems to be on Mandrake or Debian.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Everybody oughta have switched over to Debian ages ago.
I use Red Hat 9 at home. Because of this, when time came to roll out some Linux servers at work and my boss asked me which we should use, I told him "Red Hat Enterprise" (we wanted support and had the money to pay for it).
I suspect that for a reasonably significant portion of their market, Red Hat Linux (and cooresponding useful items like RHN) is the primary reason that their customers buy Enterprise. I hope they've considered this...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Before anyone here prophecize the end of Red Hat and persuade people to move to other distributions let me say this. Well!!It definitely looks like just a re-branding move to avoid any confusion. They are just branding enterprise solutions to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the non-commercial line becomes Fedora.
To me it looks to be a smart move. Others might disagree
...it's not like there aren't any other Linux distros.
I'm not familiar with their enterprise version. is it free (as in beer) to use? If not, there won't be anymore red hat for the masses? Guess I'll have to learn debian now.
This info has been around for a long time. Red Hat Fedora Core 1 was due to be released today, but they found an issue so it's delayed, as you can see from the Fedora schedule. You can read the mailing list post about it here.
is that it leaves us without a really easy to install distro for new users.
I think Mandrake fills that hole to some extent, but they're largely a repackaged RH, and I can't help wondering whether they'll be able to maintain rpm, cygwin, and all the other widely used RH products on their own. Will RH still be employing Cox?
It *is* possible to make money off free software - look at Hans Reiser, or MySQL. For that matter, Slashdot and LiveJournal use totally open source software, even if the software isn't where they make their money.
Why hasn't RH been able to do the same?
This is a bad situation for those of us using RedHat Linux, but there *is* hope.
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
Just another MSFT nail in the coffin to prove that
1. everybody's got to eat, which means, someone's got to pay
2. going opensource is not for every company.
It's a good day in Redmond.
It means Red Hat isn't going to sell a product in the Red Hat Linux line.
...
It doesn't say there won't be a distribution in the tradition of Red Hat Linux. In fact, Fedora Core 1 is about to be released
You don't have to worry about them making money.
The first distribution I heard of, the one that introduced me to Linux. I have since moved on to bigger and better things, but this will definitely create a hole. Nonetheless, Linux will move on.
The server line only is so successful because of the branding of the desktop line. If they drop one, they'll lose the other. Not to mention that it's Almost to the point that corps will be willing to pay for it! That's great, drop the OS just as it's about to become functional!
What is the difference between Red Hat Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, other than the price tag?
The main problem I had when I received this is they seem to be really focused on the "Enterprise" aspect of this. I am a happy subscriber to the update service with a handful of servers. However, none of these boxes are really "servers" in the heavy duty use sense. We use them as firewalls, and one as a light duty PHP/mysql/web server for doing bug tracking, design documents, etc for the developers.
Under the old scheme, I was able to purchase the low end version and run it as a light duty web server. Now, looking at the product mix, it looks like they are taking the Microsoft 'your workstation isn't a web server' approach to stratification.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Congratulations!!!! You win the laziest slashdotter of the day award for not only failing to read the article but for failing to read the slashdot blurb entirely.
I can only guess that you were so desperate to get first meaningful post that you neglected to notice that RedHat is not asking you to switch companies but that they are only going to support the enterprise version from now on.
Fedora 1.0 will be basically RedHat 10. The Fedora project is sponsored by RedHat and took over the codebase. I am currently using Fedora Test 3 (upgraded from RedHat 9).
Huge mistake. RHAT may not profit on the desktop;
but it's great advertising for them. The guys
that build big systems that use Red Hat support
prototype these systems on laptops and desktops
running RedHat Linux. Lesser end systems gives
Redhat credibility vis-a-vis Microsoft. If
Redhat dumps laptop and desktop systems,
they'll just wind up like SUN: fat , slow,
cornered dinosaurs.
What about those who bought boxed copies of Red Hat Linux? At least Microsoft supports their products for 5-8+ years.
Maybe "Red Hat Linux Personal Edition" (the name) is dead, but a free desktop oriented red hat linux version is not. Fedora a.k.a Red Hat Linux X is coming, download only , not sold in stores
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
But you need to offer a service that someone wants in order to make money. I think people would pay for linux, it's a great OS, but when its perfectly legal to just download it and install it for free why would you pay for it? Only if the incentive for purchasing it was good enough. There's been plenty of companies that have tried to make a profit selling linux, but only a few have come out ok. I know everybody is going to bitch about the spirit of free software and all that crap, but the people at Red hat have families to feed too. Sometimes I wish linux was cheap not free. $50 for an enterprise class system is a damn good deal.
A possible side benefit from this might be that, without the perceived dominance on the linux desktop, 3rd party vendors who produce closed source linux solutions may offer something other than RPMs for those of us who don't run Red Hat, Mandrake or Suse.
Yes, I realize that Debian can be made to use RPMs but frankly fooling a 3rd party installer into thinking I'm running Red Hat is not my cup of tea.
Also apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; works in many cases better than up2date -f -u -p;
I think\hope that Redhat will notice that I am not the only person doing this sort of thing and may have to lower their prices. Its hard to go to the PHB with the costs comparisions of the "Free" OS costing more than Windows.
BUT They still have and fund the Fedora Project. This is essentially Red Hat linux. It's just no longer commercially supported. Just like debian.
That the open source business model is flawed.
Why not just use apt? http://freshrpms.net/apt && synaptic? Works like a charm.. paying for updates is dmb.
Red Hat will have to continue releasing any GPL'ed code in the same way they always have. You may not get any proprietary software, but I can't think of anything that was, in base Red Hat.
I'm less concerned with the "no new Red Hat" than with "You've got two months to upgrade". Many vendors only support what RH supports, so vendors may no longer support their products on the free system, and that's a big headache for SA's.
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
n/t
Fedora is the replacement for the free Red Hat.
choose from amongst the 50-60 free Linux distributions that are left? And also choose whether to go to OpenBSD, FreeBSD or NetBSD? That's just too much pressure, man.
As a big fan and advocate of XD2, this doesn't sound like good news... Ximian made a nice face and updater for Red Hat 7, 8, and 9, but looks like SuSe's the wave of the future for the Ximain/Novell team.
Then again, it might be nice if Ximian Desktop 2.1 supported Debian...
They aren't worried that you don't pay them anymore. Even if there are a few people like you out there who pay them, they are losing more money than they make from the RedHat Linux product line. In short: they don't care about your money.
Daed si xunil!
I'm not sure why this was slashdotted. The deadlines for ending support are not new. RH will still be active in Fedora, won't it? And with yum, who needs up2date?
I guess a lot of people will be sad to say the least that RedHat is pulling support for RH8.0 already. Stopping support for 9.0 seems fast, but then again so was the release.
;)
As this (AFAIK) also means that RH will no longer maintain the updates/errata RPMs that kept my system up-to-date, I guess a lot of of people will start looking for alternatives. I guess I will be changing my system over to Gentoo
All things aside, changing strategies might be a necessity to keep business up, but stopping support on a distribution so soon is just ridiculous. Even Win98 still lasted years and years:)
as a user i would rather pay $170 for a RH Workstation license that gives me support and full access to RedHat Network (for 3 years), then pay $99/year for access to RHN up2date only.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Moderators please note that Matrix272 is a first post artist. He is manipulating the moderation system by posting something that seems insightful but really isn't and he is doing it quickly in an attempt to get first post.
Please do not reward this behavior.
Anyone with an elementary school understanding of arithmetic and a lick of common sense can tell you that Red Hat's business model was unsustainable.
A free product, free downloads, free support?
Enterprise linux support? Sure, until it's profitable enough that Big Blue decides to take it from 'em.
Big Blue is the only company around poised to profit from Linux. And we all tip our hats and give them our full support. Hip hip hooray.
Does noone see that the open source community is nothing more than a source of free labour to IBM?
They'll milk Red Hat for free code, and when the work is completed to their satisfaction, they will have the might to succeed where SCO fails - "owning" Linux.
Why do people think IBM is a "good" company? Their track record makes MSFT look like a care bear convention.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I think of RedHat's support services as a bit of a crutch. I find I get better "support" from the horde of Debian users, for free, with the requirement that I think out my questions, and try to give back answers when I can.
Won't hurt me, or any of the profitable "small frys" that I know. Will it hurt big business? Meh, who cares.
My concern though; will this do -anything- to RedHat's contributions to Linux proper? I mean, they've done a fair share, hella fair share in fact.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Open source software doesn't feed the family so what do all those out of work developers do? It seems to me that OSS is like a virus that eventually consumes its host, thus ending its own life.
This is a serious question from one who seeks to be educated.
Oh yeah, I already know that I am an idiot and most likely a facist, capitalist, bozo, insertyourlabelhere so save those type of comments for your high school classmates and please seek to address the question.
Congratulations!!!! You win the laziest slashdotter of the day award for not only failing to read the article but for failing to read the slashdot blurb entirely.
Uh... yeah... The part about Fedora wasn't there when I posted.
I can only guess that you were so desperate to get first meaningful post that you neglected to notice that RedHat is not asking you to switch companies but that they are only going to support the enterprise version from now on.
Hence the FREE part.
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Time to switch to Suse!
That's because Microsoft has a lot more money and market share to be able to support their desktop products. RedHat is small and has to aim for the enterprise in order to get profit.
The point of any company is to make money. If Red Hat is not making money from you, why should they care if you switch to another flavor of Linux from another vendor who also doesn't make money off of you?
Hmmm. This is interesting. Old timers use Slack or Debian. Those that want something more modern or without crazy licencing nonsense use Gentoo. But what to give to someone when people ask if they should try Linux?
I used to just hand out the 3 Redhat CDs. But now? 6 Debian floppies? 1 Gentoo Live CD?
Many people simply think that Redhat is Linux. I think Redhat are doing themselves out of large amounts of new users. And what users are using at home, can be found in the work place a while later. (Classic example is me. Mail, DNS, and FW all on Gentoo now. Nice, stable and fast).
Get your own free personal location tracker
New Coke.
Probably not their best move to date.
You can switch to Debian today and get the same distro you would have gotten if you had switched two years ago.
Well I'll need to find something new to switch to by April then.
Because based on licensing my two little servers will need to spend $349 each.
Gentoo is looking like the winner. Just not real keen on doing that right now. Is there a howtoo anywhere that would let me not format my big 120GB volume?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
So RedHat is an Enterprise OS company targetting what Sun/HP/MS/IBM are already been highly established in?
I'm just saying that it might not be a great high-growth area since there are already players in the market.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
This promises to be interesting. I like RedHat, but mainly because of inertia. I've been running it since 6.2 and haven't been sufficently motivated to change. As a result, when asked what distro to run for professional applications, I say "RedHat" due mainly to farmiliarity.
Microsoft has been rumored to almost encourage "piracy" of their office suite because it leads to adoption by paying customers. RedHat is obviously a stepping stone to RHEL. Without providing a "personal" version, RedHat will be able to devote much more energy to large dollar corporate customers, but the lack of grassroots support may offset the increase.
This is really a disappointment for me to hear. I'm surprised that they are ending support so soon, even for RH 9. We use various versions of RH on our servers at work, and while we can "support" these products on our own, this will mean that either we have to upgrade everything to their advanced server, or just go without ever being able to ever ask RH for support. It's a shame. Granted it's not THAT big of a deal for companies to just buy a copy of RH advanced server, but for little servers that's often overkill and an annoyance. (like for our 2 time servers on campus. They don't need Advanced Server since it would be just too much for the hardware that they run on.)
Ah well, it just makes me glad that I use Slackware at home and didn't get stuck with only using RH's GUI configuration tools, and RPM's to keep my system up to date. If I had never used anything besides Red Hat, I'd certainly be up a creek without a paddle!
-Through the server, over the router, off the firewall... Nothing but 'Net!
I'm going to guess my RedHat stock is in freefall right now : (
yahoo storyy &u=/nf/ 20031031/bs_nf/22602
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor
A Place for Debian in the Enterprise
Uh... yeah... The part about Fedora wasn't there when I posted.
Sure it wasn't. Maybe that is because you were so anxious to get first post.
Hence the FREE part.
Free as in beer? Redhat was never about Free as in beer. The only reason to ever use Redhat was to get support.
Please keep your hands inside the car. Do not feed the troll. Repeat. DO NOT FEED THE TROLL.
Whats to stop someone from passing around RHL Enterprize CDs? Surely the GPL allowes you to do that? Or is it so laced with proprietary stuff that stripping it out would be as hard as just creating a new distro?
IANARU btw.
It's going to be strange not giving Red Hat any more cash; getting a box full of distro CDs was a good deal back when I used a modem for internet access. But I'm willing to give Fedora a try when an x86-64 build arrives.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
'Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.'
And yet, loaded on the computer sitting beside me, I have a beta of what I would consider Red Hat 10 (or, at least 9.1). Are they seriously suggesting that those of us that rely on Red Hat's reputation as one of the drivingcompanies behind Linux switch to another company to continue getting a FREE >Operating System? Isn't that the point of Linux in the first place?
They do NOT say that they will not have follow on products just no a product in the "Red Hat Linux line", so they may be changing names to signify a new business model or some variant on that. Their business is based on Linux so I can't see them going away from that but changes in their business model (support contracts or 900 number or whatever) maybe required to grow the company.
just now ending support for NT 4 which has been out for 10 years.
Why pay for wasted boxes and Tier-1 techs?
Don't be a whiny fag.
Beta-test Severn (what you might call 9.1) NOW!
... the sooner we can all get back to making backdoor-filled proprietary systems and charging the masses an arm and a leg for them. Viva la Pomme!
Actually, right now we're on an RH 7.2 system and about to start migrating to a new 9.0 server (with the same hosting provider) ... and now there won't be any security updates after April? Ridiculous.
Could someone be kind enough to supply me with some good FreeBSD dedicated server hosts?
That is the question. Will they refund people who paid $60 or more for a 1 year subscription to up2date? Or did they sell their last one in April?
so they will discontinuse the support...
Buy Slack distros. I do.
If you don't like Slackware, there are many other distros out there ...
Seems like a lot of companies would migrate towards Mandrake. Its built off redhat and they don't charge you to keep your machine secure, which is one of the things I've always disliked about redhat.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
I see a lot of people posting "time to learn the debian install." Perhaps not (even thought its not hard folks) since anaconda has been ported you might soon see Debian install ISOs with a familiar face. I think Debian + Apt + Anaconda destroys redhat as a desktop distro, as the only problem I had with Debian usability wise was the install, keeping updated and secure is as easy as a cron job. Forget a good day in redmond, I think its a good day for Linux not to be tied by ignorant people to the Red Hat name. Then again, I can't wait for the FUD C|Net, Dvorak et. al spew out.
Are you secure enough in your masculinity to run 'man touch'?
My company has over a dozen Red Hat servers, about $900 a year in RHN seats. That's $900 a year Red Hat's getting just for providing us updates, no support.
We're migrating slowly to Debian since this latest Red Hat policy change was announced.
This article pretty much sums up what I am facing.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
That there was a standard. UnitedLinux was a good effort, especially for me. I need something that commercial vendors will test and certify against yet something i can build, customize and rollout on my own and deploy it to my needs.
Fedora seems alright, but the support/turn-a-round timelines are useless for corporate deployment. We usually need something that will last from 3-5 years before we see ROI off the cost and exposure of making the upgrade(s).
I think Suse is about the only player out there that still supports a desktop to server solution as well as certifies its software with many commercial packages.
I need a linux solution that is like my solaris solution but with all the bells/whistles/featrues of linux. I need to be able to run Jdeveloper, i need to be able to use Lotus notes and integrate with exchange. I need a current version of KDE, i need a current release of OpenOffice. I also need to be able to run Oracle RDBMS, Oracle Application Server, Websphere application server, IBM DB2 and other applications from a desktop to midrange environment.
If linux can't get this straight and if vendors can't build a common foundation it will NEVER succeed as a corporate desktop os. The cost is very prohibitive with RHEL, especially if you want to use AMD-64 and if your rolling out new visualization/CAD and processing workstations why would you want anything less?
So is UnitedLinux dead? Is the effort for common foundation screwed by SCO's sudden aboutface? Is Linux limited to Enterprise systems in both costs and maintenance now? What benefit is there in choosing RHEL over the abundant Windows, Solaris or OSX lines? Heck with OSX i know i get vendor support, i get commercial tools and the cost of OSX on a 64bit processor is the base price not some insane number. For the price of RHEL 64bit workstation or server i can have nearly a decade of OSX support at its current price ranges and upgrade costs.
Just doesn't make sense to me to loose a complete end to end solution. Sure standardizing on Workstation and Serve is nice, but who the heck made up those numbers??
If i'm going to pay that much i want a fast pdf system, i want integration with Notes & Exchange. I want an office suite to be available that is fast, easy to use and enterprise friendly (document management, workflows..). I also want to be able to buy workstations with this pre-loaded or deploy and manage on my own.
oh well.. i guess i can keep on wishing. Sad part is over the last 5-8 years that is all i have been doing.
What I worry most about is how this will impact corporate perception of "free" software. Even if RedHat decides to back down from this policy, the MicroSoft marketing drones will almost certainly use this as an example of: "Look how crazy those open source nuts are! You never can count of the product to be around long term." Obviously this would be the pot calling the kettle black given MS's record of forced upgrades, but a little hypocrisy seldom gets in the way of an MBA on a rant. :)
No, the point of Linux is to have an Open Source operating system. If all you care about is cost, you should pirate M$ software like the rest of the world.
If you want an Open Source operating system with guaranteed support RH Enterprise is still a good deal. Although the support and distribution limitations to RHE are not a traditional Linux model, it is still compliant with the GPL.
Where would we be if Wheel had hid her round rock in a cave instead of showing everyone how it rolls?
RedHat stock is on the rise. Up 1.60% thus far. Proving once again that investors don't like open source software and that closed source is where it's happening.
B. N. Kursunoglu, founder of the Center for Theoretical studies, found dead at 81. You may not have agreed with his conclusions in the "Report from Stone Mountain", but there is no denying his impact on theortical physics. Truly a scientifical maven, he will be missed.
"Looks like they realized that only their support contract-based version of the product was making them any money."
If you actually read the quarterly statement that the link leads to you will find that the Retail Subscription Revenue, at $3.121 million, is enough to cover the Total cost of all subscription revenue, at $2.310 million.
So my basic subscription to RHN at $60/year is a profitable business, just not as profitable as the expensive contracts at big corporations.
They are not losing money on supporting Red Hat Linux, they are just more interested in putting their resources into a more lucrative area of their business.
This is their prerogative, but it surely saddens me. I can't afford an Enterprise contract so I'll have to look at other options. Hopefully someone is looking at their quarterly statements and realizes that there are profits to be made in the non-Enterprise support market.
burnin
well lets see... paying $60/year for up2date service vs. paying zero for "apt-get update && apt-get -u upgrade" ... and now the RHL subscribers get dumped. I guess picking the noncommercial distro was a good move.
Please don't take this as a troll/flamebait, RedHat is a huge contributor upstream.
freebsd Just Plain Works(tm). the cvsup architecture is amazing. only having ONE DISTRO to worry about sure solves a lot of headaches.
the ports collection always works. the kernel always works.
I still like linux; I learned on it back in 94 or so. so I do have a history of being a linux-phile. but BSD has won me over for all but the most exotic hardware support (some stuff is still linux-only and not freebsd-friendly). but for most things, freebsd does what linux does and does not have kernel instability or filesystem problems like linux can (not does, but can).
no, this isn't a troll. I use free unix 99.99% of the time. I'm just saying that freebsd support won't ever go away since its totally unlinked to any specific company. that's a Good Thing(tm).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Uh, folks? you seem confused. Redhat has not announced that they are going out of business. Rather, redhat has announced new releases, a supported release called RH Enterprise, and a free release called fedora. Something for everybody, it's all good. You can't complain about being abandoned, even you cheapskates who run an old downloaded version of 6.2 or something. You have the source, and there are ways to get support, google for it.
And then there are excellent alternatives like SUSE...
I reckon other distributions would choose the same path if they had the option of pursuing a profitable model.
Remember, even RMS' first OSS foray was to make money (with a mail order business after he lost his job, as I remember reading).
What Redhat could be mindful of is whether they will lose a chunk of bedroom-based user/testers with funky hardware - didn't young Torvalds point out recently that desktop users are the new focus?
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Years ago our labs were all DECs and SGIs. I and my cohorts started using Red Hat at home back then. It wasn't nearly as savy as it is now. A couple years later, when it came time to upgrade the machines, it was Red Hat that got installed everywhere.
going opensource is not for every company.
Quite on the contrary, this move proves that Open Source is good enough to be sold for a premium. The price is no longer the sole issue. The openness is still there.
You can go ahead and create a disto based on the packages in RHEL, just remove all the RH copyrighted stuff. Obviously it won't be supported by Red Hat, but you can sell support for it yourself, and nothing illegal is happening. The different thing is whether ppl would rather pay red hat a bit more for support, because they have enough infrastructure to provide it.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I've tried out Test 3 of Fedora and I must say that it has some nice aspects. For desktop Red Hat users this is still a nice option. My biggest problem with Fedora right now is package management. As a Debian user I love apt and synaptic. Red Hat's supposed alternative "yum" is unfortunately quite broken. Updating or installing packages with new dependencies can cause yum to stall and it won't resolve these dependencies. After reading the news about the Progeny port of the Fedora installer to Debian, I wondered about what other steps could be taken to merge some of the good things about each of these distros. Like I already said, Debian's package management is ahead of that in Fedora, but the configuration tools provided by Red Hat for many system options don't have a similar alternative in Debian.
With desktop Red Hat on its way out and the free software Fedora on the way in, I think now is a good time for desktop Linux users to start looking at how they can improve the free software desktop Linux.
redhat has beena round for a long long time, sure they were everyone's favorite dist to talk shit about but only because they were the most popular and most proflific and represented the best chance at linux profitability, in fact this makes no sense whatsoever in light of hte fact not 3 weeks ago i was reading an article about hwo they had been turning a profit. But most damaging is that a lot of people pretty much thought RedHat was the only Linux contender with any chance against M$, and since they cameout against the SCO situation i'm wondering if any of those things were factors... anyway incoherent rambling, from a sleepless night in the new apartment so take it w/ a bowl of chronic and a shot of whiskey :p
Free as in speech, yes. You can do what you want with your linux system. You can modify it (provided you make those modifications publicly available), you can copy it for friends, install it on several computers, whatever.
Free as in beer has always been an added plus. Bottom line is people have to eat. Sure, a lot of linux stuff is done by sudents as personal projects or even school projects. However, if you want to push Linux into the Enterprise, and it seems that most people want it there, it has to be backed by a company (or several companies), and they need to make money.
This whole decision does suck, and I wonder if in the long run it will cost them money, but perhapse its necessary.
no comment
I'm surprised that nobody's suggested that this is a Redmond funded plot to harm Linux. I can just imagine the fun they're having working out how to turn this into major FUD. Between SCO and Red Hat, is the Linux business world trying to self-destruct?
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=RHAT
Hell, even Apple gives better support guarentees than that. ;-)
This isn't good.. I guess all the new linux beginners will be forced to use mandrake, which is good for mandrake, but even their not doing good =( This is sad news.
Finally it has been proved that Linux business is a total nonsense. Who would pay for something they could get for free? Soon you'll see an announcement that SuSE is dead. Mandrake will follow, too.
Don't forget to pay your $699 SCO license you teabagging linux cocksmokers!
- Open source farming
- Open source healthcare
Allright, you people are a bunch of clowns.. RedHat support? I've been using redhat for years and I have yet to use their "online update" feature. I compile my own rpms and run my own updates, but only when they are REALLY needed (New Features).. Linux isn't about the world of service packs, upgrades, and commercial support. If you can't figure something out, go talk to the guy who wrote the source.. And if he's not around, talk to thousands of people all over the world who know how to fix it.. Thats what its about.. RedHat is nothing more than a convinient distribution of FREE packages. If you feel that you can not survive without automatic updates and "customer" support, maybe you're using the wrong OS.. Go back to DLLs and EXEs and windows updates, or share out your hard drive on the net and give Microsoft admin rights..
$60*12 = $720/year
Enterprise, according to you, will cost:
2*379=$758/year.
If the extra $38 breaks your bank, go with Fedora or Debian. It should not be very hard to move your simple needs to either. You could totally screw yourself trying to get anything done with M$. You might just be better off taking the extra charge and enjoying better service.
If you move to Fedora, that's beter than the money you were paying. They were losing money on the services you were using. A happy move to Fedora would be good for Red Hat's reputation and it will keep you familiar with how to get things done the Red Hat way. Is there anything more to a software Brand than that?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Excuses, excuses. You want to win? Then you've got to do a better job than the competition. Stop making excuses for Red Hat.
/. When Red Hat drops support, all I see are excuses.
When MS announced it was killing off NT 4.0 support by the end of this year, all you heard was pissing and moaning on
They came, they made HUGE money off free software, they used the Open Source Movement to establish themselves and now that they can't make money off the free stuff (the stuff that they were built on) they call it quits?
Time to write to them and condemn them. Yes, I know they're a company and need profits but they need to remember that they owe it to us and future generations of developers to keep supporting Linux by providing simple distributions.
Red Hat is moving away from community releases and moving toward enterprise level releases not only for servers but workstations as well.
To view information about SUPPORTED workstation offerings goto:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/
From the website: (http://fedora.redhat.com)
The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products. It is not a supported product of Red Hat, Inc.
The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora Core about 2-3 times a year with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in the building of Fedora Core and will invite and encourage more outside participation than was possible in Red Hat Linux. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system that uses free software development practices and is more appealing to the open source community.
This is a very good point. Red Hat, Inc built its reputation and brand name with the hobby crowd. Now they are alienating it by doing this. I kinda understand the decision, but why be so drastic? End support for RH9 is April? End of line for RHL? Why not have support for RH9 until the end of 2004 and say that RHL is continued by Fedora, a community-developed distribution sponsored by RH? This is bad PR and bad management, in the "good" tradition of corporate blindness to long-term objectives.
I actually think the perceived loss here will be greater than the actual one. Not to troll - this isn't a 'Red Hat sucks' post - but in my experiences with the latest two Red Hat distros, there was really nothing that distinguished them greatly from Mandrake. Without a doubt, RH is the industry leader in desktop distros, but I don't necessarily think the community will lose too much in the way of diversity or choice. Then again, Mandrake is sticking ads in its desktop distros now too, aren't they? Maybe this is the beginning of the end of the free corporate desktop distribution?
Don't look at me. I use Gentoo.
... by getting LPI Level 2 Certified, rather than RHCE, I guess. This is really bad in terms of mindshare. Now, all those Windows Admins who are looking for an easy way out of their lot will pick up SuSE Personal, Debian, Gentoo (I hope I hope), KOPPIX or many other great distros. Or maybe FreeBSD will now have it's day?
Red Hat is acting as if they are the only game in town. I've built many servers with RedHat (stopped at RH 7.3 for servers, for reliability). Now I need to look elsewhere. I've got my home network on Gentoo, and boy, it's yummy.
If dropping support for old products and less lucrative products means a company is failing then I guess Microsoft, and just about every other company out there, is also failing.
I guess we still have support for the stone age, thanks to good ole mother nature.
burnin
This is the dumbest thing they have ever done. In fact, they should have done the exact opposite...put their focus on making base RedHat CDs as ubiquitous as AOL cds (well not *that* ubiquitous, but you get the idea).
Free RedHat cds at frys, bestbuy, target, circuit city, office depot....just the sales of support contracts from doing that would have made it worthwhile.
Instead they shoot themselves in the foot with fedora and will now be going toe-to-toe with IBM, Sun and Microsoft.
If any other company has the money and the guts to do it, they should embrace this idea and run with it. Maybe the mp3.com guy or IBM (they had a retail presence before) or even Sun or SGI might do it...hell, SCO should STFU and do this.
Linux has always been grassroots...the problem is the seed never spread far enough for the lawn to grow up healthy and green. Some company needs to spread the seed, spray it all over the country, in the form of free CDs with $1.99/minute support or yearly contracts...that is the way to make linux happen.
Why would it? All their large clients get support anyway.
Anyone know who's left that offers support for Linux users?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I'd played around a lot with the Fedora Core beta (Severn) over the weekend, and wanted to describe my experience a bit for those thinking of going that route. Purely anecdotal, your mileage my vary, and all that stuff.
I initially installed over an existing RH9 install, and also tried an install on a fresh partition. The install process was very similar and it upgraded my existing packages nicely, and did a good job of preserving configuration.
Fedora also has a couple channels on redhat.com for up2date, they work a lot like the one from RH9, but with newer versions of the software. Initially I was subscribed to the Rawhide channel, but after updating up2date itself, it changed to a Fedora Core channel that offered the same stuff. Four of the packages (the desktop backgrounds, indexhtml, and some http configuration package) did not have the right GPG signature, which causes up2date to prompt you (annoying during a very long download that should be able to complete unattended), and can also make up2date hang when it goes to install those packages.
On a positive note, Fedora can recognize my Broadcom ethernet on its own now, with RH9 I had to download and install a separate driver.
Red Hat Graphical Boot (rhgb) is pretty hit or miss, I had it working briefly but it broke again. Looked pretty good while it was working, but was hard to keep working. Also didn't appear to have much in the way of man pages.
The system would sometimes slow way down when booting as it got to probing modules and/or detecting new hardware. I got errors about it trying to install the floppy.o module (floppyless system), and sometimes lots of stuff scrolling by about other block-major devices not being found.
The Linuxant Driverloader program I need to use my WiFi card installs under the 2.4.22.2088 kernel, but after doing up2date and getting the latest (2.4.22.2115, iirc) it would not install. Even under 2088 it gave me problems I had not encountered when running it on a RH9 system that had been updated to the same kernel.
When doing an update install, it adds a new entry to your existing bootloader, as would be expected. When doing a fresh install, it seems to only let you use GRUB, which could be an annoyance to those who prefer LILO. Of course you could change it after the fact.
To sum it all up, Fedora Core is for the most part quite slick and I really liked that it has more current versions of the packages than RH9, which has to play it safe for the corporate world. However, I experienced enough frustrations to have doubts as to whether Fedora Core is really as ready as it needs to be to take over from Red Hat 9.
Why do you hate to say it? It's the truth. The truth shouldn't be so scary to you Linux heads.
;)
NT4.0 is still supported. FROM 1996. Now Red Hat's telling people who just bought 9 to get lost, or pay more money. Copying Apple, perhaps?
Since it *owns* Linux, maybe SCO will pick up support for the RH family...of course you'll need to send in your $$$ before SCO will "activate" you.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
runs on the fastest and most advanced hardware available today
Woot, its been ported to x86? This I have to see, link please?
Now if you want to continue supporting NT you are SOL but nothing prevents you from stepping in and offer commercial RH 8.0 support.
Help fight continental drift.
Big companies obviously have money to spend on technology - they've been spending gobs of it on MS and/or Unix.
There's no secret to where RedHat wants to be... "Enterprise". They're further separating their "free" product from their "real" product, and that will add legitimacy to their real (enterprise) product.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Maybe now the "BSD is dead" trolls will turn their attention to Red Hat?
Excuse the wishful thinking...
Helevius
Once you go black, you never go back.
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
I used mandrake for years but finally decided to give gentoo a try. I took me a couple of tries to install gentoo without a script (stage 3) but it was definitely worth it.
I learned so much about how the OS works. The partitioning, mounting and all the really basic stuff was all black box to me. I had only used mandrake's installer before. You will learn so much installing gentoo by hand that it's worth the effort.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
...for Mandrake and SuSE to take over.
I am a RHCE (7-2000) with 16 RH 9.0 servers, routers, firewalls and laptops in the Enterprise. As soon as our 4 figure up2date contract expires, I will rebuild each and every box with either Slack, Debian or SuSE. This behavior is corporate suicide. I would like to thank RH for significantly devaluing my certification. *sigh*
Actually you grazed on something I hadn't thought of ... this could be a serious nail in the coffin for Linux of any sort, for exactly the reason you described : perception. Sun, HP, IBM, Microsoft ... these are companies dedicated to the long term survival of whatever OS and platform they propose - and RedHat is dropping their Linux platform.
Yes I hacked out most of the facts and worked a lot on perception. To many, RedHat -is- Linux. No distinction between Linux9.0 and LinuxEE or whatever, Linux is RedHat and RedHat is Linux in the eyes of those one step behind the rest (like me, with regards to Linux.) This is more than just losing support from RH on the desktop version of Linux 9.0, this could be losing support from your CIO, he could see this as easy justification in going back to mandating (IBM/HP/Microsoft/Whatever.)
I would worry less about the particular version of RH and worry more about the viability of the Linux Movement as a whole based on this recent change in the wind.
Disclaimer : I have one RH 9.0 machine and am still fairly new to the scene (heavy MS user, but open minded and branching out to explore my options.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Or else, WTF are they thinking?! They cant cut support that soon.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
One consequence of the move to 'Fedora' seems to be that companies like Cheapbytes may (if I'm interpreting this correctly) be allowed to produce Fedora-branded CDs from the ISOs without having to jump through hoops to avoid calling them 'RedHat' .
Bye, bye Red Hat the distro - thanks for the memories. I guess your time had to come as a conventional, any one will want to use, let's me borrow the CDs from a friend, find it available at any hosting ISP distro.
P.S. I picked up a copy of Slackware back in '95 and used it until I was able to get our PHBs to look at Linux in '99, which was Red Hat. I am now using Gentoo at home, yet I am slowly moving my systems at work and on the net to Gentoo - thanks Gentoo!
(I just googled a bit and an ssl'd apache is included,
anything else?)
By saying they are no longer supporting standard rh standard does this translate to just no iso's or just alias fedora rh?
-bloo
Chill out. You can still use Redhat AND stay up to date using the same technology and methods that Debian users have enjoyed for years. Not only that, but it is free! Just install apt for rpm, synaptic (GUI frontend for apt), and make sure your sources.list is pointing towards freshrpms.net.
Apple Mac OS is proprietary but has NEVER once had a remote exploit according to bugtraqs extensive database. From 1995 to 2003, the classic mac OS (not the unix osx which has had over 40 exploits), has not had any exploitable holes and no mac web servers have ever been rooted or defeced. Even in 2003 1 in 400 web servers according to netcraftare mac classic os servers. Tahts why army.mil used them.
I think the biggest problem with Fedora Core is that it doesn't associate itself by name either to Red Hat or to Linux, the two biggest branding assets in the Linux world. D'oh!
You say "Linux" or "Red Hat" to the electronics store geeks and they finally know what you are talking about these days. You can tell your boss that you want to run "Red Hat Linux" and he'll consider it.
Now you have to go to the electronics store and answer the "What kind of computer do you have?" question with "I use Fedora Core." Will your boss consider letting you use "Fedora Core 1" even if you promise him that it's really "Red Hat Linux 10" in disguise?
Why not "Red Hat Fedora 10?"
Why not "Fedora Linux 10?"
Why instead the relatively obscure "Fedora Core 1?"
And it's a very awkward phrase... Think of the authors of "For Dummies" books who will how have to say "in Fedora Core, XYZ" over and over in their books instead of just "in Linux, XYZ" so as not to confuse the reader!
And will readers that set out to buy books about Linux even figure out that they now want the book about "Fedora Core?"
Similarly, most of the people that I know who have considered toying with Linux know only about Red Hat Linux. When they finally get a free afternoon and try to locate it, will they make the connection and figure out to download Fedora Core 1 over their broadband connection, or will newbies be downloading Red Hat Linux 9 for the next four years because it's the highest numbered Red Hat Linux they can find?
Seems like a dumb marketing move, as far as I'm concerned.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I was a paying customer of Red Hat Linux. Now I'll look for a new home.
I think this will slowly end the free linux craze. No matter what, Linux did not really take off as analyst said. Free is good, but no support is like paying for it. Rather have some money to pay and get some support too.
...if that's the analogy, then SuSE is selling Pepsi and about to see a big boost in popularity and sales.
Who do I know that uses Redhat?
;-) I installed Red Hat 4.1 before Mandrake existed (and before I knew that Debian existed), and never found any reason to switch since. Helping out at Linux installfests gave me some incentive not to switch: Mandrake 7.1 surprised us with some serious problems (of course, so did every x.0 version of Red Hat, but at least they were consistent about their numbering so you knew which versions to avoid), and the Debian installer was atrocious.
Some random strangers on Slashdot?
I may be switching to Debian depending on how Fedora turns out, though. I just got bitten by my second major RPM bug yesterday (you can see people with similar problems here and here), and I'm not happy about it. This time it's a bleeding-edge version of rpm that got me, but the last time it was the stock rpm that was distributed with Red Hat 8! (for which there were a few workable rawhide updates but no official fix) I'm starting to fear that Red Hat 8 (and to some extent 9) were the start of a transition from their prior "get all the bugs worked out in x.0, then release solid updates and a solid x.1" habits to a new "get all the bugs worked out in Fedora, then release a solid Enterprise Linux" policy. If that turns out to be the case, I guess I could keep Fedora on my home computer, but there's no way I'd recommend a bleeding-edge distribution to others. Right now I can recommend Red Hat to friends and family, then run apt-rpm myself to keep a bleeding-edge system that's extremely similar to their stable systems; if Fedora isn't solid enough then the only other pairing I know that would work that way is Debian unstable/testing and Debian stable.
To what extent did AOL have a hand in its demise or was that in it's(AOL) plans in the first place when it acquired RH?
Whats next, the death of Netscape(Another AOL Company)?
Could it be that the DOJ should let up on M$ and start watching AOL?
They cant be serious, I mean even microsoft is not this stupid. I dont mind them switching focus but damn at least give us a year! I just upgraded to Redhat 9.0 and I hear that its obsolete?!
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
It looks as if Red Hat is tipping its fedora to the Debian way. They will, I'm sure, continue to put quality free software out, but they are going to leave it to other people to distribute it. In fact, lots of great Red Hat tools have been finding their way into Debian already and it did not cost Red Hat a dime. Fedora will give you your free beer and keep you in the Red Hat family. Red Hat, it seems, is going to rely on you. Go make it happen.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Firstly, Bye Red Hat, they in My opinion were getting WAAYYYY to uppity for themselves anyway and will enevitablly be back for the masses soon enough once they figure out that a directed taret marketing ans distibution scheme is doomed to fail. Then tho, that allows for a MUCH broader expance and growth for the remaining upper level distributions (SuSE, Mandrake, *BSD, ETC) for the people to use and or support and by support I refer to NOT just coding but also $$$ in actually buying a set of CD's or paying for support if needed. In this also you will find the resulting ingoring of RHEL from the people in the "real world" uses of an OS being the ones to talk of good OS's NOT mentioning RHEL ever to anyone. Linux need not cry because of RH, rejoice in the rest of Linux becoming better and upholding the real linux life
Have no worries, once you get accustomed to SuSE, and its "yast" admin tool, you'll soon forget all about RedHat and Fedora.
This has been coming for some time. In about August I switched over three of my four Redhat machines to Gentoo. The only reason I haven't switched the fourth yet is because it's an old Pentium 90 serving as a firewall/NAT and it's still doing what I want it to do. (When I do move that machine over I'll probably just buy a machine to replace my mail server and have the mail server be the new firewall. I would rather spend time preparing a drop-in replacement for the firewall than wait while everything gets emerged/configured on the current machine.)
Two of the machines get nightly updates via portage. The third is a laptop so I update it every week or so whenever I happen to think about it.
RHEL might end up being a good product, but Gentoo does what I want, in a way I want it to. I'm in no hurry to switch again.
Someone you trust is one of us.
*shrugs* I'm using Fedora right now and it works great.
Oh well.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Okay, I had a nice example from my bash scripts on how I keep SuSE 8.2 updated automatically using rsync on the file server, NFS exports on same, and pointing my 8.2 machines to an nfs mount to pick up the updates from, but it just won't make it past the lameness filter.
:-)
/etc/cron.weekly, edit /etc/exports on the files server to export that tree, make SURE your local tree matches the remote tree so Yast Online Update doesn't get confused, and you should be good to go. It works for me.
Seriously though, SuSE 8.2, Yast Online update, and you can rsync the SuSE distributions from any of the mirrors listed via ftp.suse.com - just fine one that's rsync-friendly.
Rsync via an entry in
I never like Redhat Linux anyway. After using Slack for so long, I tried playing around with Redhat 7.3 thru 9. It just didn't feel right to me. Too much eye candy and wizards. I guess I am a real techy but I love my Slackware ;)
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Fedora 1.0 will be basically RedHat 10. The Fedora project is sponsored by RedHat and took over the codebase. I am currently using Fedora Test 3 (upgraded from RedHat 9).
;) and up2date). After going over to the Fedora web site, I don't think I would recommend it to anyone. It sounds like it is going to be beta level software rolled into a distro so RH can test for RHE. No thanks. I wish RH all of the luck, but unfortunately the clients I have can not afford to pay those prices, but require stability. IMHO, I don't think Fedora can provide that stability. I guess I'll be switching to Mandrake.
The only problem with using Fedora, is that it seems to be a way for RH to test out bleeding edge software. I've been using RH since release 4, and have deployed and recommended it to many small to medium sized businesses. It is a rock solid distro, with great support and easily updated (Gotta love RPMs
So the Red Hat 7.2 based boxes at work which we pay 'Enterprise' RHN accounts for will not be supported in 2 months time. Guess its time to ditch Red Hat then as there is no way work will pay for RHEL when we get m$ stuff so cheap.
:|
Thanks for the warning Red Hat!
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Great! now that we have a fair user base, just stop free support. Fantastic! I thought Free Software based companies knew better about his own users.
What's suppoused to happen with free ISO images for incomingt RH versions?
Sigs ?? Karma ?? Mods ??
What's in a sig?
Exactly! you are on point dawg! I can't believe no one else here can see this. Also its a fucking shock/surprise, Redhat didnt mention their plans to do this shit so I'm pissed.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
What about Windows 2000/NT? People rarely use them "at home", but they are the standard in offices. Essentially, people recommend the product best suited to the application, not the product they're most familiar with. The similarity between Linux flavors (home use and Red Hat Enterprise) should be enough to keep it going.
GL
So Fedora should be the desktop like? But where's mplayer? no wine?
sign(c14n(envelop(this)), x509)
...if I may say so, as I install the Oracle E-Business Suite on SUSE.
I now only choose RedHat when it is technically superior (which is quite rare). I no longer have any dedication to them for their adherence to the GPL.
The worst part of EOLing the RedHat line is that there isn't a real migration path from RedHat to RedHat Enterprise. Basically, the migration path is 1) back everything up, 2) install RedHat Enterprise, 3) restore user data such as home directories, databases, mail configuration, etc. 4) spend the next week getting the server to work as it did before you installed RedHat Enterprise.
If you're trying to migrate a critical installation that can't be down for long periods of time, I guess you're SOL.
Maybe beginner (for Linux support) commercial houses like Oracle demand RedHat now, but someday they'll fix their install scripts to be seriously lib and kernel aware rather than simply distro aware. That will leave RedHat perpetually chumming for more beginners in a shrinking market as the world recognizes that the true defacto standard is Linux with GNU tools, not RedHat.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
This is a nail in the coffin for linux? are you people out of your fucking minds?!!!
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
It's time you learned to use Debian instead. up2date is nice, yes, but apt-get kicks it's butt every day of the week and twice on sundays. Debian releases timely security updates for it's stable branch, and if you're subscribed to the security-announce mailing list, you'll even be notified whenever you need to update. When a new stable version is released migrating to the new release versions can be done with a single command. Syncing installed packages and configurations across hundreds or thousands of machines takes very little time relative to other operating systems.
In fact, I have a very hard time coming up with a reason not to use Debian.
I've been using redhat for years and I have yet to use their...
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."
RH just charged me $60 for another full year of RHN. Anybody know if they will be rebating part of that?
I'm happy to hear about the "Fedora Project" and all, but at the same time, corporate financial support is what advanced Linux to the doorsteps of businesses all over the world.
When a vendor selling a popular Linux distro publically announces that "It's just not worth our money to keep pouring money into development of our free version of our Linux product!", that's sending a strong, negative message. What are companies like IBM supposed to think, when they've believed enough in the indirect rewards of Linux to pour millions into it -- and they don't even make their own distros!
I don't know.... I understand RedHat's move from a "bean counter" perspective, but I still think it's short-sighted. Nobody ever suggested making a profitable business model selling Linux distros was going to be easy. For a long time, I wasn't sure it was even going to be possible. Companies like RedHat proved it can be done - but now they're "cutting corners" in the wrong area, trying to save money, and I think it may upset the balance they achieved that worked so well for them up till now.
Like many people already pointed out, you need the free product to keep momentum up, so a "critical mass" of users recommend buying the more expensive "Enterprise edition", when and where it can be installed by folks that will pay for it.
So I just dumped my shares in RedHat.
I have been running RedHat at home for years. I have had their stock for years.
They want to only use the RedHat name with the enterprise and I am not an enterprise.
I will go find a distribution that is interested in me.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
If you call RedHat their customer service recorded message is still trying to sell the old business model products like RHN and RH9 Professional. NICE! A few weeks ago they sent me a nasty past due notice and I renewed my RHN account till Dec of 2004. The past due notice was because they implmented a new billing system and were sending out email notices for the first time. Kind of funny that they went and collected as much RHN dollars as possible before they made this anouncement. Only had to wait 10 minutes to get through to cancel it! I don't think keeping my RHN account is worth it for an eval copy of WS. Now what do I do with my RHCE?
I bought their server special edition a while back and ended up with so many holes and broken daemons that I had to rebuild the thing before I could use it.
...just my 2 cents that is all.
In fact. that server ended up as a desktop machine for me and never did see the net other than from behind an OpenBSD firewall.
So I asked myself, why did I pay RedHat so much? Because of the hype?
Next on advise from many folks I bought Mandrake and did install it in a machine. It suffered the same redhat syndrom and I never dared putting it into a DMZ either.
In fact, I never got around to installing it into any machine that was in regular use. I could never figure out how to reinstall that older RedHat boxen without losing everything I had done... years of work. Or weeks of rebuilding.
So later I decided to upgrade and this time I went out and bought a new box and left the RedHat machine as it was and still is...
Then I put Debian Woody on it and I have never looked back!
As for the Mandrake machine? Well - it got an install of MaxOS (www.maxos.ca) which is derived from debian and knoppix with lots of great stuff added... and I gave it to my daughter who is somewhat computer illiterate but probably better than average.
She wanted winders too so I gave her a copy of NT and NT2000 and either 98 or 95 (I don'tknow - I don't use them) and a spare drive for her to play with and told her it is a free country and she is free to do whatever she wants.
If she wants M$ support, she can find it on her own or pay M$. IF she wants maxOS support or to try a different distro, then if I can't help her I know ppl who can.
So far, she is telling me she likes MaxOS and I have not heard that she has gone through a reinstall of anything else.
Meanwhile my son is musing about installing debian or macos because he's tired of w2K self distructing every few months. Since he has re-installed it about 5 times he has learned about how to install an OS into a computer. It would seem that M2K is good for something. (an educational toy perhaps?)
But I doubt he'll be interested in Red Hat.
RedHat had some serious issues with broken deamons and upgradability that IMHO were not properly addressed. So the center of the world moved to a new location. They may do ok for a while in enterprise level support. But I've looked at their pricing schemes and we are simply not interested.
There are many very good systems admins in this city that can provide a better level of support at a better price.
Perhaps Red Hat should have looked to work with the consulting community more.
Well, I find that Debian is a breath of fresh air and I'm sticking with it. A lot of this has to do with the idea that Debian is not RPM based.
Another part of it is that IMHO for a server you want a lean mean serving machine and OpenBSD fills this role just beautifully. For a desktop you want a different approach.
Perhaps Red Hat saw these two requirments and aimed for the middle ground.
If so, then really it was two boats... one being the server boat and the other being the desktop boat and Red Hat pisitioned themselves right in the middle... in the drink so to speach... and found themselves having trouble keeping their heads above water as a result.
Except some of the most technology-intensive Fortune 500 companies are adopting RedHat's Enterprise Linux offerings at a staggering pace.
e.g. the tens of thousands of RH Enterprise Linux AS servers that have been deployed on Wall Street in the last 18 months.
The major investment banks are in a sense key trendsetters for enterprise technology.
I not only understand this move, but I agree with it. It does not appear to me that they are dropping their free distro outright, their just moving it entirely into the open domain. They still support and have access to that developer community and even say the development of Fedora could find it's way into enterprise RedHat. I would imagine that finding support for Fedora should be no harder than finding support for Debian (or any other free distro).
So, instead of RedHat 10, you have Fedora 1.0....big deal, won't stop me from using it.
All this means is that they are focusing thier business on Enterprise level support. I, for one, welcome our new RedHat over{smack}...er....I, for one, hope it works out for them.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Organizations will always be extending the functionality of software into their areas of interest. When the last piece of proprietary software falls into the ocean of GPL/BSD open source, all money will be made in customization and maintenance.
"You want to win?"
/. When Red Hat drops support, all I see are excuses."
No.
"Then you've got to do a better job than the competition."
MS is no worthy competitor on the server market. RedHat is already doing better than MS on that market.
RTFA. They're going to stop supporting their DESKTOP line. MS is not a competitor on the desktop since RedHat is leaving that market.
"When MS announced it was killing off NT 4.0 support by the end of this year, all you heard was pissing and moaning on
Uhm no. Look better. There were tons of excuses on that WinNT story too. People were massively making excuses for Microsoft.
All you see here is excuses? You must be blind. There are tons of people flaming RedHat as we speak, and they even get modded to +5.
Back around the time of Redhat 5 was when I frist started using linux. I tried all the major distros. I liked Redhat the best and became an advocate of it. Enough so that I was able to convince the rest of IT to convert most most of our back office servers from windows/novell over to redhat linux. As a small company we didn't really need direct support from Redhat but the subscription for Up2date was worthwhile for our main production boxes. Redhat Enterprise still isn't the answer for us. I feel Suse may follow Redhat's lead someday. Mandrake is a wild card and may stay in the consumer market since it will have less competition. The answer for us may be Debain for the server but I'm a little worried about them because I've heard they are a bit slow when it comes to releasing security patches.
I think Yum may be the future for up2date-style functionality for free.
I find it interesting that people compare Red Hat to Microsoft and Sun. You all do realize that Red Hat has fewer than 600 direct employees world wide right? And that figure includes everyone from the receptionist in Raleigh to the sales force, to the CEO. So it's a matter of scale.
Red Hat, like most corporations, needs to allocate their resources as optimally as possible, but since it is such a small company, this distribution of resources is even more critical. If 6 employees at IBM say support OS2, no one would even notice, but at a company like Red Hat that's 1% of their corporation working on a product that they have end of lifed!
I know it's easy to point the finger and yell corporate sellout at the folks from Red Hat, but really, they work very hard on their distro, and have for years. I certainly don't begrudge them trying to make some revenue off some of the many, many, many businesses that have been building their products on top of Red Hat Linux. If you're hacked off because you use Red Hat Linux at home, switch off to Fedora Linux. The core of the OS is still maintained by the Red Hat development posse, plus there are currently several automatic update services that were free for Red Hat Linux, I would expect them to move over to offering Fedora Linux updates.
-Runz
The webservers at our organization are currently running various version of Redhat. This just the ammo that I need to be able to switch back to Windows. Linux was a fun exercise while it lasted, but Im really looking forward to getting back to a shorter dev cycle and easier administration.
However, I experienced enough frustrations to have doubts as to whether Fedora Core is really as ready as it needs to be to take over from Red Hat 9.
Think of Fedora Core 1 as if it were Red Hat 5.0 or 6.0, which each burned lots of people who installed them right away (rather than after the first few weeks of major updates came out). It's the equivalent of a Red Hat x.0 release, and I don't have any higher expectations.
The question is whether we'll ever see the equivalent of a Red Hat x.1 release, when instead of spending 6 months hunting down every subtle bug they can find in their current software, the distro developers will be upgrading everything to brand new versions and ditching the "ancient" stuff by the time it's 9 months old. Red Hat (again, assuming you waited before installing x.0 versions) always struck me as a happy medium between having the most brand-spanking new software versions for features and having time-tested old software versions for stability. Now I worry that Red Hat users are going to have to choose between an unstable Fedora version and an outdated Enterprise version. I used to feel bad for the Debian users who had to make a similar choice between "Debian unstable" and "Debian stable" versions of that distro; now IIRC Debian users have a more moderate choice available ("Debian testing"), and Red Hat users may be losing ours.
1. Redhat set it up. Why support a company that just screwed you? Fedor is bound to be different from the Redhat Enterprise distro enough so that you can not test products that require Redhat Enterprise. 2. History. I spent to much time learning Linux and RedHat. I started at this on RedHat Linux 4.0. I know have a RHCE. If I would have picked Debian back then my knowledge would still be useful in a totally free environment and at work. Why would I want to set my self up to be screwed again? 3. Redhat has deliberately screwed its users. Think back to the release of Redhat 9. Why did they move from 8 to 9. May speculated that it was a gcc version change and it was no big deal. Todays anouncement proves that they have been planning for a long time.
I have been saying for a while that RedHat's moves are annoying me, and I had been trying to find the best all around replacement *nix to work and play on. So far the best option has been OS X.
Big problem for me is I don't like the associated hardware costs, etc, etc.
It will probably never happen, but now is the best time I could see for Apple to release or prepare to release an x86 compatible OS X. People would go to it in droves. Especially as of late OS X is basically a good Unix distro with an awesome desktop. It appeals to both the technical and nontechnical crowd, and the only turn off from both is the pricing and lock-in factors on hardware.
Come on Apple, this is your chance to swoop in and make a bigger dent than ever before!
The operative word is Pink Tie Enterprise Linux 3.0.
Creating the AS2.1 install tree
Is it april fools? I mean, the largest distributer of linux by far! Going out?
Depending on how we look at it this can either be a devastating blow to OSS or a possible great stride. If RedHat releases all of its IP before it goes tits up then we will have a great contribution... other wise... 'tis a sad day indeed.
Tragek
Yeay, my first Slashdot post.
I would rather see Redhat reorganize its resources and stay a profitable, viable company then start loosing money and weaken by continuing what I assume is not a profitable venture for them. The enterprise is there bread and butter amd it is difficult to critzise them for focusing on that. As long as they are making a profit, they can afford to keep coders on staff to contribute to all the projects that they contribute to.
Are those contributions any less valuble if not released in a Red Hat Personal distro? I think not. The Red Hat funded Fedora Project will fill the space that the old distro.
As far as updates go, possibly urpmi could be included Fedora? ( excuse my ignorance if it is already there ) It keeps my Mandrake box nice and happily updated.
Your notion of "free upgrades" would cost this cat nearly $3000 for the initial switch alone (and don't even mention buying used equipment, not an acceptable option considering Apple's current business model)... not to mention that regularly posted updates piped down from Apple won't cover the majority of his server needs.
Look, I'm not anti-mac. Hell, my old G4/400 is my recording studio and my Lombard is my portable networking tool (YDL 2.3), but switching platforms is not an an acceptable course of action just because your distro of choice forces you to examine an OS move.
RedHat's new business model will not end up with me tossing my RH 7.2 based K6 webserver or my RH 9 based XP2500+ anymore than this cat is going to toss his two perfectly usable systems.
If you want to justify your Macintosh zealotry... do it where it's warranted.
You damned evangelists are the whole reason I don't announce that I own Macs.
Walks off shaking head in disgust
And you... you, you bloody birkenstock wearing GNU hippies!
*pointing and grumbling at the snickering anti-social duo in the corner*
Put down that Mountain Dew, drop those multi-sided dice and pay attention! I've got a few choice words for you as well!
----
#SickNotWeak
They're one of the few GPL-oriented companies to really hit success. This is what we should all wish for; that our efforts in the open-source world creates thriving businesses and jobs.
Excellent work. Almost makes me teary-eyed to see our baby grow up so big and strong!
HP and Sun and IBM (yes I know they use Linux but they have other products too) will scream and cry this too.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
The found an issue? Why has the word problem been replaced with "issue".
:)
Of course, if the problem is my fault I call it an issue
like pretty much all new linux users i started with Redhat Box Set then later switched to SuSE because their hardware support was much better. I tought myself on SuSE and have thus reccommended it's use on all our servers and firewalls at work. We buy our packages outright and we dont pay any extra for the update service. Though Redhat has become the benchmark I don't believe it is the best product out there.
No, I said "the fastest hardware available today". That means G5. You may have misinterpreted that as "the most overpriced, underperforming hardware available today" in which case x86 would have been right.
so that we can get Debian stable out of the stone age...
It sure would be nice if individual developers focused some more attention on Debian GNU/Linux. Perhaps with Red Hat ceasing development (them being what rpm was originally named for), individual independant volunteer developers will think more carefully about supporting forked distros, and going back to the roots of what "Linux" really is, the Linux kernel, and all the GNU applications combined to make a workable product.
No, I'm not a programmer, so don't tell me to go do it myself. I've contributed in the past in my own way, and will continue to do so in the future. But what I'm suggeting is that in supporting the major distros through rpms (and not rpms), it has spread volunteer developers thin. If you take a look at the Debian GNU/Linux project, and how they separate free/non-free apps, and how they organize and delegate development, they have the most comprehensive organization when it comes to survivability against commercial competition and proprietary apps/tools (Yast to name one, can't name one for Red Hat since I haven't used Red Hat in about two years and don't remember their proprietary stuff) creepage.
So, if some developers turned off by Red Hat's move were to refocus on Debian, it would be a win-win situation not just for the Debian project, but for GNU/Linux overall.
Even though this post wasn't meant as an incitement to riot, those with other favorite distros can now flame away...
I work for a large WebHosting Company. I'm not due to start work for a few more hours, but I can already imagine some of the things that must be happening.
We have thousands of servers, hundreds of them are RedHat Linux. Our Flagship Systems Management product runs on RedHat Linux and FreeBSD. Our model has been very effective and efficient so far, because RedHat Linux had known reliability and cost factors. With Cost about to skyrocket, and a limited migration opportunity timeframe, we're screwed. Many other organizations who chose RedHat Linux for similar reasons and deployed it in similar numbers are screwed as well.
IMHO this is a bad move for RedHat only because of the no advance notice. Had they said this 6 months ago, everyone would be in a better position to deal with it.
My company can not, and does not, just go around upgrading all the servers. We do them when the box fails, customer has problems, or is hacked. This is the only time when the customer feels that a change is necessary. No one has the time to migrate en masse.
RedHat does want our money, I can assure you. Though we haven't paid them much, many of our customers have. Plus, we help give them Name Recognition. Customers come to us for our excellence of service (we are actually that good), and if they choose Linux they get RedHat. They learn more about RedHat and coupled with our quality, they will probably continue on in life very happy with the idea of using RedHat Linux.
Now we have to start figuring out what to do.
Thanks RedHat. Your loyalty to your customers is crap.
Next time, how about just two weeks for the End of Life announcement.
Q: What is the errata policy for The Fedora Project?
A: Security updates, bugfix updates, and new feature updates will all be available, through Red Hat and third parties. Updates may be staged (first made available for public qualification, then later for general consumption) when appropriate. In drastic cases, we may remove a package from The Fedora Project if we judge that a necessary security update is too problematic/disruptive to the larger goals of the project. Availability of updates should not be misconstrued as support for anything other than continued development and innovation of the code base.
Red Hat will not be providing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for resolution times for updates for The Fedora Project. Security updates will take priority. For packages maintained by external parties, Red Hat may respond to security holes by deprecating packages if the external maintainers do not provide updates in a reasonable time. Users who want support, or maintenance according to an SLA, may purchase the appropriate Red Hat Enterprise Linux product for their use.
i looked around on their website, and there are no links for buying CDroms of Fedora-1, i know it is a few days early, but i am willing to send them a few dollars for the three Cdroms necesarry for installing a Fedora Linux Desktop...
Fedora needs to address this issue becuase it is worth a few bucks to me to buy professionally pressed CDroms than to spend many hours downloading three ISOs...
think about it Fedora if you sell a 3 CDrom set for 30 bucks, multiply that by 1 or 2 million, WOW thats a LOT of money!!!
Who ever modded this up is toast I just got to meta mod you down.
Trolling with mod points is really a bitch ya know?
Lets hear it for really free linux..
Guess its back to debian for us.. ( and FBSD for the server side )
I admit i didnt read the article, but from the news quote... its sad really..
But that is what happens when you 'trust' a company that is in it for the money. They have to think of their bottom line first.. or they dont survive...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm switching to another distro. It's not about support for me, but product releases & maintenance etc. I can do my onw support and use (& be a part of) the community etc. I've used red hat and developed software on it for employers for several years.
This has to be the craziest decision ever. I'll probably go SuSe now.
Damn, I just installed this on a friends computer and bought the "RH9 Linux for Dummies" book for him.
If Red Hat don't think this will impact their enterprise business negatively then they are certifiably insane.
Adios Red Hat.
RedHat had very little quality assurance on their normal Linux distribution, so you weren't getting as much stability as you think. RedHat also had less-than-modern community involvement (especially lately), and looking at Fedora's web site, it looks like they will have MUCH more community involvement than RedHat *ever* did, so my feeling is that Fedora will be FAR more stable than RedHat *ever* was.
1. "Everything" will never be written. To think that OSS will have written everything, and there's no commercially viable programs left is silly.
2. In-house developments and/or adaptations of OSS work requires programmers. In fact, most programmers today are busy doing in-house things.
3. There's always some things for which there is more money than programmer interest, which simply wouldn't be written unless those with money paid for it. Think uncool, boring, tedious, repetitive programming with hardly any value to the general public.
Besides, there's nothing fundamentally wrong or unique about the process destroying the market. Think e.g. a company that has specialized in automating manufacturing - replacing humans with robots. Once they're "done", they've obsoleted themselves, since their services won't be needed anymore.
Except that for them too, the job is never done. All the time new products go from prototype stage (typically with some or a lot of manual labor) into full-automated production, creating new jobs. Same with programming. This program or that has been "done", but there'll be other programs, other software.
Maybe you think the PC and Linux is like the "final" step. In my opinion it is only the beginning, as more and more embedded devices (everything from cell phones to dish washers to PVRs) are becoming "mini-computers", almost without exception commercial and proprietary (at some level, like OS X over BSD and Tivo over Linux). And all of those will need developers...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was being overly dramatic. It happens.
Win or lose, there are going to be a turning points in the history Linux that people (we) will refer to in describing the rise and fall (or rise and continue to rise.) This will be one of those points.
Sort of like when you ordered the push for Stalingrad during WWII. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but we look back and point at that as one of the turning points.
Disclaimer : Read my journal - the last thing I want is to lose support and patches for RH9. Maybe give me the benefit of a doubt and assume I meant 'nain in the coffin' in a good way.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
2. The fact that RedHat will not produce a RedHat-branded free Linux distro was also known for a while.
3. Finally, the fact that RedHat's free Linux distro will be developed jointly with the Fedora project was also announced here a few weeks ago.
So, I am not sure why is this even being posted on the Slashdot front page. This is non-news.
How much does a copy of Windows XP cost? And then compare that to free downloadable Redhat 9 ISOs. If you want support like what Microsoft gives for their server products then Redhat has their own Enterprise versions as well.
just because red hat linux is dead doesn't mean that linux is. Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, etc. still go on strong.
Long live Linux (LLL)
btw, I use debian.
What is totally missing here is the simple fact that all the customization will be done in low-cost areas, like India or Russia. It is hard to set up a large development there, but finding a few talented guys is no problem. Cost is order of magnitude smaller - feeding the family in the US might still be a problem, after all.
I disagree!! Redhat is not Linux, remember IBM is Linux. Suse works just fine, so does Lindows, if Redhat wants to be stupid their competitors gain market share. I say we let Redhat explain theirself before we sa y its the end.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Will Gillette announce discontinuance of razors, since they really only make money on the blades?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I think they're screwing up big time. What got Red Hat into the enterprise were the many evangelists who had used the distribution to learn on at home, and then recommended it to their employers. Now, the individual needs to spend a lot of money in order to become proficient in their (Red Hat) version of the OS.
Guess what. This works for a monopoly like Microsoft because the direction is from management to employee when the platform decision is made. Management forces the employee to learn the Microsft platform, or face losing his or her job.
When the tables are turned and the employee has to prove to management that Red Hat is a good idea, but has no experience with which to fall back on, any such proposal will seem weak and won't fly in the enterprise. The evangelist employee will eventually give up and go the path of least resistance: Microsoft. Red Hat will loose.
I can see Red Hat's point of view. In their business model, they compete with themselves. Why buy the OS if I can download it and buy support if and when I need it. What's missing from the model is a solid, value add that sets Red Hat aside in the OS distribution, and that's where they don't have a story. Unfortunately, Red Hat chose to try to pull back their open source community ties, which will cause them to loose their initial momentum. Very bad choice, indeed!
They think that volunteers are making money for them. Give a beta release away. So Microsoft does. The last months we hear a lot about how worse Sun and SCO is.Maybe Microsoft is the most polite company of all. For me Redhat is too expensive for a lot of not really good working stuff. And all other Linux companies are following RedHat, I bet. It's quit simple. This is a capitalized society and only their rules works. Maybe tomorrow things are going to change.
"The server line only is so successful because of the branding of the desktop line"
Sorry but your completely wrong on this and are totally ignoring the history of the company. People using Red Hat as a Server is EXACTLY what made the company. Red Hat rose up through the ranks by providing a stable easy to setup server since the mid 90's. When it comes to who pays the bills that keep Red Hat afloat, its the people who know Red Hat as a server that matter.
Only since Red Hat 8.0 has Red Hat been known for providing a decent desktop. Even then like I mentioned, servers not the desktops are what provided income for Red Hat. I don't know if your new to linux(no disrespect if you are), but long term Red Hat as a desktop never really mattered all that much.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I've just read the posts at +3 and it seems like everyone thinks this is a negative, bad thing -- it's not at all :-)
RedHat have found that a free software project cannot be developed in a close way -- it is too expensive amoung other things. So they have opened up development to the community.
If you just follow some of the mail on the fedora lists you will find that the opening up of the project has led to loads of cool stuff starting to happen, the fedora legacy project to support old versions, people offering to do i18n stuff, people working on a PPC version, support for apt and yum -- none of this would have happened without out the dev being opened up.
Also why is it called Fedora? -- well one reason is so that anyone can duplicate CDs and sell it! Before people doing cheap CDs had to remove the Redhat trademark stuff, now you don't need to :-)
Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS
i am removing Redhat from my computer and going with Bluehat instead...
"I guess I'm slow but it's just become clear to me that the Redhat I've used and evangelised since 4.1 is dead. I find this surprising. I am an IT manager at a large telco and have fought (and won) the battle to get Linux accepted into the datacentre. When the discussion came to flavour I chose RedHat, not because it is better but because I used and understood it.
If the same question comes up, and it will because other companies in the group favour Suse, I will not fight the corner. Linux is still important but not RedHat. They have walked away from the things that got them where they are today - not a good idea.
I run a business too on Linux and I have now gone off to look at Suse, Mandrake and Debian to move my services onto. I'd be interested in opinions on the best general purpose server variant to run apache, mysql, mail etc on out of those 3.
Bummer."
Since then I've spent a week or so looking at Suse and Debian. I've been very impressed with Suse, it just works out of the box and for a non techie like me it's easy. Debian is harder but it's installed and I'm persevering with APT because all those geeks think it's good.
I'm half way to the point where I figure I'll use Debian (bastilled) as a server platform for web/db/smb/mail and SUSE as my desktop.
To re-iterate, Redhat have (IMO) done a silly thing which (rightly or wrongly) has alienated the people who got Enterprise into the enterprise.
I understand they need to make money but there might have been a better way to manage this.
(NT)
I've wondered for some time what parts of RH Enterprise Linux are open source and what parts aren't, and whether or not it is possible to build an Enterprise look-alike from available components.
Now that RH Linux is being axed, my interest has escalated from casual to keen. Can somebody enlighten me?
When you say, 'Newbie', what kind of user do you mean? Grandma, or a sysadmin who has only used Microsoft?
I was the latter kind four years ago when I was turned on to Red Hat, but for my purposes it could have been Mandrake, SuSE, or now, Xandros (killer MS compatibility). In a way, we have more and better choices than Red Hat, it just depends on what you want to do with it.
That said, one of our main applications at the school is now running on a RH 9 distro. Will I bite for the Enterprise product? Yup. Still cheaper than Windows and bulletproof too.
As for Grandma, there's always Lindows. Don't laugh, it's a kick-ass little distro for the desktop.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I have a handfule of servers and found it very convienant to pay $60/year per machine to have a centralized place (rhn) to track updates & perform installations.
This wasn't profitable?!?
Fedora's rapid-update cycle ruins it for me, keeping machines on software/releases that are "patchable", without an upgrade, will simply take to much effort
It seems that most dedicated hosting providers currently offer a choice of RH9 or FreeBSD, with quite a few offering RH7 and a few offering other Linux distributions.
What will this mean for them? Although direct support isn't really their problem (once they give you root, anything you ask them about non-hardware costs money), I can't imagine their marketing people will feel warm and fuzzy offering "unsupported" distros.
Do you think they'll just fork over for RH Enterprise? Or maybe switch to something else? I think their profit margins are fairly thin to begin with.
Once again, I don't think many of those providers actually have service contracts with RedHat et al, but shared hosting providers may well have.
Anybody work in that industry and have any insights?
This Like That - fun with words!
So wait for 2 weeks after each release.
That's what I do with any distro (though I might forgo it for something as paranoid as Debian-stable).
For years open-source/Free Software Advocates have been telling us that the way to make money off of Open-Source software is by selling support. It's too bad that the Open-Source community has decided to treat Red Hat like a pariah for doing so, instead of embracing Red Hat as a company that finally built a working Open-Source business model, and gave up on the silly strategies of the dot-com era.
If you want a free and supported commercial Linux distro, do what the Europeans have done with SuSE- use anti-American/Anti-Capitalist/Anti-Microsoft sentiment to sway governments and businesses toward it. But don't get mad because a Linux business needs a business model appropriate to its locale and customers.
I switched from Slackware to RHL version 2.0 a long time ago, and while I've considered Fedora, this change has prompted me to think about switching distributions. I like what I've read about Debian's apt-get and I like using FreeBSD's ports system at work, plus I want to be a bit more current with certain packages so I'm planning to give Gentoo a try.
There is definitely a need, in the desktop os area, for a supported version such as RedHat 8, 9, etc was. Corporations are not going to typically chose RedHat Enterprise as their server side os and obtain a different support contract for machines that don't need to run enterprise server. This, in my opinion, will be a major downfall to Red Hat's decision.
Again, just one man's opinion, but an educated opinion based on real world first hand experience!
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
When RH 9 was released, the details of this were clear: they were going to EOL 7 and 8 in December and support for 9 would only last a year. All that happened more recently is that RH 10 morphed into Fedora. If you bought 9 expecting something else then you are a moron.
If you want 5 years of support then you can buy RH Enterprise, or you can switch to another distro.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Maybe indeed this could mean the end of Red Hat as a distro.
I think the case is little different to what progeny was. Fedora would be a community runned distro based on Red Hat, and Red Hat will be selling its on distro for enterprises, which in the future will be based on Fedora. Just like Progeny tried to sell an Enterprise Linux distro based on Debian. The main difference is that RedHat is going from being a commercial distro to a community based one, and that progeny started from a well known community based distro and tried to sell an commercial version of it.
The point is that Progeny had to give up triying to sell its own distro, even though Debian is by large the most succesful community based distro there is, and had to restort to selling support only.
Would the fedora project gain experience fast enough to become a sustainable community?, if it is like that would RedHat suffer the same fate than Progeny?
I think that whatever happens, it is a big gain for the community in general.
Ely Alvarado If you remember a nice signature imagine it here
The free desktop version is no longer being only developed by Red Hat. It is now a COMMUNITY project that anyone can get involved in. The first release is due out soon named Fedora Core 1. Fedora was a project that provided high quality third party RPM's to the Red Hat community. Red Hat has joined forces with Fedora and now this will be the community version. Infact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be based on Fedora Core.
The original Fedora project is here and the new Red Hat/Fedora project is here
I have been using Fedora Core 1 test 3 for a while now and it is really great. The up2date client can now get updates from apt and yum repositories and makes it even easier to get third party products into your Red Hat/Fedora desktop. The release of Fedora Core 1 should be out soon. Go to Fedora and get on one of their meailing lists, they are very active and it will give you a much better idea of what is REALLy going on.
The only real difference now is that if you want paid support, you will have to use one of the Red Hat Enterprise versions since Fedora Core will be community supported.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Suse's time has come.
Seriously, I like and use redhat & fedora - but after installing suse 9 I was blown away. I'll be seriously thinking about migrating to Suse for the most part.
i see 2
RedShyat.BeeYotch aka "Anonymous Coward" (yes it is I who is a free-loafer)
..thinks that this whole issue with RedHat discontinuing their free support for a free product that they themsleves have to pay for and more importantly strive to work towards making may be a good step to bring back the roots of the wonderful open source community. This can hopefully spur a wider embracement of all the distro's out there (which are really just _easy_ interfaces to the most important part.. the wonderful kernel!). The modularity of the kernel and the distribution of various systems to be made and compiled together into one little glorious environment we coined the distro is simply just that. A distro. One that's no longer available freely is okay, I hope that the talented folks over at the RH offices whom can sit all day and code 'n compile to our own benefit can hopefully turn some coin to better help their company become successful. Afterall my fellow ./'s, this is a capitalist economy, not a 1969 save the tree's and freely give out and accept my monopoly money as currency! ;-b If individuals do not want to pay for suppport and upgrades, then fine, learn how to support yourself! Indulge yourself in the very knowledge they use to better help you before you perform the stoning ;-) Or better yet, go free-loaf off of SCO so they can be driven out of business, such a nobel way to fight for the linux community! :-D
[[extends hand smiling]]
Anyone want a chocolate covered pretzel?
--RedShyat.BeeYotch
[eof]
"A soft felt hat with a fairly low crown creased lengthwise and a brim that can be turned up or down."
This according to dictionary.com
Comment: Yes I realise the username 'fuckfuck101' makes me sound intelligent, no you cannot buy it from me.
I'm running Redhat 7.2 and it works great. Has for about 2 years, thanks to Red Hat providing errate and updates.
In 2 years from now, you can be certain your current Fedora installation will not be working great. That is the important difference between Fedora and the legacy of (free) Red Hat Linux.
Are you going to upgrade Fedora in 4-6 months when the next release comes out? Or will it in 2-3 months after that when updates to the Fedora release you're running now are no longer provided? Or are you going to manually update programs or simply not update them as security advisories are made?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Why not?
From the perspective of the large customer:
They want to pay someone and have a contract for support. For the same reason "no one got fired buying IBM", No one got fired for buying a suport contract that they didn't fully use- only for not having a support contract for when they needed it.
While support contracts mean nothing to a 10 peson outfit with a linux hacker in their midst, larger corporations see a different story.
They want to cut costs, but they don't want to be left high and dry. This isn't for a working groups personal file server; this is for mission critical applications. They need to gaurantee minimum down times, and support contracts help managers sleep better at night.
Look at IBM... their new pSeries machines are crazy expensive- But you can run linux on them! Red Hat is gearing for the same market that IBM is- cost cutters and those switching from Solaris on the enterprise level.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Actually Oracle is going to start helping Redhat write the next version of Enterprise. The ties between Redhat and Oracle are strengthening, not weakening.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This has also been a fairly clear step in their evolution for a long long time. There isn't that much work in building a distro, especially if you start with Redhat's work. There are a number of Redhat based distros out there that are basically redhat with some different packages. Then there are SuSE and Mandrake which use RPM but are fairly different now. I guess it's a good time to start a business building distros or something.
I guess United SuSE and Mandrake will be the end user distros anymore. Debian and Gentoo seem to have nice little niches going on also. Unless of course Fedora becomes the Debian based on RPM.
I guess I understand why RedHat is doing what it's doing, but I think it may be shooting a little too high for much of the market. Linux is just starting to make inroads at my company, but only because of the zero cost right now. When we need to throw something up quickly or host a new project, linux is always the first pick now because it's quick, easy, and free. But if we had to pay $799/yr per linux server... well, I hate to say it, but MS makes more sense. We already have a lot of it, so we already pay for Subscription Services. We're mostly an MS shop anyway still.... so why are we fooling with this linux stuff, again?
And just to ward off the notion that we're complete freeloaders, the success of linux at the small server level has led us to consider RHAS for our oracle environment. We'll probably still consider it, but there's no way we're ever going to see RHEL WS corporate-wide at these prices ($299/yr per workstation?). For free workstations, you might be able to convince the folks in the offices with doors that a migration might be worth the pain. Trying to sell them the pain *and* higher prices... well, the best I could ever hope for would be a good laugh.
I almost thought that SCO won the lawsuit... *Phew*!
I guess I can stop screaming now.
Commercial companies like Red Hat have to make commercial decisions. They have to go where the $$'s are. They made the right business decision for Red Hat. Slackware makes the right decisions for users becuase that is who "owns" the distribution.
Slackware has been around for 10 years and will likely be around for another 10 years. It has an automatic update tool (swaret), an active project to have GNOME and its components running and auto-installed, all the packages you want, a site to track the latest packages (www.linuxpackages.net), etc. You'll even find a tool to convert most Red Hat rpm's to be installed on Slackware.
About a year back I was at a manadatory division meeting, and the first marketing doofus gets up and goes on and on about all the great press a particular product we produce has been getting. Citing all the articles written about it, the clever slogans, etc...
...."
Next speaker, another marketing doofus. What's his pitch about? "We're gonna be rebranding all our offerings under the new name
At least the audience had a few souls brave enough to ask why we were going to spend a bunch of money and effort to change a name which we had just spent a bunch of money and effort to get people to recognize.
We never did get a clear answer, just nervous laughter and more blather about cross-product market synergy...
"Geeks" certainly often don't know a whole lot about running a business, but I am pretty convinced that MBAs know even less...
Yup, yet people on Slashdot lose their minds when MS discontinues support on products after 5-7 years. I'm not comparing what RedHat to MS by any stretch, but I think the readers here will get my drift.
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
I called and they refunded mine earlier today.
I could foresee some of the possible impacts of this news
.People will eventually like to migrate to some other distro which is adapting quickly to the latest technologies. ..
1. Development Support to Fedora would be lesser than the Original Free Redhat Linux.This would inhibit the growth rate of this distro
2. New bies may think "why learn something that is almost extinct than something which promises growth".So they may resort to mandrake
3.Meanwhile Redhat enterprise would certainly scale up in the corporate market.Although i personlly feel their success is dependent on enthusiastic developers who contribute to free version.Now with that support declining, they may have compettitors climbing up in corporate market pretty soon
4.This lessens the confidence in a newbie to adopt linux.What if every other linux distro has similar plans of tantalising [attract , addict and trade]? I be better of Windows although they r dragons.
5.Its harder for us to convince the XP fans to migrate to Linux.Becuz Redhat was the popular distro to newbies.
Lets thank Redhat for their services so far and wish they reconsider their decision for mutual growth.
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
maybe now I can convert more of you guys to SuSE.
I'll bet that they'll only come out ahead in the short run.
It's not whether or not the the one particular product makes money. It's whether or not the entire suite of products makes them money. It's a a common practice to for stores to have an outrageously cheap product where they lose some mulla on the transaction if they can get you to buy other products while you're there that more than make up for the initial loss.
The only real question is can they come up with another product line that makes them more money overall. I don't think so... at least in the long run. They've got product loyalty & whopping big name recognition & an OK rep. But it's RedHat's loss-leader that "buys" them the name recognition & product loyalty & gets the "boots in the store" ready to buy the other more dear products.
Name recognition is going to dwindle as fewer people use the product as their first distro.
Product loyalty? As others have noted, people tend go with what they know. If your 1st distro was RedJunk then you're more likely to use that one later. No more 1st distro to be loyal to.
Their rep? Well it won't matter too much if they don't grow their customer base.
Maybe a restructuring of the product-line to loose less money could have been called for but losing the their metaphorical foot in the door is a stupid move.
Would be called a rose.
Telling me Fedora is RedHat is stupid.
If Fedora is RedHat,
its RedHat,
not Fedora.
All these posts are saying the same thing, "RedHat, this is stupid.". Mark Twain wrote; If one man calls you an ass, don't listen to him. If ten men call you an ass, buy yourself a saddle.
It was the free distro that made RedHat what it is today. And it was these people who are telling RedHat that this move is stupid who made RedHat what it is today. The question remaining to be answered is: Has RedHat outgrown the nest? I don't think so.
There's also some logic to losing a battle to win the war. I don't know if Chrysler is making any money on the Viper. But I know that with out the Viper Chrysler would be less of a company. It's the Viper, and about 5 other cars, that keep the customers thinking, "Buy Chrysler". Without the Viper they'd just be Oldsmobile. Oh, wait....
And for the record: I've paid my 60 bucks to RedHat, then switched to gentoo.
I've paid my $65 (or was it $60? I forget) for Red Hat Network (RHN) -- what do I get for my $$ after April 2004? Will they automatically stop my subscription? Will they keep charging my credit card every year but give me nothing? Is Fedora going to be part of RHN?
Many questions about all this... all I know is confusion is bad for Red Hat and bad for me (and my small business). Personally, I'm experimenting with Debian.
You got Fedora Core - which doesn't have the Red Hat Linux brand, which I assume is because they plan to load it up with so much beta software they don't want it associated with their other stable software. If that wasn't so why not simply stop supporting it and have Red Hat PE (personal edition) or Red Hat Home (a la WinXP home) as an unsupported free "product", then the "enterprise class" products with support?
I took a look at them. WS basic edition: 180$/year, NO support whatsoever. If you're getting this, it's for the brandname only. WS standard edition: 300$/year. I realize that they're going for the enterprise market and not my server in the corner, but 300$/year to support 1 PC?
Maybe Red Hat has enough mindshare and followers to live without anything between a beta testbed and 300$/year. But to me it seems that they're completely abandoning a major part of the market - the individual market that gave them the name as "the" linux distro. Running Red Hat Linux makes me feel that we had a mutual benefit - I got a good distro, they got brand recognition, userbase and bug reports for their enterprise products. What I've read about Fedora just makes me feel as a free beta tester.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Amen, brother! You are exactly right. As an RHCE who feels screwed by RedHat's latest move, I agree with your comment: "It sure would be nice if individual developers focused some more attention on Debian GNU/Linux. Perhaps with Red Hat ceasing development (them being what rpm was originally named for), individual independant volunteer developers will think more carefully about supporting forked distros, and going back to the roots of what "Linux" really is, the Linux kernel, and all the GNU applications combined to make a workable product."
I think you guys don't get it
I think this makes a lot of sence.
1. Technological advances made in Fedora will make it into Redhat Enterprise Linux.
2. RedHat developers will work on Fedora. (Maybe not as many as before)
3. Non-Red Hat Developers can now change RedHat for the better. If you don't like certain things in Fedora you can now change it.
I think RedHat is saying...
We want to concentrate our work on creating the most
- stable
- secure
Linux OS.
I think this is good. Finally there will be a Linux version that you can trust on an enterprise system. I'll bet IBM will jump into bed with this one.
Fedora may suck. But, it doesn't seem that different from the original RedHat.
Redhat just isn't going to spend effort to make it
Robust
Secure
Reliable
Stable
RedHat 6, 7, 8 weren't very stable or reliable in my opinion. And I'll bet the Fedora community could create some sort of update server as well.
I might still migrate away from RedHat. We will have to see what happens. Its all perception... This name change might hurt there image.
Not the best analogy. After New Coke came out, the pent-up demand for "Old Coke" reached new highs (I used to cross the border to get it when I was in college). When Old Coke was re-released as "Classic Coke", the two brands combined were selling much more than one brand ever did before. There was a lot of speculation in business schools as to whether this whole fiasco was a planned event.
I think this is why Red Hat started Fedora.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
yes,
that loss of vendor support is the biggest threat. RedHat linux had the advantage of being effectively the standard distro for add-on things, so binary apps -vmware, nvidia drivers and our sites ipsec stack to name the three I use- all come with official versions for the OS. I dont know if they will all support fedora themselves, or whether they will expect me to move to RH enterprise.
Same goes for hardware in general, 'red-hat linux' was the check box item that US hardware vendors aimed for, if they thought about linux at all. Still, maybe this will force them to think more broadly about what it means to support linux
That's great, drop the OS just as it's about to become functional!
That's the way it's working here. After months of preplanning for a client side Linux rollout and looking at many distros the decision was made to go with Redhat. (cue sounds of toilets flushing)
We will look at Fedora as part of the re-evaluation but it will be some time before an equal measure of confidence in that product can be established. Probably not possible in the time frame we have to work with.
Beyond that we are forced to retract our recommendation which casts doubt upon the validity of that recommendation by this IT department.
Rolling out Redhat on the desktops was an iffy proposition as it was. It will be next to impossible to resell management on an alternate Linux solution at this stage in the process.
I fully expect a call will be going out to Redmond for another round of Microsoft licensing as the result, rather than continue this (now) protracted doody dance.
Our opinion was that versions of Linux suitable for the corporate desktop (and desktops in general) would arrive in 2004. We still believe that to be true but it takes more than opinion to sell that to button down management types who desire the support of a solid company on the backend. I can't say that I blame them.
Redhat was the hands down winner in this regard and had been considered such for a long time. The wait was for the Linux desktop to catch up and mature. Redhat has just moved their corporate/business client to the realm of yet another hobbyist distro at (in my opinion) the worst possible time.
If nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM (or Microsoft), the same can hardly be said for Redhat.
It looks like Red Hat's greed has not only made them irrelevant (who's going to pay for "Enterprise Linux?"), but also is yet another nail in the Linux coffin.
The other distributions, especially Debian (which hasn't had a stable consolidated release since December 2002), simply suck.
That having been said, I'd like to welcome you gun-toting, bearded, anti-establishment basement thumpers to Mac OS X. Sure is pretty on this side of the fence, and Panther sucks much less!
Party on -- it was fun when it lasted.
Looks like you are all FUCKED now! It sucks to be you! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
--Mike--
Like many Redhat was my first linux, eight in fact (I'm still a newbie). Coming from the windows world I was amazed because of the compilers, httpd, ftpd office utilities and the rest. I'm grateful for the opportunity to use Redhat, Linux and open source without cost or guilt. Nine months later (I've never had a windows install last that long because of milleage). I have nothing to say but thanks, thanks and thank you again. Fedora, naw; I have LFS. Redhat Enterprise, yes because I feel I owe the company for the introduction, even if I never use it (which I will out of necessity anyways, thanks again). Redhat still contributes heavily to the kernel (test9 has alot of standards from Redhats' 8.0) and all users will still indirectly benifit from their participation with linux.
Thanks, it's been fun and is this why your stock had risen 30% a few weeks ago, I looked but missed the reason why.
So I guess I'm going to have to migrate to Debian or something instead ?
.sig), and it's all completely free. Of course, I wouldn't mind getting some money -- it would allow me to upgrade the build hardware, and release the binary updates more quickly -- but even $5 from everyone using FreeBSD Update would be an impressive amount.
Switch to FreeBSD, and you'll get a choice of the "always up to date but sometimes unstable" -CURRENT, the "mostly up to date and generally stable" -STABLE, or the "completely stable, security fixes only" -RELEASE branches. All of which allow you to rebuild the entire system whenever you like.
Binary security updates are available for the -RELEASE branches (see
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I, like many others I'm sure, started out with Redhat and learned a lot from it. I saw the writing on the wall though, when Redhat first announced it's "end of life" policy, and I began moving my servers to Debian. Now if I were a large company, then moving to RHEL would probably make sense. But we're just a small company that uses Linux for fileserving, mail, web, and firewall, and I'm geeky enough to run the same services on Linux boxes at home. For folks like me, "free as in beer" is just as important as "free as in speech". If there wasn't a free as in beer version of Linux available, then I probably would have never tried it, and I certainly wouldn't be using it as much as I am today, because I simply couldn't afford to.
I hope that Redhat has made the right decision here, but personally I think that if the Fedora project doesn't attract developers and become at least as viable to use as Debian, then it will hurt Redhat in the long run. I understand that offering Redhat for free download or in retail boxes didn't make money directly, but I think it should be looked at as advertising dollars well spent.
"And now, Frank N. Furter, your time has come. Say 'goodbye' to all of this, and 'hello'... to oblivion!"
>You want to win?
/.
>
>No.
I'm glad you're not working for Red Hat. They may actually want to win.
>Then you've got to do a better job than the competition.
>
>MS is no worthy competitor on the server market. RedHat is already doing better than MS on that market.
>RTFA. They're going to stop supporting their DESKTOP line.
>MS is not a competitor on the desktop since RedHat is leaving that market.
MS isn't a worthy competitor? I guess all those sales of NT 4.0 server, Windows 2000 server, and Windows 2003 server were imaginary. MS may or may not have beat RedHat, but they are certainly a competitor. The reason RedHat is leaving the desktop arena is because they realize they CAN'T do it better than Microsoft. They can't do a better job than the competition, so they're leaving. Exactly my point.
>When MS announced it was killing off NT 4.0 support by the end of this year, all you heard was pissing and moaning on
>When Red Hat drops support, all I see are excuses.
>
>Uhm no. Look better. There were tons of excuses on that WinNT story too. People were massively making excuses for Microsoft.
>
>All you see here is excuses? You must be blind. There are tons of people flaming RedHat as we speak, and they even get modded to +5.
And they deserve to get modded to +5, because they are right. Unlike you, who is an apologist for RH.
And get a logo! Slashdot can't keep putting stories about you under the Redhat icon any more. Time for an identity! :-)
And best of luck with the distro too.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
You may be reading too much in to the statements on the Fedora site. For instance, the fact that there's no support from the company might seem frightening, but that's been the case with Red Hat Linux for several years now. The Enterprise line is the only one with commercial support available.
The fact that Fedora will incorporate new technology before Enterprise does does not mean that Fedora will be beta-level software. It means that Enterprise is a much slower moving platform, for the benefit of application vendors like Oracle. Fedora will continue to go through all of the QA that Red Hat Linux ever was. (ntp 4.2 was removed from the distro, in favor of 4.1 because 4.2 wasn't working. Just like you'd expect).
You might choose to switch to Mandrake. That decision is up to you. I'd do so slowly, though, and with plenty of testing. I've never really heard great things about Mandrake's stability.
My plan for the time being is to continue using RHL 7.3 (as we have for some time), with support from FedoraLegacy. If that group needs manpower, I'll probably end up involving myself to make sure that we get the support for our servers that we need. We'll continue that for as long as it takes for Fedora Core to prove itself, or to fail to do so. I expect the former, but maintain plans in case of the latter.
That linux, *BSD, and anything non microsoft is dead, or dying. How can anyone be supported if everything is given away?
/.er love linux is because they can get something for nothing, and like I said, no company can without financial support.
True Red Hat, Mandrake and the others are selling versions of their linux Distro, but, all someone has to do is copy it enough times and since it's legal to do so, or download the free version, they're not getting the money to support themselves and microsoft has the money because they know how to operate a business, and they give money to the people who really need it, not the people that just want a free ride.
MS is not evil, they are just trying to survive, the only reason why
Go read a book or something. If you took the time to get on slashdot, you can surely read the essays that are on dozens of open source websites. You could even search postings about this in the little search box at the top of the page. You even ask a question addressing the concern of developers, for christsakes- serious question my ass!
I suppose we should give up on ethical share holding and make modest donations to debian.
Is red flag linux quoted on the Chinese stock exchange? Surely that is where there is volume up side in support and mind share.
I had thought of investing in red hat 6 months ago but never got around to it.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
With a new PC, about $120 (for XP Pro, around $100 for XP Home)
And then compare that to free downloadable Redhat 9 ISOs.
$60/year. So XP is cheaper if you're running for > 2 years.
If you want support like what Microsoft gives for their server products then Redhat has their own Enterprise versions as well.
Again, for $350/year, MS is $500 (again OEM pricing) plus CALs if you don't already have other MS servers. Still in the 2-3 year range.
Now, I'll grant you that you need to factor in the cost of administrative maintenance and the occasional(?) virus removal, but those numbers are "fuzzier", and it makes it more difficult for me to demonstrate that it is cheaper to run Linux than to run Microsoft.
I've played with Gentoo at home - it may be time to start looking at it from a server viewpoint.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
There is no way providing a simple up2date service at that costs them hardly any additional money per user that uses it at $60/yr will lose money. We aren't talking major support in the message responded to, only access to security and other updates that they have to maintain for their own internal base anyway. What is the big deal?
Where the hell have you been open source puts developers to work you fucking ignoramus. If you can program or simply configure an linux (or any other) installation properly there is no reason why you can't go out your from door and 'assemble' some products for local companies. How on earth could you miss such a simple thing that is so goddamn useful to so many people.
Jesszzz
... but still need a supported distribution.
The best thing in these situations is to engage a third party for support. For example, this company offers complete migration and support services, and they're located right in RedHat's backyard (Raleigh, NC) to boot.
Maybe some of them will switch to Gentoo Linux now. ;)
(Or maybe not.. I'm just being silly..heh)
That's funny. I got an e-mail from RedHat warning me that my subscription was expiring, and that I'd have to pay to continue using it.
If up2date is really free, that was one seriously misleading e-mail.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Your post is, to put it simply, uninformed propaganda. The only country in Europe that has significant support is Germany, not "the Europeans", and this should be obvious since SuSE is a German company. If all of Europe were on some anti-Capitalist witch-hunt, then perhaps you could explain what Mandrake has been doing in bankruptcy protection (chapter 11 equiv) for the last half a year, you fucking idiot?
And some city adapting Linux because they want to be able to control it, was probably also some anti-American mindfuck, in your star-spangled sunglasses, I suppose?
With baboons like you sprouting your Nazi-like propaganda we'll probably be fighting you Yanks in the trenches in the next 20 years.
Just accept that it is difficult, hence marketing. Bob Young(now gone from RH) said it best. It's all about branding. This will seriously hurt the brand and slow any new blood from jumping on board.
They could have done the same thing structurally and still called it Red Hat Linux. But now people will rightly say, "So why did they change the name?"
Expect to see an attempt at back-pedaling in two years, but it will be to late.
Who will be the next distro king? Who will get all that dirt cheap cross branding for the services their company offers...
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
Has anyone managed to install (build?) and run RHEL and keep it 'up2date' with a free tool like apt-get?
i.e. How do I run RHEL for free?
(I find RHEL preferable to a 'beta' like the Fedora Core)
We've been having a long argument about whether to continue with Debian in our 20+ box lab with the idea of expanding it to the rest of our 50+ box Linux env. I think I just won the argument. :-)
You see, we're an academic organization, but I suspect professional orgs are going to have the same issue: what to do about their home users? We can't afford to buy RHEL licenses for these folks, but it doesn't look like Fedora is going to be as nice as Deb?
Besides, RH just lost a lot of my trust. Why should I believe that they won't just EOL RHEL in favor of something even more expensive? One of my big concerns with RH has always been that their upgrade process is expensive and fault-prone. This hasn't reassured me on that score.
As someone who once ran a small lab full of RH7 boxes, I'm pretty happy to be on Deb. I think I'll stay there.
RedHat has never wanted to displace M$. If you have to argue between M$ and Linux at your place of work then you are amatures. Redhat has know that their business model works when they compete for the same business as Sun Solaris, HP UX, and IBM AIX. There they can make the argument that RedHat Linux is cheaper, more stable, and usually faster. While I think that Redhat completely screwed this up they are still a good product when compaired to the large commercial unix choices. You can not compare any Linux disto to M$. You do not deserve to run Linux if you think that its comparable to M$.
Or... should I just be looking at Gentoo or Debian?
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
G5s aren't the fastest. Get your head out of your ass, those benchmarks were rigged. AMDs 64-bit processor is faster and cheaper. Apple is a major league ripp-off artist hiding behind smoke and mirrors.
With this change, is Red Hat now like Apple, with a free/open community source base, and an "embraced and extended" closed source base "derived" from it? Apple has Darwin, which absorbs much developer interest, and OSX, which benefits from the free R&D in the extremely similar Darwin codebase. Does Red Hat's Fedora correspond to Darwin, with their Enterprise Linux corresponding to OSX?
--
make install -not war
...until Gentoo goes titties up...
Business wise- they are doing great- I am thinking of investing. But it came down to them not making money- and they gave it to Fedora that will continue with it. The bad part is that this is a huge step back for Linux as I believe driver support will start to shrink as the market looks more fragmented for the desktop market. On the other hand you could see a rise of debian- with the new installer and maybe we could see a slowdown of the RPM push
I just looked at the pricing for the Enterprise version of Red Hat software, and I don't think my boss will go for $379 a year for the standard version.
What's going to happen is that we'll probably let Linux go and find a Windows (yuck) solution to replace the only Linux server we have right now. From a cost perspective, the new Linux pricing scheme does not meet our needs, since we have a corporate M$ license, deploying one more Windows computer will cost us zero.
My question is, does anyone know a good Windows software that can dial out predefined numbers from a modem bank? Right now we are using a shell script based on uucp(cu). Or could PERL do the job?
Thanks
vzamora@hotmail.com
Failure is not an option -not me
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
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(reason: 550 5.1.1
(expanded from: )
I was in a shop this afternoon and almost bought the Redhat 9 boxed version today. The Linux section of the shop, here in Switzerland (large mall type place like BestBuy called MediaMarkt) has the Linux packages really nicely laid out. There was the complete SuSE line, personal and pro, and both the RedHat personal and pro versions. Nice packaging both of them with RedHat stealing the show with it's cool red and grey offerings.
In two months they won't be around anymore.
This is incredibly stupid reasoning from a marketing point of view, no matter how much it is costing RedHat. It removes the standard way that normal people get introduced to their distro and loses them huge amounts of mindshare. Normally I would think that it doesn't matter as SuSE and Mandrake can close the gap, and perhaps they will (and perhaps they would if they had the marketing budget) but chiefly I just think that it leaves a subliminal whole in a shelf that will probably get filled with Microsoft stuff.
Good thing I run OSX. At least they know what marketing is.
Though todays announcement shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's followed Red Hat over the last year (support discontinuance was announced long ago, Fedora was announced more recently), I think it was a very poor move.
Yes, I do understand producing their "Red Hat Linux" product was expensive, and hurt their bottom line. They should have never split their product in two to begin with. Maintaining both RHL and Enterprise Linux was too much of a burden on the company. It reeks of bad management, much like the Mozilla project does (They are trying to develop no less than three different browsers at the moment, possibly more depending on how you count--and Netscape just cut them lose, so they're severely understaffed... you'd think they'd make consolidation efforts--but this is another tirade).
What they should have done is modularize their base product, and sell add-ons. They retain all of their users, all of their mind share, only have to develop one product, AND it can act as a stepping stone into your Enterprise-level services. Hell! They even had the infrastructure to do a single core product all laid out with Red Hat Network. Sell an Enterprise Web Server channel add-on to Red Hat Linux 10 for Enterprise-level prices, and so on. It would have been beautiful. Really.
It would have also provided their Enterprise customers with ten-times the amount of testing of the core OS. This is not to be underestimated. Much as Linus renames a kernel from e.g. 2.5.79 to 2.6.0-test1 when he wants (free!) wider testing, Red Hat now has a user base one-tenth the size to "test" their releases on. And problems that aren't caught in relase QA (many just can't be) will now HAVE to affect (high-)paying customers. There's no free users to take 90% of the falls.
Red Hat produced the de facto Linux distribution in the United States AND they were in the black. There was nothing to stop them. They provided a free, high quality alternative OS. People were switching to Linux, and switching to Red Hat. It was working. But apparently not fast enough for them.
Windows users have no highly visible, high quality alternative now. (No, it's NOT necessary to chime in with your favorite distribution.) What's good for Linux was good for Red Hat, and this is unquestionably bad for Linux, medium-term, at least.
Fedora does NO ONE any good. It's pseudo-managed by Red Hat, but with no guarantees, no support, no Red Hat Network, no Enterprise add-ons, and regular Joe-Schmoe developers fucking it up (cf. Debian). And the mix of open development and corporate bureaucracy, neither with any vision, is sure to pull and tug at it in no general direction, making it nothing more than a poor Debian clone. I wonder how long until Red Hat cut's it lose completely.
It's a sad day for Red Hat. Up until they split their product line last year, I was considering investing in the company. They had a real handle on the market. Now, they have nothing to drive themselves into becoming a big player. They'll remain a small service-oriented company. If they remain at all. (They kind of remind me of BSDi now. Probably not an association they would like.)
And it's a sad day for Linux. But I have faith the (huge) void will be filled. Will Debian step up? Someone new? It should be interesting, at least.
[Wow. That turned out to be longer than I'd expected. If I wasn't hungover I'd actually invest a little more time and proofread it. Hope it's been an interesting read, if anyone made it this far. Hey, e-mail me if you did! Tell me if you agree, or if I'm crazy, or both. Or just say hi! I'm bored. No one sends letters these days. The Internet's become so impersonal. But that's a whole nother tirade.]
Was changing the name of the free version of RedHat to Fedora really neccessary?
Personally, I think they should have left the name alone and just allowed outside programmers to work on it.
Even from an enterprise point of view, the more people an executive sees using RedHat, the more comfortable s/he'll be to use it in their shop.
This will be the death of RedHat.
Just like everyone else, RedHat is selling out. First, it was Napster selling out
They use people to get their name out and develop a community of loyal users, and then strip their name away from the community inorder to make a buck!
I'm switching to {fill in another flavor of Linux}!!!
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Here are a list of differences to clear things up.
Alot of times companies look at one thing without factoring in related issues. Okay did they take into account the $39 or $399 there etc? We don't know. Will the net effect of thousands of open source folks and small companies moving to Debian or some other distro affect them in ways they can't measure on accounting balance sheet?? I believe it probably will. After all those folks downloading the free version and sticking it on thier boxes amounted to free advertising to a certain extent. That is now gone.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Only if you want to subscribe to Redhat Network which I have yet to do. To receive upgrades or install new apps you can use apt4rpm or yum and the software repositories (for both Fedora and Redhat 9, 8, etc) at fedora or freshmeat. You aren't really forced to spend the $60/year and when you factor that in the price drops back down to $0.
Ok, If I wanted to download and install a Linux distro that is relatively modern (Samba 3.0 and such) and I could get pay per incident support, what would you recommend? Because that is what I wanted out of RedHat. I install ISOs of the current version and give them a credit card number should I need help.
OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and SUSE now.
It's really more a question of morals than ideology. Closed source is a form of deception and is suseptable to abuse that creates very real practical problems. It starts with the NDA between the developer and the company, but it ends with the company selling you stuff you don't need, did not ask for or already owned. Free software is the solution to these kinds of problems. If you are willing to put up with those kinds of problems when free alternatives are available, oh well.
Now, if you are have no problem with "closes" source, you must not have any problems paying for software. If this is true, why would you have a problem paying someone to collect free software for you? Checking licenses, keeping binaries up to the latest available and serving it out is a usefull service. As free software is usually superior to it's non free alternatives, the end result is better software for you. Why not pay for it? I bill for my time, how about you?
No, free software does indeed have an owner. That owner's copyright is what stops people from coopting it into non-free software.
I'd rather my software be "owned" by an author that likes the GPL than some nasty salesman like Steve Balmer. How about you?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My manager emailed me in a panic today over an email that RHN sent out to subscribers talking about this very issue. Fedora was never mentioned. This seems like a scare tactic to bully people into buying RHEL.
But I figured out how I'm going to deal with it. I'm taking the source RPM's for RHEL 3 and building my own distro for internal company use. If it works well, I expect that I'll be permitted to release my work to the public and have a broader pool of collaborators to work with. We'll use yum instead of up2date/rhn for patching systems. So you'll basically be able to get RHEL (without the name) for free and optimized for i686 and athlon processors.
Mandrake is another great alternative. If your shop depends heavily on kickstart & rpm's, Mandrake is close enough to Red Hat to make the switch pretty easy.
stable has a dedicated security team
:)
unstable gets upstream releases fast
testing gets neither
nuff said
That's a +5, Defintion of Loss Leader. Apple understands this; that's why they've been helping schools get Macs for so long. Teach them how to use one for free, and they'll still want to use it when it costs money. The free Linux was the loss leader for the pay support line. Maybe now Redhat has a strong enough brand that they don't need the loss leader any more, but I strongly suspect they will be hurt by this move in the long run.
Anyway, all I have to add is "hooray! maybe our product will only have to support Debian someday soon."
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
A lot of people are complaining about the end of the Red Hat Linux product line. I say give Fedora a chance. If it turns out to be a disaster, complain then. Until then, stop whining.
Redhat was only viable for us because it was what you would use on the desktop. It was pretty much common denominator and we just recommended everebody just to choose Redhat to make some kind of support possible. We could support and encourage this grassroot migration. I am sure it was similar for a lot of other enterprises.
That will cause us to abandon the move of using it as a desktop, which has just barely started. Another 2-3 years and we might have had some real Linux desktop presense. Not going to happen.
And if you look at the history you'll see, that once you stop competing for the desktop, you are dead. Good-bye Linux! So much noise from wacky analysts...
Do I even need to say anything? Gentoo.
...is not open-source. Neither is the installer. Neither is a LOT of stuff. That's most everybody's problem.
A recent example of this was Sears. They recently sold off their Novus/Discover unit, which was the only profitable part of the company, to focus on their sagging retail division.
The gamble worked: Their retail division went from crap to profit in one quarter. By focusing their efforts on one thing and doing it well, they were able to create value.
I think there is money in desktop linux but I have NOT put my job on the line on that bet, so I support RedHat to make their own decision.
Still, it's a matter of critical mass. If Desktop Linux takes a chunk of the market, let's say 10%, it will in fact be profitable to sell update to those users... as the grandparent points out, it's a must have service.
Redhat is just placing their bets. But remember what made Microsoft rich was that bulk. Redhat seems to have come to the conclusion that that is not where the money is ever going to be in open source.
They know better than me. But that doesn't stop me from thinking they are wrong.
-pyrrho
Dang. Who moved my cheese?
This is still supported by Red Hat. Embrace the change and quit acting like Hem & Haw.
Phil
Thats really all I'm worried about. Will Redhat continue to contribute as it has done in the past? Redhat employs key kernel developers and have been responsible for many major contributions. NPTL and the 0(1) scheduler are amoungst them.
it's all a gamble. They were making money off of him.
:) Someone is going to make a bundle charging for a linux update service, some day.
They just needed more subscriptions to make money over all on this practice. They've decided that's not going to happen. The market is not big enough.
It's business but it doesn't mean that RH's bet is correct.
We can all guess if it is or not. I think not. But I also think RH is a very savvy company that might know what's going on in their business better than me...
-pyrrho
If they modify version x.y.z, and distributes x.y.z-10.rpm, then x.y.z-10.srpm also has to be distributed.
I can't help but wonder if RH's decision is another example of the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80:20 Rule, gone feral. As everyone probably already knows, this states that a minority of input produces a majority of results -- as applied to business, it means that 80% of your profits usually come from 20% of your customers.
Sometimes businesses (or, rather, the consultants they hire) get so caught up in this idea that they don't think through its consequences. All they see is the potential to cut that slab of un- or less-profitable business.
So they do... and when the dust settles, they discover the Pareto Principle still holds. Eighty percent of their profits are still coming from 20% of their customers -- only now that 80% is less than it used to be.
The lesson here is not that it's always wrong to cut unprofitable products or markets, but that businesses need to realize it's often impossible to neatly excise the part of their business they don't want from the part they do.
I should buy some cement.
Or you can just use Windows and not have to worry about the company going out of business, EOLing things 1 year old (Red Hat, Apple), and have a choice of applications to run.
The reason Microsoft is succesfull, because everyone can install it at home (maybe illegal). So Linux. Everyone can learn at home how to administer Linux. Unix is expensive, not suitable for X86 and haven't nice applications to play with If the redhat E.S. is different then the Fedora project, I think a lot of systemadministrators are not recommending Redhat anymore. And what to do with all the webservers on the whole world. You can build you busisness with a company like that. They are digging their own grave. I read a lot of answers to switch to Suse. But I'm thinking it will be a very hard job to persuate your manager not to switch to Microsoft
My local supermarket sold milk, eggs and bread below their cost. Suppose people could just go there for those items and go across the street to buy everything else.
But they didn't and eventually the other supermarket went out of business.
Red Hat had the best advertising in the world and they didn't even realize it. How many corporations did they get into because someone was running RH at home?
Someday this will be a case study at Harvard Busines School titled, "how to bite the hand that feeds you."
Man Holmes
the amount of knowledge required to install debian compared to RH is significant. You have to know a hell of a lot more about your hardware and the installation tools for debian are non optimal for the market RH *aimed at*.
Your basic RH install allowed you to
compared to debian install which required
Once installed I get-apt is fine but the install is a big hurdle for the RH.
I guess the real test betweem the 2 distros is longevity. While my RH 6.2 boxs are being upgraded to another os1 and/or os2, debian is still there and will be for the long haul. But it is not the alternative choice to RH for the market it attracts - corporates burned out on MS.
The Fedora Project is one of the sources for new technologies and enhancements that may be incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the future
Is technology flowing back from the enterprise version to the fedora version? Looks like the community develops and RH is the reseller. sounds fair as you get support for the code if you pay.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
expecially important if one thinks that linux is going to take over any portion of the desktop, like say a steady 10-20% of the install base in a sustained way.
At that point it will not only get people to play with RedHat, but the update services will in fact be quite profitable. People HAVE to have such a service.
But it may be a few years until (1) the users are there and (2) they get hit by some linux exploit which makes it clear they need to pay a few bucks a year for updates.
So, maybe it's a good decision after all for RedHat... but it seems to lock them out of a big future. Microsoft has already proved where the real money is, and it's not in a server side company.
As you point out as well, this can only mean that people will play with other distros and not feel like buying RedHat Enterprise when they "grow up".
Now: the funny part is that RedHat looks like they are going to continue free RedHat via Fedora, and I BET the free update will be as good as currently. It's a branding issue. They want their brand to mean "server room enterprise stuff". Again, I think that's a mistake. Call it Open Redhat, or RedHat Free, or Trial or or or, and let it still be Redhat.
OTOH: I'm not worried because that's only a business issue. I suppose when the time comes I'll try Fedora before moving to a different distro all together.
-pyrrho
Sick of gentoo zealots throwing plugs in completely unrelated topics? Me too!
:)
I guess I just need a Corporate Linux site. I'm sick of hearing how great these distros are that only run handwritten apps. Ever try to run Oracle or DB2 on Debian for SPARC? Didn't think so... give me people running commercial apps in a corporate setting with real PHBs who don't give a shit about TCO.. big enterprises run Linux because it runs Domino, DB2, Websphere, BEA and Oracle on numerous platforms and doesn't barf. I need peers who understand that businesses do indeed spend $50k on software, and could care less about windows vs linux until their people can't do their jobs for one reason or another. I guess I thought this place would grow with me, but it really is staying the same as time goes by.. kinda like being too old for MTV
Intelligent Life on Earth
This is what I would have said if he hadn't got there first.
Microsoft started on the desktop, and now the major reason MS servers are so popular is the branding. We need a good brand name in Linux that is both on the desktop and on the server. Redhat filled that position until now. Now who will it be? SUSE?
Redhat will rue this one day, because the desktop can be a powerful advertisement for the server, and Linux growth will not be as fast as it might be.
no big sig
Mind you it was probably 5.1 that put me off. It was a dog.
Ever since then I've been using SuSE. Not that SuSE's distros are perfect and absent all inconsistency, but they do pretty well considering the phenomenal amount of software that you get in the box, ready-to-run. It's always been a *much* better value proposition than Red Hat.
Right you are. But Fedora is spelled differently from RedHat. If you like the linkage described, why do you take the Brand off the free version. You can subbrand it. It can be RedHat Free. Or RedHat Fedora. They are moving their brand identity around because of the impact of doing so.
Don't be suprised there is an impact. People using "Fedora" (espc. new users) will not think "RedHat" automatically.
-pyrrho
ah, you make a good point about mozilla, I've been too lazy to upgrade it and up2date keeps the old one.
Ok, I won't panic or do anything hasty like install Gentoo.
-pyrrho
SUSE may now step into the Lead.
This is a fabulos oppertunity for them.
but one thing.
I bet that there is back porting in Fedora and if not some other distro will pop up.
The reason is merely that this plays into open sources strength and reliable side. We NEED that. We will do that and share it in the distro of our choice. So... the forces are there to accomplish it.
It would be nice to pay someone, however, if only to double check that everything is backported, including lesser used packages.
Why do this? My company is ramping up linux and of course are buying the desktop. It's a critical mass thing. Redhat must think the critical mass for home, desktop, and workstation use is too far off... but where I sit is seems to be hitting big organizations right about now.
-pyrrho
Wouldn't it be possible to just grab updates from somewhere else?
Just like in Debian's apt-get. In the sources.list file, it contains a list of places to check for updates.
Is this possible with Redhat's up2date? Is there anywhere we can get an alternative (even if it is paid, like Redhat's $60/yr)?
Is this an opportunity for some company to offer these updates to all the customers left stranded by Redhat with nowhere to upgrade to?
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
Too many comments are just hip shots. Uninformed. Noisy. Boring. Please go see both RH and Fedora before posting.
That's typical slashdot bullshit.
:-)
What really happens is this:
Red Hat Inc. will cease to use the "Red Hat" label on its free distribution (previously known as "Red Hat Linux"), and continue using it exclusively on its paid-for distribution (a.k.a. RHEL - "Red Hat Enterprise Linux"). "Red Hat Linux" will become "Fedora Linux", and RHEL will continue to be the paid-for distribution.
Neither of these distributions will change in its inner core and/or "philosophy", with one exception: Red Hat will loose its grip a little
bit on Fedora (previously known as "Red Hat Linux"), which will become more open. Think of it as a combination between the old Red Hat Linux, and a non-corporate free Unix distribution such as Debian or FreeBSD.
Otherwise, the core of the development effort on Fedora will continue to be provided by Red Hat - hence the term "Fedora Core" used for the releases.
Essentially, Red Hat expects to continue as before with the development of the distribution, it's just that they opened the doors for contributions from outside related to packages of a secondary importance.
In fact, future versions of the paid-for RHEL will actually be older branches of Fedora Linux, plus proprietary additions by Red Hat Inc.
The older RH Linux versions (6.x, 7.x, 8) will become unsupported by Red Hat on Dec 31 2003, while RHL 9 will continue to be supported until Apr 30 2004. "Unsupported" meaning that Red Hat will not provide updates anymore. That's normal, and in fact it was amazing they continued to support 6.x for so long.
Fedora Linux will get a mixed support model: Red Hat will support Fedora releases for limited amounts of time (shorter than the
lifetime of the 6.x releases anyway!), together with support from the community built around the Fedora Project (a la Debian); once the
"official" Red Hat support for a certain Fedora version disappears, its the community support that will continue to provide updates for it.
My estimate is that the support provided by the community will actually last for a lot longer than the "official" support - see the case of the non-corporate Unix distributions such as Debian, FreeBSD, etc. which are supported for long periods of time.
Obviously, Red Hat is trying to draw as much attention as they can to their RHEL product, which is where their money come from. But i feel that, during this whole change, their "market droids" did a poor job of explaining what's really going on.
Hence the rumors that "Red Hat Linux goes away, everyone must buy RHEL or migrate to something else" etc. Oh wait, but then they did a _good_ job!
Fedora Core 1 (or "the distribution formerly known as Red Hat Linux 10") is scheduled for release this week.
I'm not going to buy Enterprise, It costs to much. I guess when I need to switch from RH 9, I'll go to SUSE or Mandrake.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
(Remember when)
RH used to equal Linux.
Yes, many people would deny this vociferously.
People would rant and rail against the idea that RH equalled Linux. But it was still basically true no matter how much fuss anybody made. it was true because people widely believed it to be so, and people believed it because RH was the most visible distribution. It was a self fulfilling kind of prophecy.
With this move RH is now severing all the ties to the community that caused that equation to seem true in the first place. They're severing their ties to the base of the Linux community and removing their visibility from the newbies. There's nothing they can do to replace this kind of mindshare, the kind that comes from being first, omnipresent and inevitable. They think this decision is "right on the money" but they'll be wrong. They'll slowly Calderify now, and their installed base and new converts will dwindle. That's how they'll be wrong.
So: It's a stupid decision and one they'll have a hard time crawling back from. By the time they realize where they went wrong, all the goodwill they enjoyed will be gone and they'll find it's much, much harder to restore once lost, than it was to retain.
(And in case anyone is wondering, I am not using any RH systems that I didn't pay for with a boxed set purchase of RH Linux. I am not bitching about the end of "freeloading".)
They only discontinue the usage of the "Red Hat" label on the free distro. Otherwise things remain the same.
Read the docs. Fedora Core still is, for the overwhelming majority, developed by RH engineers.
The future RH Enterprise Linux will actually be Fedora releases, cherry-picked by Red Hat and with some "enterprise" stuff added on top.
There's no way the two will "diverge".
I want to second this. I'm in the middle of converting a (small) office of workstations to RedHat.
Bluecurve is absolutely as usable as Windows XP, and *much* more functional. They are insane if they think they can't compete on the desktop.
As for brand, relegating Linux to headless servers will only reinforce the belief among PHBs that computing *requires* Windows. RedHat should have held out longer.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Mod this guy up. It's amazing how very few people got it right.
Fedora Core is just too silly as a name! Anyway, I hope this move will work out for them, although I do think its a bad one.
Except for the name.
Fedora Core is what used to be Red Hat Linux. They just stopped calling it like that.
Repeat the mantra after me: it is just a name change.
Red Hat just put a bunch of eggs into the Fedora basket. If it does not get wide spread adoption in this transition we might see a RH 10 or perhaps a slow death at Red Hat. Anyway death to Red Hat, long live Red Hat.
The truth suffers more from convictions than from lies.
Thank you.
Goes in to the "good rejoinders for idiot managers in absurd meetings" file.
What used to be "Red Hat Linux" is now called Fedora. The Enterprise version stays the same.
Otherwise nothing changed.
Sort of like when you ordered the push for Stalingrad during WWII.
Slashdot: where people respond to Adolph_Hitler as though he really were.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
If Red Hat wants to be really sneaky, they will break binary compatibility in such a way that binaries compiled on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will only run on RHEL (e.g. trivially changing C++ name mangling, incrementing all kernel syscall numbers by 1). Want to run Oracle 10i? Unreal Tournament 2004? nVIDIA XFree86 drivers? Sorry, they only provide Red Hat RPMs that won't run properly on Slackware, Debian, or FreeBSD.
One could even argue that they have already been doing that, what with GCC 2.96 and custom patches to glibc and so on over the last few years.
Just a thought... :)
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
... that setting up infrastructure, paying staff, purchasing bandwith and then giving your product away for free wasn't a viable business model. Still sucks tho.
1. Spend money
2. Give product away
3. profit??? I don't think so.
Now you're a pro having kicked more than one distro and more than two back to back releases, but you feel sort of, well, lost. You need to git reeel and think about weening your self from the distro+binary habit.
.src.rpm, .tgz and statically. Pull something from ftp.xx.kernel.org and work with it until you can apply 1 patch, configure and build it reliably. Play with kernel configuration until you have no unnecesary modules or wired features ( 900K for 2.4.x, 650K for 2.2.x), learn to write simple shell scripts, regexp, sed and awk. Boot to runlevel 3 once a week and see for yourself what's behind the GNOME curtain. Dont forget where you came from and how dehumanizing it was to be force fed fec^H^H^H strained carrots all the time.
In the olden days I'm told, you had to get a bare kernel+drivers, always vendor/hardware specific, and then scrounge around for apps that never compiled the first OR second time. There were no binary anythings. Basically if you wanted to not be sucking on VMS (or worse), you had to learn how to make the little changes peculiar to your hardware, kernel and personal limitations. No package management, xmkmf barely worked, library mismatches and loadable modules. THE HORROR. If it wasn't all working, nothing worked. Blah,blah, acknowledge, move on.
Make RH's business decision to survive your opportunity earn a bit of your own freedom. You can start here if you like: figure out what shared libraries app xxx needs (ldd); how to build application software from
Planet10, RealSoon.
Planet10, RealSoOn
Stay away from... Red Hat! Tried to install it on three different machines: 1) installed (mostly) OK 2) X freezed randomely once every minute... 3) the install was not possible (rebooted). I never had such annoying issue with recent Mandrake releases that are excellent for me (in my opinion) for heavy server use and corporate desktop as well. In addition, Mandrake provides excellent and professional updates through http://www.mandrakesecure.net. For free.
And regarding the LG-Cdrom issue, it's a... LG bug (not ATAPI compliant) and other Linux users were affected as well.
Is the world turning upside or what? A military grade battle tested OS - Solaris, is free (or the cost of media, something like $20.) Nuclear bunker file system (logging UFS, not EXT3, a "filesystem"), scalability, awesome recommended update rollups, frequent/daily patch releases, quarterly MUs, and working NFS!
Linux, a random hodge-podge of random C library, random shell, random kernel version with random patches, a random userland with random SYSV and BSD idiosyncrasies is thousands for the ES and AS product?
Goofy.
I'm glad I'm on FreeBSD and Solaris while watching this mess.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
new versions will be the preferred path, rather than backporting security fixes
/. would be a stock rant site... *sigh*
This really is a shame, as it appears Redhat has confessed that it simply does not understand its market.
I'm a smaller shareholder of Redhat stock - owning enough stock that the losses I took (from a purchase at $22/share) could have paid for a lifetime of Redhat commercial licenses (and yes, I've even suggested this - even a free lifetime maintenance subscription as an apology for the loss - not even an email reply from a marketing weasel). Naturally, I'd welcome any move by Redhat to recover their stock value. This move, unfortunately, encourages me to dump and finally take my losses, as I've definitely lost hope in Redhat management.
An earlier poster pointed out that he'll simply stop running Redhat at home, load up Debian or some other distribution, and when the boss asks him to buy an enterprise license for a work project, he'll naturally go with what he is familiar with. Any halfway competent marketer understands this strategy - it's the "sneak past the decision maker by getting to his recommender geek" play. If you're not IBM/Microsoft/etc., and especially if you're the underdog, this is your game. (Redhat, are you listening?)
Microsoft occasionally admits (though it is increasingly rare) that it too has benefitted from the pirated use of its software by home users. How many SQL admins cut their teeth on bootleg versions (I can name a few in my circles), and have since even converted new employers to SQL from older non-Microsoft dbms's? I can name a large satellite distribution company that did just this, and much credit goes to the db admins for advocating MSSQL from their bootleg experience. A better example is Microsoft's educational discounted software and packages nearly given out at classes and shows.
Then there's the Netscape vs. IE illustration; Netscape got a real attitude when its stock soared into the stratosphere and immediately forgot about all of us ISPs out there who evangelized their product. They started demanding license fees for copies of Navigator included with our installation kits. Along came IEAK...
Granted, Navigator vs. IE is an application battle, not an operating system, but I don't believe Redhat is ready to play as a stand-alone OS (and not as a support model). Those that pay for support will and do. Those that won't will just move to another distribution; e.g. Redhat's move gains no new customers and loses many others.
And come on, expecting users to settle for crippleware when alternatives exist is a waste of time. I'll say it first... Fedora is DOA. Redhat, if you're going to abandon your userbase, don't bother wasting time with an unmaintained crippleware release.
So it doesn't look good for Redhat. If there isn't a change in direction, I guess it's probably just as good a time to dump my stock, cept I've told you all now too:-(
Never thought
*scoove*
The Fedora project will be picking up where RHL left off. Like Debian, it will be community supported and completely FREE software, but still connected to and supported by RedHat. I rejoice. I think this was a brilliant move! I'm psyched! Of course, it means I can't pick up a box set at Staples anymore, but, who cares? Oh..then again, it was nice to see Linux at Staples, and I'm sure they won't carry RHE. But they can still carry Suse and Mandrake, which I have seen there... All the same, I think this was smart for Redhat and will have positive results in the community with the Fedora project.
http://www.school-library.net Freedom to Learn!
... it's the same thing. People could install the software and experience it before realizing they want to pay for the box. Etc.... a free RH is still where the dominance came from. They are betting they don't need that now with the brand recognition they have among corporations. It's fair to make bets in life.
-pyrrho
I put three production boxes into this RHN service and figured what the heck, I'd checkmark the auto update option. I'd carefully vetted the boxes to make sure there were no dodgy RPMs on them and they were stripped down to the bare minimum to run the services I required. It would save me from a daily visit to the RHN to install updates.
Guess what? The auto update function doesn't work. Nor does it email me when patches are available.
It took me **three** emails to support to find out I had to submit a bug report to get this fixed. The first was ignored, the second wasn't sure what I was talking about, and the third said put in a bug report ("RTFM" essentially). Nice.
When I find somebody who helps me out on IRC I'll usually send them a US$20+ gift certificate of their choice. And we're all riotiously happy in the end. I've recevied quicker action on IRC and better levels of support.
So, the RHN is a fat waste of $180 and I'm seriously thinking about putting in a chargeback on my credit card. I hope Enterprise level support is bit better than this. RH is up the creek if it isn't.
SuSE? Debian? I'll experiment on a non production box fdisking the lot and reinstalling.
Bah, bollocks, etc.
Also, I see absolutely no indication that Fedora will be manageable over RHN -- something we've come to rely on heavily. We have been paying for (formerly called) enterprise entitlements for two years now.
I can't afford the tech time to sit and manually manage all these linux servers under Fedora or some other distribution. RHN was a godsend for us and allowed Redhat Linux to proliferate.
While this is a college, it's also a business. I need stability and affordibility. Right now, thanks to deep educational discounts provided by Microsoft, looks like they are the best bet.
Redhat needs to support the educational market. Lose that, and you lose future customers. Microsoft and other software vendors understand that...
FINALLY!!!! I hope it never comes back!
I, as well as several other Red Hat Users, had no idea this was coming until today. I don't mind migrating to RHES/AS, but I do mind the short notice.
Even if I started today and purchased new servers, I could not be ready to migrate off RHL by the end of the year. Since I have several internet facing servers, I have no choice but to migrate to a supported version.
As of 12/31/2003, I won't be able to use up2date to keep our systems current with security fixes.
Red Hat must be crazy to think that people with mission critical applications running on RH Linux, could possibly migrate and test their applications by the end of the year! In fact, Dell is still offering factory installed RH8 and RH9 on all their Servers. They even recommend RH8 instead of RH9 because of some problems with RH9. Even when you call Redhat sales, the hold message is constantly promoting RedHat 9.
WTF?
I've got a small non-profit website I'm running on behalf of a club; there is simply no way I'm going to upgrade it to "enterprise" linux.
Clear, Dark Skies
Not sure if they will be smart enough to seize the opportunity or not, but Red Hat's decision opens up a large opportunity for Sun to become the major Linux distribution if they want to do it.
They have the brand name to reassure business. This might go a long way to winning back developers if they put some major resources into their Linux distro.
Man Holmes
Fedora = Not Recognizable As Redhat = Bad.
Wait. Who exactly is choosing to run Fedora? Individuals, and at least for the near future informed ones, too. New users should, hopefully, be told of the end of RHL and will probably make the change without difficulty, if given a good explanation. People that don't use Redhat directly (managers etc.) won't encounter any difficulty anymore between the similar names of the two Redhat-named distros. Fedora may also get "Redhat" added as a prefix, at least when referred to in a business setting, because it is still a RH product and the brand name will add a lot of weight. You don't have to call it just "Fedora" if you're trying to convince someone of it's legitimacy.
Fedora won't be as good waaaah
Perhaps. But then, Mozilla has turned out pretty well despite all the bumps it's had along the road(though the present situation isn't as pretty), and it was based on the same model: Open-source with financial support from a corporation. How it's doing right at this moment isn't as much of a concern as where it will be by the time Redhat ends support for its old distro. If development goes well, this won't be as much of a concern. The reports on update support from the posts I've read vary, but it certainly doesn't seem like you'll be left out in the cold with Fedora. Most of it depends on the management, though, and I think Redhat will make good decisions.
The headline really should have been "RedHat spins off free distro into Mozilla-like organization".
This is pretty much what happened with Mozilla, only RedHat will still maintain some control. My question is now that Fedora will not have commercial support, is the project now free to develop a free up2date network for fedora??? And more importantly, will they???
Will things like PowerTools creep back into the distro? Will RedHat keep Fedora from releasing their distro with certain packages (like openldap or SMP kernels)? And will Fedora support older distros of theirs (or will support only be provided for the most recent version)???
I could almost see a market for a group to provide most of these services to Fedora users for a small fee (less than $100/yr).
*spits Coke on monitor*
That was funny.. hehehe
Seems like this move to Fedora will allow a community to continue devlopment through a RedHat like OS, but will, in the end, discourge the average MS user from ever learning or moving to Linux. I started on RedHat becuase of the "name." I also don't like the Microsoft business model, even though their OS is much easier to use and play games. I used RedHat because it had standards, easy to instal RPMS, lots of support and webpages with Howtos and tutorials.
I really wanted to move to a Linux Distro that had a lot of support and recognition. There isn't any other Distributions that has the RedHat effect imho. I wanted my latest and greatest gaming hardware to be easily supported so I can dual boot XP.
I know Fedora is a quite similiar OS, but its the name that counts. Its the name that gets hardware/game companies to see and know is well supported so they start their support for them. Sadly, I guess I'm going to remove RedHat this week from my main machine and go back to my Xp Pro partition untill there is another major "name" that other companies will support for the average gamer/mp3er(slowly converting to ogg).
RIP RH
.... but you are pretty ignorant.
Most software development is in-house applications, so all those families you are so concerned about will continue to be fine.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Is Mandrake next ? ...
Linux running in commodity hardware is a very attractive proposition as long as somebody is supporting it at the same standards as Sun or HP currently do with their offerings.
Big financial companies and oil industry big hitters are using Linux more and more.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Am I correct in thinking that RedHat Enterprise Linux is freely redistributable? How could it not be, since all its components, including the kernel, are GPLed or licensed under other FOSS licenses? You only pay for support, including access to the ISO images, RPMs etc, but there is nothing to stop you putting it on as many machines as you like, or giving it to others. Is that correct?
The non-enterprise stuff is only for tinkering. Neither SuSE nor RedHat have ever certified any serious mission-critical software on any of their desktop-products (with one noteable exception for each, before they actually had "Enterprise"-products.
;-)
You can still run all the apps that worked on RH x.y on Fedore, I guess.
But if you do that, you can run them on pretty much any other OpenSource OS (including FreeBSD).
I must say, that the one time I had 7.3 running I was shocked at how difficult it was to get mplayer sort-of running, compared to FreeBSD.
Next was 8.0 on a Laptop - it was slow as a fat dog. Why people choose that to run on the server is beyond me, but then some people also like to run Windows on the server...
My advice to those willing to jump ship: try FreeBSD for a few weeks, read the handbook, read about cvsup and portupgrade and see if you can accomodate to the way things work in FreeBSD-land.
If it fits your needs, fine. If not, you can always buy RHEL-lics (or make that RHAS, for the matter)
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
So, let's assume that a bunch of us are going to move away from RedHat. What distro are we going to switch to? I know Fedora is an option, but I'm kinda pissed at RedHat in general. Debian is pretty cool, but it's sure not as slick as RedHat. I've been eyeing Gentoo, but I don't trust them to be around long enough to invest the time to put them on my server. What are your suggestions?
I have RH 9 and 7.3 at home mainly because my ISPs have without exception RH7.3 running on all the websites that I support. I use RH9 for my workstation and 7.3 for my intranet file and webserver to test applications and sites .
I am confused as to how this is going to affect me and what I should do. I rely heavily on the updates from RHN for both 7.3 and 9.0.
But now I realize I will need to change my home setups now. I have used FBSD before and like it very much as the server to replace 7.3 and I guess I will finally give SuSe a whirl for my workstation or go back to Mandrake.
Emails to my ISP's have not returned any answers yet as to what they will be doing. If I thought they were going to RHEnterprise, I might be tempted to move to Fedora. I am at a loss. Has anyone else heard from their ISP about plans to migrate or options? I'm not worried about my workstation, I'll try anything, but I would like to have a similar server to test on before sending files off to my remote sites.
Most of my clients are very small companies who can not afford a full time IP or even a full time webmaster. They depend on me for something simple and stable. I have, in the past recommended RH for thier ISP servers and Macs or Linux for thier office computers depending on how PC-wise they were.
Is RH for the small person/company such as myself or has it now opted for the Enterprise companys. Is this my cue to move off RH completly? or is this change nothing much more than name changes. I need some perpsectives here.
Thanks...
It is interesting how calmly the majority of posts are justifying this as an "ok" move.
Yet, I STILL see posts about how Dell (and other major PC manufacturers that don't sell Linux to home consumers) is lame because they got rid of Linux as a choice for home computers.
It comes down to support. It is not yet cost effective for a corporation to support Linux on the home desktop. Dell learned it a couple years ago, and now Red Hat agrees.
If you're not going to beat up Red Hat over this (I wouldn't), you should not beat up PC manufacturers for making the same decision.
I agree with AC. Brilliantly stated.
Great. I bought an entitlement for my RH8 back in april 2003 and that support(new errata) is going to end Dec 31st. That leaves me out 4 months of updates I paid for. What is RH going to give me? from https://rhn.redhat.com/help/rhlmigrationfaq/
"3) What happens to my paid RHN subscription if it expires after April 30, 2004, (the end-of-life date for Red Hat Linux 9)? *Dec 31st end-of-life for RH8*
Customers whose paid RHN subscription expires after April 30 will receive a complimentary evaluation ISO and channel access for Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS for the remainder of their subscription. These customers also have the opportunity to take advantage of the 50% discount currently available on migrations to Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES or WS."
Oh, yeah, great. That helps me. Especially because
"4) When will the complimentary evaluation copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS be available?
The channel will be opened March 1, 2004. Users whose account expires after April 30, 2004 will be able to access the complimentary evaluation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS from March 1, 2004 until the end of their subscription."
So, lets see, even if I DID buy their Enterprise, I would have to wait 3 months (past eol of rh8) to receive OS updates. and not to mention the problem of me NOT HAVING PHYSICAL ACCESS to my machine seems to be complicated by:
"8) If I choose to migrate to the complimentary evaluation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, can I simply upgrade my OS?
Use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires a full reinstall from Red Hat Linux. There are a full set of migration whitepapers and best practices available for download at the Red Hat Linux Migration Resource Center."
Now sure, I want to download my 40 gigs of data I have on my server, and upgrade the OS and UPLOAD it all again (over DSL that would take a *couple* hours. Yeah, my server, like everyone else's HAS A BUSINESS relying on it.
I dont have time to spend following 100+ packages looking for changes and upgrades and then installing them, and I value Redhat's service but leave me with some options here...
I am not looking forward to this Dec. 31st deadline. Its coming fast already. Just in time for the holidays! Anyone have this same problem?
Error: Id10t detected
1) The free version of Red Hat Linux is now called "Fedora Linux", because now that the "Red Hat" brand name is valuable, they're going to exploit that.
2) Red Hat, Inc. is turning it's back on 99.9% of it's installed user base, by pricing it's future "Red Hat" offerings out of reach of normal users. Red Hat is only obligated to give you the sourcecode for RHEL. They dont have to give you pre-built binaries. Good luck compiling it.*
3) Red Hat, in one single memo, has managed to insult every developer who has ever worked on, or contributed to, making Red Hat Linux a brand name. They're taking what we helped build, and making a Cousin Oliver out of it. We put our support behind (and helped build) _Red Hat_, not "Fedora".
Thats about it.
* = How long do you think it'll take for someone to write a little program that downloads the whole bag of RHEL code, compiles it, makes RPMs out of it, and spits out a few ISOs, and undermines Red Hat's stupid ass attempt at a ca$h grab in one fell swoop?
Bowie J. Poag
They have seen the success of Debian and decided that they will have to rely on somthing similar. Maybe the enterprise edition will rely on Fedora someday.
Anyways, I don't understand why they throw away the marketing effect of having a cool community desktop. Maybe they saw that the cool Debian name didn't work in the enterprise.
Yeah think SCO is going to have a field day with this?
"Look, Linux must be ours, even RedHat has stopped selling it."
They changed the name because if they'd stuck with redhat then noone else can sell cd sets as "redhat linux". Fedora isn't trademarked so when Ferdora Core 1 comes out you can burn copies of the iso's and sell them marked as "Fedora Core 1". Try the same thing with RedHat 9 and RedHat's lawyers will be knocking on your door talking about trademark infringement.
I just got 'RHEL WS Basic & Management Serviced System' for $137.50. Now I can upgrade to RHEL when I have the time. (That price is the 50% off deal, I think, but I can supposedly get that price for two years.)
For someone who wants a good, stable Linux platform and all the updating, this seems like a pretty good deal.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Clearly the answer to all problems is a tax cut. All you need for that rash on your ass to go away is to give ord'nary workin' 'mericans a big ol' tax cut.
Or... did Bill Gates buy someone off?
--Mike--
You, sir, are a racist! Red Hat R00LZ!
Once you go red, you never...er....you...er...get to run sed!
...but how the fuck do I buy Red Hat at PC World now?
This is a typical OSS user. Wants all the benefits, but doesn't want to pay. Based their ENTIRE business around an open source OS, but admits they they haven't paid RedHat much. Did they support the OSS community? Did they support and OSS project? Not likely.
How about hiring an OSS developer to maintain all those thousands of machines you so desperately rely on? The gravy train is over.
Now wait a minute...is this to say that Redhat will now hand over fedora to the open source community in the hopes that they will do all the bug testing and support for a predecessor to RH enterprise? Sounds like bullship to me. What a dam shame...I will truly miss my redhat.
Started to think if this is just a bussiness ploy to get IBM start coughing up big bucks.
IBM has a lot of investment in Linux and RH is surely a big part of it. RH might see this as an opportunity to:
1. Be bought up by IBM
2. Get IBM to fund a regular RedHat distro
Just speculations. But I think it might be interesting nonethelesss.
Maybe Gentoo will finish compiling by then.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Either learn a different paradigm or go the way of the Do-Do.
I want a Hummer H-2 for free too, but can I whine and bitch and get one? I mean if I get one for free, I can make a lot of money leasing it out to people who want to use it for just going to the store on Fridays or to show off at the golf course on Wednesday.
I'm making money using free software, how DARE Redhat screw up my business model by actually expecting to get paid for their work! I want them to do something I am incapable of doing and give me the fruit of their labors for free, so I can make an unholy profit and retire in a year or two....
YOU have a faulty business model and now it is Redhat's fault? I fail to see the logic. There is NO free lunch, it is time to pay the piper, either in money, or by doing all that "work" of compiling the source yourself. Or at the worst, learn another distribution!
...if all the redhat linux hackers out there switch to a different flavor, won't they bring that flavor to the workplace...
Redhat Linux hackers don't get to decide what OS their employer uses. The people running the company do that, while the hackers are busy on trouble calls.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I have already started looking at other distro's to replace redhat. If they don't have a free version available then I will be looking elsewhere. We've purchased AS and are always looking to learn how RedHat Linux could make our lives easier. Now that the free version is gone (Fedora? are you kidding me??) we'll be looking at Debian and slackware. Suse is already top of the list.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Seems to me RedHat would have to be mindlessly foolish to build their business around trying to sell something to the likes of you, and most of the ranters around here.
Why go broke, like almost every other commercial Linux distribution except SUSE, giving a product away to people who will never, ever, buy a penny's worth of support?
So, Fedora gives you what you want: free RedHat, plus the level of support you'd buy: zero.
Meanwhile, RedHat will be busy trying to make some money selling to businesses who'd rather buy support than try to maintain the bloody thing themselves. They've got better things to do than worry about their digital plumbing.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I don't get why you people seem to think that Red Hat is ending its free distro. They are merely renaming it, and if anything changes, they are making it better!
Red Hat always makes a nicely integrated and polished distro, but the biggest problems are that there are 1) not enough different packages available; 2) it takes too long for new versions of apps (particularly GUI apps) to make their way into official release and; 3) it's too hard to hard to upgrade. Fedora fixes #1 by increasing community participation so that volunteers can add official packages in addition to the core packages provided by Red Hat. Because Red Hat no longer has to worry about businesses trying to use the free distro as a production distro, #2 gets fixed automatically. (Those businesses who demand 18 month feature freezes can pay for RHEL or use at their own risk.) Problem #3 is fixed by moving over to yum or apt repositories.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
No, I said "the fastest hardware available today". That means G5.
Hahah.. that's a good one. Tell me another.
I don't pay for bugfixes either. The bugfix is just as free as the program. What you are paying for is someone to find out it's there, integrate it with the rest of your porgrams, tell you about it and offer it to you in a slick binary package. That's a service that's worth paying for, but I don't really have to thanks to the tremendous Debian community. Fedora looks like it's going to be a similar effort.
Free software will always be low or no cost. People are making and sharing it for their own best intersts. Anyone, given skill and time, can string together a distro. If Red Hat gets out of the free beer world, someone will carry on with their work. Society has shown again and again that it will support these efforts.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
it seems to me that if they charged 50 bucks for redhat enterprise, and then a monthly fee for technical support (in the case of a business), then no free downloads or anything, they could pull in some cash. i mean, sure, maybe it wouldn't be as much as it is with enterprise at 800 dollars, but they'll be "feeding their families" alright.
Now, I have 100+ Linux servers around the country, and a stream of new customers. I've frozen new deployments at Redhat 8.0 because 9 didn't allow me to use the HP/Compaq-specific hardware agents/drivers. So, we've everything from 7.0 through 8.0 in the field. Over the past few months, Redhat dropped up2date support and patches for Redhat 7.0. I feel guilty installing 8.0 on new boxes because I know support for it will be dropped at the end of the year. By Dec. 31, all of my systems will be "unsupported." This looks awful because we're starting to get more corporate customers, and I've receiving calls from their CTO's like, "wait, we want to make sure you'll be installing a SUPPORTED version of Linux if we buy your application." Grrr....
I don't wish to buy into Redhat's Enterprise Linux because I don't understand what I'm paying for. *I'm* the Redhat support. I just need something that will receive patches and support for more than one year. The 5 year lifespan of the Enterprise versions is nice, but I've NEVER called Redhat for support. I don't plan to.
I also build the kernels for each of the servers. I use vanilla kernel.org 2.4.21 source with additional XFS patches. We sell 2, 4 and 8-way Proliant servers. Am I missing out on anything from the "optimized" Redhat Advanced Server kernels? I downloaded the RHEL 3.0 kernel and looked at the 200+ patches they make to the plain 2.4.21 source. Other than the hyperthreading patch, none of the enhancements will make that much of a difference in my company's application. Would using my stable kernel setup with RHEL negate the purpose of using that OS? Patching XFS on TOP of their already heavily-modified kernel is close to impossible. *
I think it's confusing because we initially chose Redhat for the accountability aspect of having a corporation behind the distro. Now, I'm not sure who they're targeting. I would imagine that most firms that select Redhat Advanced server and are willing to pay the price (>$1000/license) would have a staff talented enough to support it. So why the mandatory support costs from Redhat? It's a bad move because 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 are great matches for our hardware. HP's support for RHAS 2.1 is even a bit spotty (old kernel, etc.), so HP concentrated in supporting 8.0. I'm afraid to recommend RHEL 3.0 for these critical servers because the userbase is going to be tiny, and we'll essentially be flushing-out bugs..... in production. That's not a good situation.... * Sidenote: After looking at Redhat's Enterprise kernel's default .config, I'm surprised that they still enable HAM radio, PCMCIA, ISDN and other rarely-used (at least in the US) functions by default. I mean, I choose to compile my own kernels.... but I'm pretty sure that their target market for RHEL won't bother. Odd.
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
Thank you!!!
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
OpenOffice is free, but StarOffice is not.
-- forgive me my poor Engl...
Ah, the hordes of card-carrying dot.commies...
/.'ers have to get one thing thru their one-track minds: Free Software -- GNU-Linux or otherwise -- harkens the doom of *ALL* business models at some point in the glorious future. Redhat is simply showing its true colors; that it has always been guided by the same logic which motivates Microsoft: the Profit Motive. /. neolibs are all now huddled-together in a worried mass, exchanging comforting platitudes about the need to be 'smart' about this being a smart 'Bizness Thang'...
brandishing their little books of Quotations from Chairman Ayn Rand...
It's a head-shaker to watch such a sad, continuing fetish for the supposedly-desirable (improbable) commercialization of Free GNU/Linux.
Truly touching they are, in their naive faith.
No doubt, they also naturally support the use of Linux by the secret police (i.e. NSA) and the Imperium itself (i.e. U.S. military)...
News from Nowhere Guys:
From the beginning it has ALWAYS been clear that corporations Like Redhat, Ximian, et al. would try to subvert the Free-Software ethic espoused by the likes of the FSF and Debian, et al.; and failing that -- to eventually abandon it altogether.
Neolib
That it will take a few years yet for the other shoe to fall -- to reveal Redhat abandoning Free Software altogether -- is the only reason the
My Ass.
It remains to be seen whether the likes of Redhat (or whichever corporate behemoth consumes such a tasty morsel) can actually _subvert_ the Holy GPL, and yet steal the intellectual property of the masses -- but in my case they'd have to pry my cold, dead fingers from my console first...
!!!Debian/rules (if it doesn't rock)!!!
Did you read the mail they sent you?
/. don't know how to read...
You get a 50% reduction for two years.
You only need the WS variety for your applications. You can install RPMs for Bind and Postfix on a WS Redhat enterprise.
So that would make it $179 / 2 = $89.50 per year
$89.50 / 2 = $44.75 per machine
One of the machines would be entitled for support not the other. So you would have to manually scp the security updates from the up2date folder and run rpm -Uvh yourself...
You could also run Fedora (= Redhat Linux free version) with up2date.
Or you could switch to Mac OS X ($129 per machine with automatic daily software update)...
Redhat are doing the right thing. The message they have sent is clear. Seems that lots of people on
realkiwi
oddly enough the freeloading is set to continue with RH support (Fedora) and there just won't be any brand connection... a severe of the most affrontable source. I bet Fedora suits my needs... but why RedHat doesn't want to have it's name, RedHat Open Linux, or something, it sounds very MBAish. The idea would be that it's ok to seed the technology using open source, but don't compete with your own free product. If it's called RedHat anything, people will use it instead? But I don't think so... I think the word "Enterprise" is enough to bring in those sales. But I'm still admitting it's not my business and I don't understand it except as a computer user.
-pyrrho
You can re-install that copy of RHES or RHAS on as many servers as you like
You either have not bought RHAS or you have not read the License Agreement
Or, more likely, are misleading the readers to make RedHat appear nicer than they are - I have seen this happen on Slashdot way too often to think it's a coincidence.
Sigged!
"MS isn't a worthy competitor? I guess all those sales of NT 4.0 server, Windows 2000 server, and Windows 2003 server were imaginary."
So? They're still not dominating the server market.
"MS may or may not have beat RedHat, but they are certainly a competitor. The reason RedHat is leaving the desktop arena is because they realize they CAN'T do it better than Microsoft."
And who else CAN win? Apple? No way. BeOS? As good as dead. Anybody else? Nope. NOBODY can win from Microsoft on the desktop. You are entirely missing the point.
They're leaving because they can't make money from that area, support or no support. This again shows your ignorance.
Basically you're flaming RedHat down for something they're not, and don't want to specialize in. It's like flaming a dentist for not being able to cure your cold. That's just rediculous.
"And they deserve to get modded to +5, because they are right. Unlike you, who is an apologist for RH."
So? I don't care what you think I am. That's not the point, and has never been point. You claimed that Slashdot is full of apologists but when I've proven you wrong, you started to flame. Admit that you were wrong and stop trolling.
There were, and still are, tons of Microsoft apologists. And their numbers are MUCH higher than the numbers of Linux/BSD/OSS/whatever apologists. Yet I don't hear you complain about them. That proofs that you're just biased.
We manage several hundred cpus on RH8 in a CGI render farm and desktop apps thru nvidia graphics. This choice is made for us by expensive graphics packages and rendering apps. For us it has been a trip from SGI to NT and I just got us back to unix again over a 10 year ride. The price was the issue and now that's gone. We have no security issues but the applications will be forced down the redhat route by manufacturers. So as OSX is becoming the flavour again in the film and TV world if I have the choice of lashing up my own fedora or buying into mr jobs' new world then it will probably be OSX which is supported by most of our desktop and batch apps. Sick as a parrot as macs drive me insane.
I switched 1-2 years ago to RedHat from SuSE due mainly to Japanese support, for my laptop. But also RedHat has taken over in Japan. And I recommend/install RedHat boxes all the time. Recently I upgraded one from pre-7 to RH9. This would be a prime client for an enterprise liscense perhaps, and I recommended joining the RedHat program. I have done so for other clients as well.
But here's the thing. I don't want to pay RedHat for my development machines, but I want the same OS and directory layout as the for-sale servers just to keep sane. I also want easy security updates for them. But RedHat keeps making it more difficult to answer my clients' questions about how safe RedHat is (yes lots of companies still only really trust Sun for servers) and this is just another thing they can point to.
If I can have a system that handles Japanese okay, runs a desktop and server edition, and has a for-pay security update service I'm there. I was just about to purchase a linux server to host a new domain and figured of course RedHat, but the reality of it is I don't need anything more than the standard GPL stuff that is in all the distros. It's not like they invented everything in it themselves right? Why should they get money for the kernel, perl, apache, sendmail, iptables? It's not like RedHat has made my life much easier except with regard to providing signed binary builds, and that is the only thing I want to pay for now.
Another thing: I am willing to pay RedHat for security patches, but the shortness of their life cycles is so horribly cynical I want to scream. Do they think they have got enough critical mass to take over the world and drag us all along with them? I think they are shooting themselves in the foot. And I am now for the first time since my conversion to RedHat, considering something - anything - else! I'll vote with my money and the money of my clients. Hope you do too.
By the way I recently installed two IBM xSeries turnkey servers for a client. The servers came with RH7 which is all IBM would guarantee, but I tested and put RH9 in - only because of security updates - that darned "life cycle" they invented. I recommended they purchase RHN. Now tell me RedHat, because I trusted you am I going to have to tell them to purchase a fat liscense for you some day in the future and then hire me to migrate them? What in fact will IBM or other companies do? I could live with RH9 on those machines because I wasn't using the software that broke with RH9, and I decided I didn't need IBM's patch on RH7 needed to make the autoreboot feature work. Do these kind of issues make RedHat sound like the kind of a company for which you are willing to put your name on the line? This is utter bullshit, and the funny thing is if they just provided a simple service which kept those servers securely updated for me I would not hesitate to tell all my clients to pay TEN OR TWENTY TIMES what RHN would have cost them. RedHat is going to discover that someone else is going to do it the right way and leverage the off-hours work of RedHat's employees in a very lucrative way. That's where I hope this goes. Or I may just change distros; gentoo, slack, and even FreeBSD and Debian are looking mighty good right now.
Doesn't exist. If you click on "Buy software," your lowest-priced option is RHEL Workstation edition, at $179. No mention of Fedora. No mention of community. Just an option to spend as much for linux as WinXP professional costs, for a dead disto with only three years of support and no active upgrade path.
RedHat just shot themselves in their fedora. Sad.
see http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/01/28/21492 03
RedHat is leaving their desktop customers in the cold. Mind you, we're not talking about new versions of RedHat. We're talking about SUPPORTING older OSes that people use and RELIED on RedHat being there for them. Just like some people who use Windows NT 4.0 still expect MS to keep on supporting their old OS. RedHat is WORSE than Microsoft. That is why you are a biased fool. If you still can't see that, then there's nothing else I an say to make it easier for you to comprehend.
At least for the short term (next year) I will continue running my Redhat 8 server, and I will keep running the up2date every day until it's no longer available. After which I will keep patching my services patches are released by perl, apache, whoever. After another year or so (or should a technical reason require it sooner) I will start evaluating Fedora, and other distros to see which will become my new OS
I suspect that I will reccomend my company pony up and pay for enterprise just to minimize surprises. But for my at-home boxes fedora sounds as good as starting over. So redhat has now convinced me to do something I was to lazy to do in the past.
Take a closer look at their competition
So what happens if debian/slackware/suse measure up better than fedora? It means in 2-3 years I reccomend my company switch, and guess what, they will.
I'm curious about the intersection between paid support/subscriptions and a GPL'ed operating system. After browsing Red Hat's site, I see nothing (except possibly restrictions on the use of RH trademarks and logos) that would prevent third parties from legally distributing, or obtaining and using, copies of Red Hat Enterprise editions (and we know there are always contrarians willing to post ISO images of GPL'ed stuff, so I presume there are RHE ISOs in the wild as well).
Of course, one would (might?) lose out on updates and would certainly get no RH support, making this method of access unattractive to a business customer, but doesn't the involvement of the GPL imply that non-enterprise users will still effectively have access to current Red Hat Enterprise releases via third parties? This would seem to have some bearing on the ecosystem of Red Hat vs Fedora.
Of course, there are reasons NOT to do this, too. Support for one, keeping the Golden Goose fed and healthy for another, also the need to strip non-GPL components out of any redistributed images (making work for the redistributor).
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
No dude, YOU are a biased freeloading fool. Why should RedHat continue to support ancient products that suck more money than they gain? When MS announced end-of-life for NT 4, tons of Microsoft apologists made up excuses such as that NT 4 is way too old. But when RedHat does it, it's suddenly evil as opposed to Microsoft which did the same thing. You zealots are the worst.
This is, without a doubt, the most horribly incorrect, misleading article I've ever seen.
Real story (a Fedora project member might have additions, but this is pretty close to what's happening). Red Hat realized that Debian was doing something right -- big set of packaged software, auto-updates on 'em, etc. Red Hat was trying to set up their own Debian-style setup called Red Hat Linux Project (RHLP). At some point, Red Hat picked up on the fact that most Red Hat users already like and use Fedora. So they talked to the Fedora folks, and combined RHLP and Fedora. Basically, it means that Red Hat pays for Fedora hosting and distributes Fedora (major value add) *with* their own software packages.
What's the end-user result? From a RH user standpoint, it's something like Powertools being readded to RH plus a lot more. A lot of Debian-style goodness being made available to the masses. There's a much larger package set, so less needing to use checkinstall to automatically produce halfassed RPMs from tarballs. You get a *good* set of download-and-install tools (Fedora uses apt and yum, unlike RH's piss-poor up2date...I've been griping about this on Slashdot for ages). You don't need to add Fedora's apt or yum package to your distro to actually use the large set of well-packaged packages.
This is the *best* thing that's happened for RH users for a long time, and we someone, confused or malicious, posting a "RH is dead" story? What the heck? Is this guy a Mac OS X nut, or just completely and utterly confused?
Clearly, RH should have done a press release, but it was damned irresponsible of Slashdot editors not to add a followup comment, given how significant this is to the Slashdot community. It's like a story claiming "Debian is being acquired by Microsoft" when someone packages WINE for it, or something equally ridiculous.
May we never see th
Most people say that the Fedora project is the end of RedHat age. I belive that Red Hat has become very smart because send to the community all work of the support linux distribution. How much expensive is prove support in a Linux Distribution for free ?? If it send this work to community is more cheap ?? I think so ! :-D
Red Hat Linux Product Development VP
Airport Screener Security Specialist
Corporate Name Consultant
Product Development Manager, "Microsoft Bob"
Product Development Manager, "Apple Newton"
Product Development Manager, "New Coke"
HAHAHAHA, you got modded down as flamebait!! stupid moron commie LIB!!
Recommendation: Stick to SLACKWARE.
SuSE just got acquired by Novell today, and you can bet what this means. Combining SuSE with RedCarpet, means selling a yearly update service.
Just this week I ended up signing for another year for the Symantec Antivirus updates. This is the last year I ever do this. If someone decides that they want to sell you a piece of software that involves updates, either they should give you the original software free or simply include the updates as part of the original price. I'm sick and tired up paying for Cable TV, and I'm not interested in paying for software updates.
Even though we burn M$, including myself, I have to say that at least they are not ripping me off like that. I mean, that was the original reason why Linux is what it is today, and what it could be tomorrow. What's the use if you have to pay at ever step.
I just simply wonder. If Slackware can function with one main distro developer, how come RedHat and the like need hundreds of people?
I've used SuSe in the past, and for me it sucks. Mandrake is definitely great. And that would be my first move on the desktop. I would simply stick with SLACKWARE on the server side for all my clients. RedHat is going to hell for their extremely dumb decision! I have personally promoted Linux and RedHat for years, but no more.
Right - and I admin somewhere around a dozen of these type boxes. I realize I could create multiple e-mail addresses, but so much for me Trying To Do The Right Thing (tm).
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
For the quarter ended Aug 2003 (in thousands):
;p
Total subscription and services revenue 28,849
Total cost of subscription and services revenue 7,981
Gross profit enterprise technologies and retail 20,868
Hmm, I don't see anything about $2 expense for $1 revenue. Could you clarify? In fact, it looks like Redhat pulled in $3.60 for each dollar it cost them. Now isn't that funny?
They must be cooking the books over there, because they'd have to be foolish to not support your simplistic ideas about business! IOW, Redhat *is* profitable and has been for awhile now. Nyah Thppt!.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
What do you mean "create multiple addresses"? Just create one so you can receive information about the updates. Script it so you parse the URLs from the emails and store the rpm packages on your local ftp or web server. From there how you distribute them to your boxes is your decision. You can do it with apt4rpm, yum or even up2date since it now supports apt and yum software repositories.
And thats what it all boils down to. GPL acts like its the best free and fair thing thats helping the world. But if your truely interested in things such as helping the end user and good software grow, you would NOT be a fraid to hold other potential companies / business models back and you WOULD NOT have such restrive licences such as GPL that are largely based around an alias of Fear and Greed.
PHP is the best example against this.. these the PHP open source side under BSD licence and theres the Zend commercial business model. The reason why PHP is so successful is because they KNOW they can BSD there stuff cos they ARE NOT afraid of any one else cos they are truely good software, and if some one can make a better commercial product then they are welcome to try and and creates great competition thats beneficial to the end user. This is was the true open source spirit should be about, not licence based around fear of competion, and holding back others. Deep down inside RMS knows this but he knows that GPL is a good seductive licence that can suck in developers, but as many other people have said RMS's goals are a little more sinister and evil then that, but I wont bother going into them.
Aparently, you've never even used it.
I mean register each machine with another e-mail address, so they would all be free.
Yes, I know I could do that. I could use up3date. I could subscribe to Bugtraq, parse out all of the RedHat updates, and they wouldn't even have any of my e-mail addresses. There are probably many ways I haven't even thought of.
The point is that they (quite reasonably, IMHO) ask(ed) for $60/year for this service. I used that service. I find it hard to believe that if people followed that (even giving the first machine away for free), they would lose money. Evidentally, there were too many leeching, so they did lose money, and now they're moving to their WS/ES/AS levels and leaving all of us (including those who did pay real money) without an alternative for the services to which I was referring - namely the low-end DNS/DHCP/firewall/non-critical WWW, for which ES is overkill and Fedora is both too unstable and will require version updates too frequently.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
Arguement #3.) The source is free, download and compile it yourself. Answer: HAHA, you first, doogie howser. They give out the source, but I bet you can't just compile it all together! I bet you have to mess with and tweak and change --config-with-blah=18934 a billion times, and you'd still not be half way there.
That's where Gentoo Linux comes in, they make compiling from source at least as easy as installing the latest binary build. Read up about Portage at www.gentoo.org
We don't need RedHat to create distros for us anymore...
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.