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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.
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.
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.
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.
In two years you will be using Fedora at home, and when your boss askes you what to use, you will say "Red Hat Enterprise" because you want support.
All that's happening here is that the free download, no support Red Hat is going to be called Fedora, and a loose committee of volunteers will pick package versions and make other decisions, kind of like Debian or Gentoo or other distributions not run by a business. Red Hat will sell a version of that with support contracts, and keep a close enough eye on Fedora and have enough employees helping out there that they can steer / follow the direction it is going in.
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.
You don't have to pay to use up2date
The end result for Redhat, no more income from me.
Still, this was not done to stop freeloaders, as we can still use fedora (a.k.a red hat linux 10).
So the only thing that is changed, is that you wont receive installation support or being able to buy it at stores
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Buy Slack distros. I do.
If you don't like Slackware, there are many other distros out there ...
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.
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"
How can they possibly lose money?
They only need to update the packages once, that's a fixed cost, no matter how many subscribe to RHN.
The only variable cost is the bandwidth, lets say 2gbyte per server per year, it's probably lower than that. That's 62 bytes/sec per server subscribed, if you average it out. That's 3000 servers on a T1 worth of bandwidth.
Yes, this is about money, but their logic is faulty. They think that most of the RHN users will mostly upgrade to RHEL. This is where they are very wrong. Most of us don't need phone in support, we just need updates, and we are willing to pay a reasonable amount for it. Maybe up to $100 per server per year. That's about what RHN used to cost, before they lowered the price to $60 a year.
But not $350 per server per year, with an EULA to rival something from MSFT. In my eyes, the EULA is a bigger deal than the money. I might want to spend the money, if I didn't feel like I was giving up all my rights under the GPL just to get updates for a server.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
+5 Insightful? Free RedHat == Fedora
Why is this so difficult for people to comprehend?
It costs a lot of money to backport security/bug fixes to old releases for years on end. RedHat can't afford to be doing that for products that people download for free. So, you get your free community-supported Fedora and your $$ commercial-support-for-five-years RedHat Enterprise. Fedora will be the proving ground for things that end up in later Enterprise versions.
This was announced many months ago - first that the "consumer" RedHat distro would only be supported for 12 months, then that the "consumer" RedHat distro would no longer be sold as such and it would merge with Fedora instead. If this story caught you by surprise then you were asleep at the switch.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
You would use RHEL over a competing Linux distro mainly for the strong support of other software vendors like Oracle, and IBM (Java, WebSphere Studio, ClearCase). Sure these applications will most likely work on other distros, but the systems are already designed to play nicely with RHEL and vice versa. There's also the backported security patches for 5 years. You won't have to upgrade to a new release of openssh when 5 exploits are released in the span of one week next year, you just get the patches backported to your current version by RedHat, typically in less than 12 hours. And if you have 100 servers, I'd take RHN over apt-get. You just log onto rhn.redhat.com, identify which patches to apply (you can apply them to all affected servers or a subset you define), and the machines all upgrade themselves from one handy administrative interface. I'm not aware of such an interface for any other distro. You can delegate privileges to multiple users too.
Do you have a moral objection to Debian being maintained by volunteers. Red Hat is transitioning their free distribution to the same model. Red Hat will pay their employees to maintain and package their code. In the meantime, joe volunteer is now able to step up to the plate and maintain official packages for his favorite application which RH doesn't include. For example, RH doesn't offer the linux-wlan-ng software, but someone already maintains RPMs of it built for RH. He now has a framework to have his work included as part of Fedora Core. Sounds like a win for both sides to me.
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.
Are you banking that readers/moderators will not bother to read the message you linked to? Of course Fedora will be available in public CVS.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
Interesting, as when I posted this months ago, I was blasted in here for being a total idiot. Here's my post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=74902&cid=6709 167
Anyway, this has been a long time coming, and it should be no suprise.
This isn't wrong (hell it's good business practice) but do not mistake it for something that it's not.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
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