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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!!!!
Seems to me that the product formerly known as Redhat Linux, is now called Fedora. What's the big deal?
Seems that way. People are going to recommend what they know, and without a free Red Hat, not as many people will know it.
LordBodak's journal.
Red Hat is targeting corporations, and corporations don't care about personal recommendations. They know they need UNIX, and they know that Red Hat Enterprise is as stable and reliable for production servers, and beats most of them at TCO.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
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
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.
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
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
So they are going to rely on Volunteers to do the work for them? It seems a little dirty that RH has decided that they want to use the community to provide Fedora -- to maintain this 'farmiliarity' -- but not do it in house.
Have a look at the mailing lists and who is doing the work. RedHat is hosting Fedora and their developers are working on it as well. They are doing it in house, but out in the open and allowing the community to participate in the process.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
It's days like this I'm glad I made the switch to Debian at home. I seriously doubt there is every anything to worry about with them "selling out". Since it's free it also won't be going away. Someone else will just take over in place of people that leave. Debian is truly the free distribution that supports the FSF's ideal of a free operating system. Thanks Debian contributers, you make an awesome distribution.
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.
This is completely wrong, at least for our situation. I work as a EE using tools from places like Cadence and Mentor Graphics (EDA stuff - spice, schematic, layout, etc), and currently ALL the tools support old UNIX OSs. HP/UX and Solaris are the main choices. Tool vendors just recently started porting their apps to Linux (for the most part they picked RH, sometimes SuSE also).
The main selling point for Linux for us is hardware NOT software. I can get a more powerful AMD64 or P4 box a LOT cheaper than a Sun U60 or HP C3700 (and those aren't exactly high-end these days either). A lot of the cost advantage comes from the OS side. I'm trying to get the people here to convert to Linux, but RH just took a lot of the motivation away. People are going to argue, why should we pay to move to an unproven platform, when the cost saving is so little. The tools we use play nicely on Solaris and HP/UX, and RH is the unsupported one. For the AMD64, RedHat Enterprise Linux WS costs $792 per node!! We could buy a single set and copy the hell out of it, but thats probably forbidden somewhere (yes/no?)
I can tell you there is NO way we are going to replace 500 workstations with an unproven OS costing $800/box. I mean get real, where the heck did they pull this $792 number from, their stupid red hat?!? IMO, RH just shot itself in the foot...
I used to own an R/C indoor carpet track. I charged people $3 a day for track time during the week when there were no races. Come in in the morning and stay all bloody day for all cared.
.
My brother could never understand this. "You can't make any money that way. You have to charge them by the hour."
But I didn't make money from this and didn't even intend to. That $3 a day added up to cover the fixed costs I had just to remain open whether someone gave me a few bucks or not. Rent, insurance, etc. all coverd by that nominal fee. That meant every penny I took in for racing, cars, parts, snacks, etc. was pure profit, profit that otherwise would have been eaten up by rent, insurance. .
I loved the fact that my customers payed me money to allow me to sell them tires and Coke.
But more importantly it generated traffic. There were always people hanging about and playing with their cars. That made my place the place to go hang out and play with your cars. When new people showed up there were people there, hanging out, playing with cars. Cool!
That made my place the place to race. Which is where I made my money!
I think Red Hat would be standing there with my brother saying, "But how do you make any money only charging them $3 a day?"
Arrrrrgh!
KFG
The Fedora trademark is deliberately arranged so that people can make and sell CD images of it (see fedora.redhat.com for details). Fedora is like the old old Red Hat, with people making images and rapid turnaround. I know several people who will be selling Fedora on CD - which is important - we don't all have broadband.
Its like the world was in Red Hat 5 and 6, because with business split off you can go both ways.
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
The Red Hat name. When I bring folks down to my data center to give them the "Blinking Lights" tour, I can no longer announce we run the bank of computers on "Red Hat Linux". Doesn't matter that Fedora is the same basic OS that gave RHL its strong brand name in the first place. They don't hear the name, they'll think "cheap knock off".
Why not just break down and buy RHEL? Cost. For what it will cost to "upgrade" all my linux boxes I fought hard to get installed in lieu of Windows, I could be serval new servers, which personally I'd rather have. Hell, I can't even claim cost savings anymore, because RHEL is a yearly subscription, and for a typical 3 year lifespan of hardware, $299x3 > $799 once for Windows server 2003.
What does this mean? We IT folks basically have to "Steal the Brand" back. Tell upper management Fedora IS the version of Linux thats been running your servers so reliably for the last 5 years.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
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.]
My guess is that the decision to re-name the free version came from the marketing group. I bet they want to take advantage of the well-known Red Hat name to publish the more profitable Enterprise version as the 'gold standard' OS that a middle manager can justify putting on an important server system, while Fedora will gradually become identified with the 'hippies, hackers, and poor students' crowd. I suppose that this is a way for them to get around the 'free software is for commies' view of some of the higher-ups in business and make a buck at the same time. Not a big deal in my view, and maybe not even entirely crazy from a business plan point of view.
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).
What, Red Hat forced you to buy their stock? Instead of asking for an apology, you should thank them for having the integrity to price their stock IPO at an honest $7 (relative to your purchase after the stock split once) a share during the height of dot-com mania. If you'd waited until after it dipped down to $7 again, and bought it at the price they suggested it was worth, you could have sold it today and doubled your money.
The last time Red Hat offered a stock-related freebie to their supporters (the IPO offer to everyone who'd ever given them so much as a bugzilla report, not to mention code), they took a lot of flak from the confusion of it. Imagine how much fun they'd have sorting out a "everyone who claims to have bought RHAT during the dot com bubble gets a free subscription" policy!