Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"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.
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?
Maybe some of them will switch to Gentoo Linux now. ;)
(Or maybe not.. I'm just being silly..heh)
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.