Red Hat, SUSE Announce Educational Discounts

geoff313 writes "Good news week for Linux users in the education field, as both Red Hat and SUSE have announced that they will provide academic discounts in an effort to attract "students and educational institutions." According to this article published on CNET, while both companies have decided to offer discounts, they are each going about it a different way. SUSE has begun to offer "schools, students, universities and nonprofit customers a discount of more than 40 percent through two sales partners, CCV Software and Ricis." Red Hat, on the other hand, plans to offer two new versions of its distributions, based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) line. The first, aimed at students and named Red Hat Academic Desktop, will sell for $25 and is based on RHEL WS. The second, to be sold to schools and named Red Hat Academic Server, will sell for $50 and is based off RHEL ES. Both products will include online updates (presumably through its Red Hat Network) but will not include telephone support. Bulk pricing is also available, and administrative licenses will be available soon."

Comments

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this to catch up with Microsoft? :-)

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

would steve Embalmer get fired if he started saying Linux is a better product than Windoze???

you bet Bill Pearly Gates would fire him in a minute...

Not really clear.

[FreeLinux]

I understand what Red Hat is offering, as they no longer have a free version of their software. But, SuSE still offers a free FTP install. What does SuSE's academic version offer that the free FTP install does not?

Re:Not really clear.

[Anonymous Coward]

support

Re:Not really clear.

[numark]

I'm guessing probably official support from the company. Free versions don't usually have support included.

Re:Not really clear.

[swtaarrs]

Probably what most distros give you for paying: Priority support.

Re:Not really clear.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, my guess is:
- Support
- Manuals
- Installation Medium (you can copy it for your students too, and it's easier/cheaper to install from those for many people).
- Some software like MuPad (computer algebra system), or RealPlayer which are not in the ftp server.

Re:Not really clear.

[KillerHamster]

How about an operating system for students without broadband? (We do exist.)

Re:Not really clear.

[MikeD83]

You can only download the last release free of charge. The current release is only avaliable if you pay. For instance, Suse 9.0 is out; however, the mirrors only have Suse 8.2.

Re:Not really clear.

[ottothecow]

I see 300 people downloading from a bittorrent link that says otherwise

Re:Not really clear.

[ottothecow]

say...they say but the link says

Re:Not really clear.

[treat]

But, SuSE still offers a free FTP install.

Really? Where can I download the latest SuSE?

Re:Not really clear.

[bhtooefr]

Keep in mind, SuSE isn't selling custom versions of their distro - they're selling the same box as the SLPro9.0 box, just with a sticker saying "Academic" on it, and a MSRP of $50 instead of $80: http://www.ccvsoftware.com/c/@4PyjmvbDbxkQg/Pages/ product.html?record@CDSU903

What sucks is that they need a student ID, which my high school does not use (although, they could do what they did last time I needed a student ID - make a temporary one), and you must be a full-time college student to get the discount as a college student (I'm in a program where I go to college while I'm in high school, but I'm not going full-time to my college yet... ARRGH!)

Re:Not really clear.

[bhtooefr]

Actually, it's a re-labeled SuSE 9 Pro box. You get everything you get with SuSE 9 Pro, just it costs $30 less.

Re:Not really clear.

[EvilAlien]

SUSE LINUX for i386 can be installed free of charge directly from the FTP server

It is still 8.2, perhaps that is your point. Is that the last SuSE release freely available?

I thought universities just downloaded it for free

[eln]

Now, I haven't been part of a university for several years, but don't universities these days have fairly fast Internet connections for the most part?

If you don't get telephone support with these products, which I thought was the main reason to actually spend money on a distribution anyway, why not just download them for free?

But...

[thestarz]

...Linux is free! :-)

Re:But...

[RPoet]

- "Free Tibet! Free Tibet!"
- "Hi, Tibet? I'll take it!"

Re:But...

[pyros]

protester: Free Tibet! Free Tibet

Peter: I'll take it! Hello, China? I have something I think you want, but it'll cost you. That's right, all the tea.

Re:But...

[paradizelost]

A quote from: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/philosophy.html
Fre e software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs from material objects--such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline--in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These possibilities make software as useful as it is; we believe software users should be able to make use of them.

Re:But...

[Dr. Evil]

Shhh!

You'll ruin their business model!

Re:But...

[AchmedHabib]

And you are free to download the kernel and build your own system around it.

Technical support

[Phoenix Dreamscape]

"And Red Hat will offer more expensive but still discounted options for schools that want Red Hat technical support."

So you can buy it discounted with no support, or expensive with support. Why would anybody take the first option? There are plenty of free distributions with updates and no support...

Re:Technical support

[Geekbot]

Actually, this is a great deal. Geeks at academic institutions don't necessarily need phone support, or at least it's not cost effective in many cases. However, academics absolutely need the more stable Enterprise version of RH, not the new Fedora. Also, the updates and computer based support is essential for the professionals at the college to get their computers running as only they know how, but with the information they need and the updates to keep it stable.
As for students, this is a solid benefit. CS majors will want a linux distro that offers support. They will benefit from an extremely cheap OS and support system. And there's still the free version for hobbyists that do not need immediate professional support, or do not need it enough to pay for it. Personally, I like playing around on linux, I don't use it that much, and I'm cheap. I'd take the free version. But if I was in one of these two situations or in a situation where I needed enterprise level support I would jump at one of these deals from RH.

Re:Technical support

[AKnightCowboy]

"And Red Hat will offer more expensive but still discounted options for schools that want Red Hat technical support."

Debian countered the Red Hat and SuSE announcements with a press release of their own saying that Debian will continue to offer a completely free Linux distribution to academic users so they can avoid the "pompous greedy sods" at those other two companies.

Re:Technical support

[Menthos]

Yes, providing five year commercial-level support agreements in exchange for actual money is greedy and should be outlawed. Or something...

The FSF and the GNU project actually encourages commercial interests and business models in the free software arena. Funny that Debian, from the description of the previous poster, seemingly cannot tolerate that, but has to do such statements.

Re:Technical support

[Menthos]

So you can buy it discounted with no support, or expensive with support. Why would anybody take the first option? There are plenty of free distributions with updates and no support...

One word: RHN.

By using RHEL or RHAS we can continue to use Red Hat Network, while the same option won't be available for Fedora. And RHN is much more than just the mere theoretical availability of updates; it's guaranteed access to updates when they're available and allows for automatic or scheduled installs, system grouping and grouped update policies, and so on.

One thing that annoyed the hell out of me in the past was that when I needed updates to patch servers as soon as possible, the ftp servers were all full and the mirrors didn't have the fixes yet etc, which was more than just a little frustrating. With RHN I suddenly had priority access to updates and could get them in no time at all times, and also schedule their install or even install them automatically upon availability. That made a major difference. I need no telephone support, but I cannot live without RHN anymore, so a RHEL or RHAS without support fits this use perfectly.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok.

Here's the insider-scoop. I work for OSDN and that's why I can't post here with my account.

The reason why Michael left was his dissatisfaction with the recent TacoSnotting sessions. Taco's getting old and drying up. Michael had to wear his SS-uniform extra neat and whip Taco's and Cowboy Neal's pasty white buttocks with extra vigour before sufficient amounts of TacoSnot were produced.

He's rumoured to be heading for K5. They need someone to update their moderation system and Michael's the one to do it.

What a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems surreal that something that was born and raised in academia is now offered for a "discount". What a shame.

Maybe RMS had a point.

Re:What a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of projects are worked on by universities which then create a company to market them (or go bankrupt).

Re:What a shame

[Telex4]

It seems surreal that something that was born and raised in academia is now offered for a "discount". What a shame.

Maybe RMS had a point.

Maybe you should have another read of what RMS wrote. Remember free as in speech, not as in beer?

Re:What a shame

[God! Awful 2]

Maybe you should have another read of what RMS wrote. Remember free as in speech, not as in beer?

Yeah, as if RMS really believes that! Ever heard of lip service?

-a

Re:What a shame

[moranar]

...Maybe RMS had a point.

A point like "you can sell free software as you like, as long as you distribute sources too?"

I've never heard Stallman denying the possibility of making a buck out of free software. Insightful... Sheesh!

Re:What a shame

[yomegaman]

I don't know him personally, but RMS doesn't exactly strike me as the sort of person who would just say what he thought people wanted to hear. Quite the opposite, actually, which is why I'm sort of glad that I don't know him personally. :-)

Re:What a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems surreal that something that was born and raised in academia is now offered for a "discount". What a shame.

Aww, you mean a company is trying to get money in return for the services they provide? What assholes they must be.

Re:What a shame

[Guppy06]

"It seems surreal that something that was born and raised in academia is now offered for a "discount"."

This may be difficult for you to believe, but there is more to "academia" than the computer science program. The vast majority of college students and faculty don't know what the word "compile" means and would be interested in user support that goes beyond "RTFM, luser!" posts on USENET.

Re:What a shame

[God! Awful 2]

RMS may not be not be against selling software in theory, but I'm pretty sure he's opposed to 99% of the ways people try to sell software in practice.

I guess it comes down to what I always complain about, which is geeks seeing everything in black and white terms. RMS may speak his mind, but I think this is a case where he has rationalized something. Call it what you will... I call it splitting hairs, lip service, rationalization, etc.

-a

Re:What a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

The FSF makes a large proportion of their money from selling CDs. This was even more true before the Internet became popular, and the only way to get the latest versions of the GNU tools was to subscribe to the CD update service.

Re:What a shame

[God! Awful 2]

The FSF makes a large proportion of their money from selling CDs. This was even more true before the Internet became popular, and the only way to get the latest versions of the GNU tools was to subscribe to the CD update service.

If you go to the FSF page today, the fact that they offer CDs for sale is not exactly displayed prominently. If you dig a bit deeper you see that they do sell CDs, but they make no attempt to disguise the fact that this is basically a donation, not a sale.

-a

Re:What a shame

[dtfinch]

I'm still waiting for my bootable membership card to arrive in the mail.

Re:What a shame

[Sk0Rn]

But, "RTFM, luser!" has such a nice ring to it...

Free as in $25

[Fux the Penguin]

I find this to be an interesting turn of events. At my university, they have site licenses for all of Microsoft's software, so you can get Windows XP for precisely $0 dollars. Now, my classmates will have the opportunity to purchase RedHat or SuSE for a mere $25!

Oh, what a world, when Windows is cheaper for students than Linux.

Re:Free as in $25

[Adolph_Hitler]

This is good, I'm happy that Redhat is deciding to do this as a student myself. Now I'm considering purchasing Redhat, $25 is reasonable.

Re:Free as in $25

[Anonymous Coward]

You should compare $25 with the cost of site license divided by the number of users.

Re:Free as in $25

[jason.stover]

At the College where I work, our CS department uses the MSDN-AA agreement. Basically, students can get any MS product that we teach, and a lot not taught, at no cost.

The problem is the product keys. The student needs to get a different product key every time the OS, program, etc is re-installed. So, say they're working on a Server 2003 build, and screw it up totally when setting up an Active Directory. They need to re-log into Microsofts MSDN-AA site, request another Key, etc...

All in all it's a great Academic program for the Microsoft crowd. If I was a MS type, I'm sure I'd use it more (staff can take any MS product we have, install at home, etc...).

-J

Re:Free as in $25

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you are taking a few English courses! Read what you wrote and tell me what is wrong with it.

Re:Free as in $25

[Anonymous Coward]

someone should end your life you miserable little spinmeister

Re:Free as in $25

[Anonymous Coward]

> Oh, what a world, when Windows is cheaper for students than Linux.

How is this insightful or even remotely accurate?

Re:Free as in $25

[Heartz]

You have paid for it mate. It was included in your tuition fee. Nothing in this world is free. There's always associated costs, yes, even with free software.

Re:Free as in $25

[pp]

No. For the Microsoft campus licenses you still need to buy an OEM Windows license for every machine (around $100). This lets you install
any version of Windows, Office and Visual Studio
on the machine. If you don't have one, your "free" XP is as illegal as it is if you warezed it off the net.

Of course, your university pays something in the range of hundreds of thousands to millions of
dollars / year for the contract, but since that's
not out of your pocket (apart from tuition or taxes), it's obviously a really great deal every university should buy into!

Compare this to the $2500 site license that article mentions for RHEL, assuming that happens. I hope it will, that would give students a possibility to get a long-term supported OS for free, or if they feel like it suits them better, they can use Fedora or Debian (also for free).

Re:Free as in $25

[Mr.Ned]

RTFA. For $2,500, any school can offer its students as many free versions of the Academic as they'd like, complete with security updates for the lifetime of the product.

Re:Free as in $25

[Threni]

>They need to re-log into Microsofts MSDN-AA site, request another Key, etc...

And how long does this take? Sounds like it's quite quick, and a good solution to piracy, given the alternative (protected media/programs, looking up words from manuals, online checks each time the code is run etc)

Re:Free as in $25

[fermion]

Now I haven't been around a university for a while, but MS software was never free, even with a site license. We still had to pay 'copying costs', which for large apps ran in the 15-30 dollar range.

Re:Free as in $25

[jason.stover]

It depends on the student, normally, it takes about 10min or so to dig through the site, and request a new key; then you just wait on the e-mail which has it.

The MSDN-AA is, it seems, a excelent program for Education Institutions. For the CSIT department, it's cheaper than what the Colleges site license cost (just the OS), and covers far more Applications (OS [pro/server/embeded/etc], SQL server, VisualStudio, Project, Dev tools, etc...).

-J

Re:Free as in $25

[jesterzog]

I was considering upgrading my ageing win98 OS to XP using the student licencing system through my university. (Free Microsoft licences for students, etc etc.)

Then I read the agreement and discovered that I wasn't allowed to keep the CD, and that was the end of it. There's absolutely no way I'll install an operating system on my PC if I'm not allowed to keep the installation software. There was also the unease in locking myself into being forced to pay lots of money as soon as I'm no longer a student. ie. It's not really free, only delaying the payment.

Within a couple of weeks I'd killed Windows altogether, and I took the opportunity to migrate properly to linux -- which I've been trying and failing to do for various reasons over the last five years or so. Now I'm happily running Debian on the desktop, and it's been going great.

I can give you free support in 2 words

[Raul654]

Local LUG

Two big stupidity points

[Anonymous Coward]

1. When Microsoft does this it's "pandering"; when Red Hat and SuSE do it it's "good news".
2. How the fuck do you give a discount on free software?

Re:Two big stupidity points

[jasonbowen]

One big stupidty point, they are selling support, not the operating system. You are free to roll your own or keep all your software up to date with the latest bug and security fixes on your own, but a lot of people don't want to do that, hence the success of SuSE and Redhat.

Re:Two big stupidity points

[stealth.c]

When Microsoft does it it's easy to see as bad because time after time MS makes it quite obvious they do everything in the name of end-user lock-in. Microsoft gives its software away for the same reason a drug dealer gives away free samples. Once you go Microsoft, closed "standards" and all, it's hard to get out.

When RedHat and SuSE do it, it's a relief. First, OSS ought to be the software of acadamia. Second, the nature of OSS prevents that lock-in. Third, when you do pay for your OSS, you're getting support that someone's reputation/job is riding on. Microsoft doesn't give two shits whether or not the patches work properly on your machine.

You can't give a discount on free software, but you can discount support. That's why the $2500 support license comes with free copies for everyone and long-term patch access across the board. If I was a university (with a clue about technology) that'd be a nice deal.

Nice, but I'm

[justsomebody]

being perfectly happy with fedora, (yum and apt rock).

All the things in Eugenia's rantings are already solvedand I have best distro up until now, at least as far as it concerns me.

Anyway still nice that RH is extending support for commercial desktop.

Re:Nice, but I'm

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Eugenia and OSNews is that she acts there like a nazi. Only her own shit counts there. Basically it's a one person Slashdot. Instead people debatting about articles she debattes about people there and flame them for their opinions.

She created a very bad reputation on the once nice OSNews and she does everything to become the top most hated person.

Re:Nice, but I'm

[Anonymous Coward]

I was sort of pissed off at Red Hat. But what the hell, I downloaded a couple of dozen Fedora rpms and did a manual install to get a basic Fedora system up and running.

It's not bad at all. I was all prepared to slag it, but Fedora really is OK. You could call it Red Hat 10. Nothing weird or different. Very stable. People who know Red Hat won't be disappointed. The real question is whether or not Fedora is going to diverge away from Red Hat, or if it will track RHEL.

Re:Nice, but I'm

[justsomebody]

yep, basically if Linux isn't Slackware describe all external weakpoints, if it is Slackware describe every theme just to get more favorable text. Well, it's easy to describe weak points against better, just to get another viewpoint that messes up facts

I mean if someone is doing detailed distribution evaluation about system internals (like compiling and samba settings), that one should be at least computer literate.

Re:Nice, but I'm

[justsomebody]

The real question is whether or not Fedora is going to diverge away from Red Hat, or if it will track RHEL

Fact that Fedoa is RHEL testbed should tell you that you've messed up the facts, RHEL will track Fedora not the opposite

Re:Nice, but I'm

[Anonymous Coward]

You'r messed up. Fedora is test-ware. It will not have bug fixes, security updates etc for more than a few short months. It is a waste of time. There are other distros that are way better. Debian is serious, stable, supported distro, Mandrake is easy for novices, Knoppix is just great to play with and is also stable because it's based on Debian. Fedora is a game without a purpose.

Re:Nice, but I'm

[Anonymous Coward]

Why dont you go read the faq and actually listen then think about what redhat & others have said about fedora instead of standing on your altar and dispensing your so called knowledge like it is fact.

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[MSG]

Stability, in terms of having a consistant platform for an extended period of time, is worth a lot. This is particularly true when you've got a limited staff trying to support hundreds of terminals around a large campus. Distributions that you can "download for free" don't offer the guaranteed, extended lifetime that you're going to get from RHEL. At least, not with continuing security updates.

Re:fuck you redhat and SUSE.

[nutbar]

Your debian THX, with full digital surround sound?

To be fair

[Raul654]

You're not paying for the software itself which, as you said, came from Acadamia. You are paying the tech peoples' salaries and for the servers to host the updates on.

Eugenia is full of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah Eugenia is definately full of freaking shit.

Re:fuck you redhat and SUSE.

[gnu-generation-one]

"I'll keep my debian thx for $0, after all that is the point of free software."

But not the point of Free Software.

Support

[Raul654]

If you want good tech support, you have to pay for it. And updates, but you can get those for free anyhow (but the paying custumers usually get peak-hours priority).

Discount on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I though it was free.

Re:Discount on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

.. yes, it was :)

Use Debianbased Skolelinux instead

[Tete-a-tete]

Skolelinux is a better option for most schools. Completely free.

Re:Use Debianbased Skolelinux instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it in English (USA) or what?

Re:Use Debianbased Skolelinux instead

[Tete-a-tete]

Skolelinux is being translated into a host of languages - the default option for most software included is naturally English, so English is the easiest part. Other than that, there are three Norwegian languages, French, German, Portugese, Spanish, Latvian... About 10 in all at present. More to come!

at the local universities around here

[waspleg]

they have deals w/ M$ that allow them to sell "educational" versions of everything they make for $5 a cd (so like, when i got visual studio a copule years ago it was $25 for 5 disks)the only difference between educational and full versions is that the product keys and activations have been pre-installed/disabled... in exchange fo this access the universities basically promise to not use or teach anything other than M$ products. So, would you rather have a $5 copy of xp or a $25 copy of redhat who has officially cut their desktop aspirations.

As a redhat stock holder, I'm extremely disappointed with the recent changes redhat has made, when they IPO'd and I got the stock as soon I could, not because I particularly liked redhat, I don't, I've nver used it as my primary OS and I prefer many other flavors of Linux over it; however I saw in redhat the best chance at a real competitor to microsoft; and now they are not. I'm working on getting rid of my stock. I advise other people to do the same thing. It's sad that the real RedHat vision had to die because I would have liked to see M$ running scared with something other than billy's old buddy's OS gaining market share.

Re:at the local universities around here

[PPGMD]

Many University are part of the Campus Lisence program where they get Unlimited free copies to many of the Microsoft programs. They do this thourgh the Volume lisence program, so it has no activation. Now the University can decide how to distribute it, the college I went to gave you a copy of Office during "dis"-orientation, and you could check most of the other Microsoft products out at the Library. If you wanted a copy of your own, you could purchase it at the bookstore for the educational discount rate.

At another school that I visited when you signed up for a class, the cost of CD-R's were included with the lab fees and copies were given out during the first couple of classes. And at another school that I visited you got a form, where you can give them CD-Rs, and they will copy it for you, if you were in a class that needed it.

Though that doesn't nessarly mean that the school has to go MS only, at the school that a went to, most of their servers were *nix, and at one of the other schools that I visited they had Linux, and Oracle classes.

Personally I believe most schools teach Microsoft products because they are easier to use, particularlly when you are dealing with Elective students that barely know how the surf the net, let alone with within an IDE.

Re:at the local universities around here

[cduffy]

As a redhat stock holder, I'm extremely disappointed with the recent changes redhat has made, when they IPO'd and I got the stock as soon I could, not because I particularly liked redhat, I don't, I've nver used it as my primary OS and I prefer many other flavors of Linux over it; however I saw in redhat the best chance at a real competitor to microsoft; and now they are not.

How so?

They still sell and support a workstation product (Red Hat WS), and while they take the official position that it isn't ready for general (ie. home) desktop use, I haven't seen any statements to the effect that they don't still believe in Linux on the *corporate* desktop.

Just because they've made "Red Hat Linux" into "Fedora Linux" and stopped selling support for it such that their lowest-end supported desktop product is Red Hat WS, doesn't mean they're entirely out of the race.

Re:at the local universities around here

[The Analog Kid]

Red Hat didn't cut their desktop aspirations, they opened their development model and allowed outsiders to contribute to what the product should be. It's called Fedora. It's Red Hat sponsored. They were not making any real money off of Red Hat free version, so why bother keeping something that looses money. They created Fedora out of it, so the community can keep it going, while they focus on where the real money is, the enterprise industry, where companies actually need support for their product, and are not going to use some LUG group. Maybe you should think about why they did what they did instead of shooting them down, as if they are really pulling away from Linux.

Re:at the local universities around here

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, give it up!

The people you are dealing with are zealots. They can no more see good in anything Red Hat does than they can fly unpowered to the moon. I am wholeheartedly sick to death of Debian/KDE crazies shooting their mouths off about this and making out that Red Hat is evil -- but I'm not going to try to reason with them... I learned my lesson before (cough... Bluecurve...cough).

Re:at the local universities around here

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://biz.yahoo.com/e/030627/rhat10-q.html under Retail.
$4.5 million in three months isn't quite what I would call "not any real money".

Re:at the local universities around here

[DrXym]

Actually their development model has always been open simply through the fact that they took other peoples stuff and bundled it up in their dist.

As for Red Hat 9 losing money... How much is Fedora going to lose? After all, at least RH9 recouped some money through retail sales and paid support, and of course the hundreds of WS/ES/AS deployments it lead to. Whereas Fedora costs nothing, sells nowhere, has no paid support and is not likely going to result in nearly as many sales of Red Hat's high end commercial offerings.

I don't see the change being a smart thing at all.

Re:at the local universities around here

[The Analog Kid]

As for Red Hat 9 losing money... How much is Fedora going to lose? After all, at least RH9 recouped some money through retail sales and paid support, and of course the hundreds of WS/ES/AS deployments it lead to. Whereas Fedora costs nothing, sells nowhere, has no paid support and is not likely going to result in nearly as many sales of Red Hat's high end commercial offerings.

Maybe that's the point. It's not meant to make money. It's free, so the less it costs to make it, the better.

Re:at the local universities around here

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora won't lose much money (directly). Sometime within the next 6 months, RH will fire or divert all paid staff working on Fedora. At that point, the cost of Fedora is the cost of hosting space and some small change to keep the volunteers happy.

You also mention the indirect costs: lost RHE sales etc. This will cost RH a fortune, and they will blame their plummeting revenues on anything other than this bad business decision.

---The Prophet

Well

[rsilvergun]

some people just can't imagine using software without spending some money. I guess this will appeal to them. It'd still make more sense to buy one of those 'Linux in 20 days' kinda books and use that though. That's how I got started with Redhat 6.2.

Evaluation

[Anonymous Coward]

Our institution was just recently approached by Red Hat who wanted a high-profile academic client to showcase. We had been sitting on the fence in regards to our next upgrade cycle. We found that the network abstraction layer on most of Windows 9x/Me desktops would no longer work with the .NET Framework which we had deployed on on our Sun Solaris 9 servers. So, the logical choice was Windows 2000 or XP, but we did not like the licensing presented in Service Pack 3 and 2 respectively.

After much debate within the different research groups, it was at an opportune time that Red Hat approached us. We deployed their KDE desktop, along with the video-edition of GIMP in most of our audio-visual labs. We've gained quite a bit of bandwidth since we no longer have to support NetBIOS broadcasts in our network and core routers.

Our only concern are the Cisco routers and their compability with RH9, but we were planning on deploying Neoteris SSL VPNs anyways.

Which is nice.

Re:Evaluation

[FreeLinux]

Our only concern are the Cisco routers and their compability with RH9

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not aware of any compatibility issues between RH9 and Cisco routers. Frankly, I'm wondering how there could possibly be issues.

Re:Evaluation

[hattmoward]

If NetBIOS broadcasts are a problem, you could have a Windows server or a unix host running Samba be a WINS server, and have DHCP tell the clients to go to WINS-only mode instead of Hybrid.

Not that I like Windows or it's "networking", but it sounds like your sysadms are morons.

If you're talking about VPN compatibility with RH9, FreeS/WAN IPSec works beautifully. I wouldn't waste the effort on the SSL VPN, it's such a hit to have a protocol stack like this: IP-TCP-SSL-PPP-TCP You'll find the Cisco IPSec VPN in UDP mode is like going from a School Zone to an Interstate.

Re:Evaluation

[110010001000]

Only on slashdot would this be marked as "informative".

He didn't even mention the DirectX 9.1 compatibility issues with Ethernet framing!

Re:Evaluation

[Anonymous Coward]

He's talking nonsense, but he mentioned KDE so he got modded up.

Re:Evaluation

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it not clear that he's talking about VPN software?

(There was a WinXP beta apparently was crashing some Cisco routers with the uPnP stuff.)

Re:Evaluation

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with IPSec VPN is that one needs a client installed. In certain scenarios it is better to have the clientless SSL-VPN, even if performance is atrocious. So the support folks only have to worry about simple common browser issues, instead of troubleshooting the whole network set-up of the workstation.

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Anonymous Coward]

The way I understand it SuSe's FTP install is only available on i386 builds? Thats a significant reason to pay. Convenience of ISO's, and as other have noted priority updates. As for RHEL this is much awaited. Previously these deals were made if you talked to the right people but nothing on the website to point to saying you get it cheaper, You had to initiate the talks yourself.

Awww man...

[Anonymous Coward]

And I just finished upgrading my redhat systems to fedora. Oh well, guess i'll save 25 bucks...

... beer anyone?

Not software libre

[etymxris]

Red Hat does an end run around the GPL forcing customers to buy a support contract for every installation, and key components of SuSE have been proprietary since the beginning.

Just use something else, don't reward these companies. If you're thinking of taking Red Hat or SuSE up on these offers, look elsewhere. Mandrake, Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, from scratch, whatever. You're a student--you're time is cheap. And if you actually want to learn something from using Linux, none of the commercial distros are the way to go.

Re:Not software libre

[mboos]

FYI, students actually have studying to do, so our time is not necessarily cheap.

Re:Not software libre

[etymxris]

FYI, students actually have studying to do, so our time is not necessarily cheap.

Then use Windows. The whole point of Linux and GNU was to get away from proprietary systems and restrictive licensing. So you really don't gain anything by installing either Red Hat or SuSE over Windows, unless you really like the Linux interface, proprietary or no.

On the other hand, many install less popular operating systems for the experience of running them. I know I did. But as these commercial distros become easier to install and use, the knowledge and experience you gain from setting them up yourself is negligible.

So why should you install Red Hat over Windows?:

1. Learning experience - no.
   
2. Access to more applications - no.
   
3. Freedom from restrictive licensing - no.
   

Re:Not software libre

[the_2nd_coming]

hmmm....25 dollars for Redhat, OOOORRRR 200 dollars for windows THEN having to buy the software I need to use for school work.

get your head out of your ass idiot.

if I wanted an OS that had no support, I would have installed debian and relied on the mailing lists.

paying 25 bucks for official support is not a big deal.

Re:Not software libre

[etymxris]

Windows and related software isn't discounted for academics? What about all those other people saying they get XP for $5, or free? And I can't think of many applications that are free for Linux but have no free (for personal use, at least) equivalents for Windows.

That $25 bucks doesn't get you much. System updates? You get that with Debian or Mandrake for free.

The only thing Red Hat has going for it over Windows is that it is transparent where Windows is opaque. So you can at least look at the code even though you're not allowed to copy the software. But anyone who can't take the time to use Gentoo or Debian isn't going to have much use for their kernel or application source code.

Re:Not software libre

[Pros_n_Cons]

> And if you actually want to learn something from using Linux, none of the commercial distros are the way to go.

I thought the point of a student was to get skills for the _real world_ ? More businesses roll out RH linux then they do LFS or gentoo. So why is the oppisite the way to go? politics? Sorry, I don't buy that. Redhat has high class certifications available, is the largest deployed distro and that makes it more inviting to most of us students.

Re:Not software libre

[etymxris]

I've used Linux for eight years and I can definitely tell you that all those nice GUIs provided by Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE just hide the stuff you're going to have to learn anyway. It all comes down to monkeying with flat files off the /etc tree.

I'll admit, I use the GUI tools when I can. But that's because becoming an expert is not what I'm trying to get out of Linux now. I just want to use it. If I had no philosophical objections to proprietary software, I'd probably be using Windows.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you'll become better able to use Red Hat by figuring out Gentoo or LFS. It's like lifting 100lb barbells to build up for the shot-put.

An anecdote to put this in perspective is a conversation I had with my hiring manager. She said that people who only know C and C++ can pick up Java and VB without any trouble, but those who only know Java or VB have great difficulty with C++. So when looking for candidates, she didn't even care whether someone knew VB or Java, she only cared about C/C++.

Similarly, if I had to hire a Red Hat admin or developer, then I'd choose someone who had only used Gentoo over someone who had only used Red Hat. Why? They are better able to do the job.

Re:Not software libre

[the_2nd_coming]

those free places for windows are financed by my money when I register for classes...they are called technology fees.

if my institution went with redhat it would save me a lot of money.

and my point is not that you get free updates, you get all the development needs and office productivity needs for free and tools that integrate those items into the system.

Mandrake is crap anyway IMHO, and the free version will not be around for very long once they go under. as for Debian, I like them, but I do not have the time to set up my system after installation.

again, the windows software will still cost me out the nose, so if my university went with redhat, it would save a lot of money for me.

Re:Not software libre

[Dunkirk]

key components of SuSE have been proprietary since the beginning

You're probably talking about YaST, which is NOT proprietary. It's open source. You just can't redistribute it -- for money -- and leave SuSE's name in place. It's the same thing for Red Hat's distro. It's freely redistributable; you just can't call it "Red Hat."

And, while I'm at it, YaST is pretty cool. I've seen a lot of setup tools on Linux, and most just get in the way. YaST takes care of everything, and you don't have to clean up after it.

Re:Not software libre

[Pros_n_Cons]

I don't agree. For one I've used Redhat almost exclusivly since '97ish. And beleive it or not I can actually use make, set flags, and link directorys too. Your programming analogy is flawed aswell cause the difference between any distro is not the same as different languages. Its more like someone who uses glade can't write a CLI tool. You don't use redhat so I'm assuming you think RH has a GUI tool for everytask but thier config tools are really left wanting, you need to dive into .config files for everything except the very basics. for instance the redhat-config-securitylevel just turns the firewall on or off. But I still know how to flush rulesets or where in init.d/ iptables is located. A GUI doesn't automatically mean you're an idiot. linux is basically the same under all the eye candy same syntaxes, same software except the distro specific package managers. big deal, give me 30 minutes and i'll know just as much about apt-get as you do. Actually I take that back since I use apt-get on redhat I don't need 30 minutes.

Yea I wish...

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in a rather large metropolitan area and we have a couple of LUGs. The biggest and oldest LUG in my area has biweekly meetings at a half dozen different locations around the city so that the meeting location is as convenient as possible to the most people. All of the meetings are attended by a large turnout of regular longtime LUGgers as well as new people.

There is no shortage of people who wish to start screaming debates over why their distro is better or whether vi or emacs is more leet. Any LUGger is eager willing and able to do an install and install fests are very popular events. Additionally, most LUGgers are well capable of supporting your mp3 player of choice or getting you up on Gnuttella.

There is however a distinct lack of technical expertise in the LUG. Have you got a problem with the Postfix mail server at work? Well, most LUGgers will recommend you use Qmail or Exim but, beyond that they can't help. Some run Postfix and are eager to get their hands on your server but, they only run Postfix on their own workstation and haven't a clue how to manage a system with 500 concurrent users.

What I'm trying to say is that LUGs are typically great love ins but, they are rarely any help to a enterprise admin. When I have problems with Postfix it is a serious situation and I need knowledgeable help RIGHT NOW! (Thank you Wietse.) I don't need some hippie freak show telling me that I should run a different MTA or, my favorite, a different distro.

One more thing, a few meetings ago some dike actually wanted to burn incense at the meeting. I was against the idea but, lately the meetings have taken on an odor that is causing me to reconsider my opinion on the matter.

Non-Profit and serious discounts!

[bfree]

As I read through this story I was thinking that it was quite predictable and boring until I noticed that Suse were including nonprofits! It is certainly a significant manouver if a nonprofit can now get (for example) OpenExchange w/50 CALs for $499 (the ccv academic price) and included in that is telephone support! In fact they can kit out a 50 user office with OpenExchange server ($499), Suse Desktop (5*$399) and Enterprise Server ($399) with one years support for a grand total of $2893 or $58.76/desktop. It's not as good as getting it all free, but support isn't free and that is going to be a hard price for anyone to beat (I think). Would you support a 50 seat setup like that for $3k/annum?

Ok so...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a student, I download RedHat.. they pay me??

I think so

[speedfreak_5]

They're charging $299 for their standard workstation desktop. That's right up there with XP Pro (pricewise).

Now if they had charged maybe 75 bucks instead of 300 bucks and included X hours of phone support, X hours of over-the-internet support, and 2 years of automatic patching that would be fairly cool, especially for people who are paying MS 300 bucks every 2 years for a shit OS and no support. But 300 dollars and 1 year of support? They could do better.

Re:I think so

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that MS will provide patches for the life-span of the OS, but RedHat forces you to subscribe to their update plan... what utter bullshit.

Re:I think so

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't force you to subscribe. Nothing but your ignorance is stopping you from getting off your lazy ass and checking for updates yourself! Hell since the code is open, you can even get an update from a third party.

Now where is the patch from microsoft so I don't have to hide behind a forewall?

STFU Ballmer - I can smell the stench of your fear through the internet!

What utter bullshit you spread when you talk about your competition.

Re:I think so

[stealth.c]

If you read the WindowsXP EULA, you will find that Microsoft goes out of their way to make absolutely no guarantee to you, the spender of $300, that they will support Windows in any way, or that Microsoft is, in the slightest, responsible for Windows at all. They MAY provide patches, but those patches have no quality guarantee either. Whether you get support for Windows is ENTIRELY UP TO MICROSOFT. Personally, I don't want my company/school/PC depending more on MS's agenda than its/our/my own.

RedHat supplies support that they constantly bet their reputation on. If you don't like their service, there are plenty of other bidders. Besides, a University can buy the $2500 license and all students get free copies of RHWS and patch support.

There's a little more at stake here than money. On top of better support, you avoid the licensing red tape of dealing with proprietary software (nobody's going to audit you for piracy), and an OS that better lends itself to education.

You don't need to subscribe either. yum and apt are prefectly wonderful free options for staying up to date.

Re:I think so

[stealth.c]

sorry about the multipost. /. n00b.

Free as in free scat!

[Anonymous Coward]

... scat anyone ?

No thanks Redhat

[asv108]

With Redhat changing their EOL, business model, and offerings every 6 months, I have no interest in purchasing redhat products. I have a long rant about Redhat on my journal. I just setup a new server yesterday using a netinstall CD from debian and because Penn State has their own debian mirror, the install took less than 30 mins. The dual 3ghz xeon and debian's new beta installer helped speed things up too. If I need to get pay support for debian its available. I use to avoid debian because of the elitist culture and the distro's political association with the whole GNU/ controversy but Redhat is no longer a viable option as an inexpensive server os.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[elflord]

I think there are probably a lot of people who share your views. I'm a .edu user, and we're migrating our university machines to debian. Next distro on my home machine will also be debian. I started using RH about the same time as you (RH4.1 up to 7.3 ... never upgraded to 8.0) and avoided Debian for similar reasons. But moved to debian for similar reasons. It's not just about the money, it's about their new release management policies.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

I use debian cause
1.) It cures world hunger with its apt-get technology
2.) It is not on the stockmarket, thus proving is ability to have a better kernel 3.) I speak swaheli so the IRC technical staff is always very helpfull. 4.) When I have a stupid question fellow Debian users are very accurate at pointing out how fucking stupid I am. But are still nice enough to give me my answer in shellcode all I have to do is reverse it and *poof* a simple well thought out answer. 5.) They are one of the last true distros left that know its not what users want its what developers want. I mean what does a user contribute anyway? unless of course you sell software but we all know that is inheriantly evil and should be a punishable offense in all 54 states.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[zlowry]

I agree totally. Since RedHat's announcement, I've been talking with our department about getting away from RedHat, since we assumed that there would be no support whatsoever in in the future for us. Now RedHat decides to come back and offer support for schools, but how long until they decide to stop it again once they realize that it's "not making any money"? I'm sorry, but I'm not going to wait around on some wishy-washy dying company with my Linux deployment, I'll be sticking with Debian if at all possible. At least a group of volunteers won't cut you out because "you're not profitable anymore".

Re:No thanks Redhat

[ducomputergeek]

I have to agree. I work as a technology consultant and over saw two companies that switched the bulk of their desktops from Windows to RH 9 Linux. Both had been using Linux on servers since 2000 and 2001 and therefore had the technical staff in place to handle the machines with in house support.

However, RH's move has made my business lose a lot of crediablity because RH had started to build a brand for Linux in the business market. The SMB's I work with are always looking for anything that help their bottom line. One bussiness would have saved an estimated $10,000 over the next three years in licing fees for OS's and Office Software. They are still going to use OpenOffice, only for Windows now.

I have to give kudos to M$ about one thing, they support products for 5 years and give 6 months notice its going away. People expect that after 5 years in the tech world, programs wouldn't be supported.

First off, it seemed like to me that 7.2 was around a while then 7.3, 8, and then 9 suddenly came out almost back to back. The about a year after 9 is released we get the, "This product will not be supported". The idea that Linux would have a longer support life for older versions longer than that of Windows was a selling point, and one that has turned into a myth. Ever try to find working RPM's for the latest PHP release for RH 7.3? After 3 hours of searching, I gave up and installed FreeBSD 4.8.

As a consultant, I was seeing Linux having a huge push onto corperate desktops by 2006. Especially in Europe and SE Asia. RH's choice to end the biggest brand in NA Linux was a major blow for the Linux adoptation in the US. Now with SuSE in the hands of a North American Company I wonder how much that will impeed their sucess. Part of SuSE's appeal in Europe, I studied in Germany for a year in a college that had 2 SuSE labs, and 1 Windows lab, I noticed how students were learning how to use Linux. Also, as the EU emerges as an economic giant, there was emerging this, "Use EU products" ideal going on and SuSE provided that ablity. It was a German product made in the EU that could give the Europeans a major leg up in providing leading edge software and technology to the rest of the world as the Anti-AMerican back-lash continues to grow.

Now I am not sure what direction things will go. Most people, including myself, are taking a wait and see additude with Novell. Its not clear if Novell is aiming for the Enterprise level, where they are already experts at delivering great enterprise software like eDirectory, or if they will continue the Desktop line. I am still waiting for Novell to make their Linux strategy clear. If they decide to push Linux into corperate desktops, then I beleive that will help to increase the adoptation of Linux in the business market. If not, it will set back Linux on the desktop at least another three to five years.

I had three potential clients looking at switching their desktops to Linux. These had 20 - 40 employees using computers. With one it was time to replace their AS/400 server and Desktops. Linux looked to be the way to go, but with the Linux limbo, we are looking again. They love IBM products and were going to go IBM eServers with RH Linux. However, this move has made them unwilling to trust RH. They see it has RH is either having business, ie cash flow, problems or "Well they did this, what is to keep them from being like M$ and say that six month later we'll have to use something else?". The other client decided to ditch Linux completely and all their Linux boxes will be replaced with 2k3 servers by Jan and all new Dell desktops.

I know that I can not professionally recommend Red Hat Linux because I no longer trust them and the reputation blow I have taken has caused some personal Angst. In fact, this was the final blow for me and Linux for most applications. Those needing a kiosk solution I will recommend the linux-based FirecaseOS and needing a flexiable embedded OS will get the nod to look at Linux, but I am now recommending FreeBSD for Servers and Apple Macintosh OS X for Unix desktops.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[Jameth]

"Those needing a kiosk solution I will recommend the linux-based FirecaseOS"

I've had several people ask me if I knew of any good Linux solutions for Kiosks, and I've had to tell them I don't, so this sounded like something to look into. However, I can't find anything about FirecaseOS with a cursory few searches online. Does FirecaseOS have a homepage, another name, anything I'm missing about it?

Re:No thanks Redhat

[Erwos]

"Now RedHat decides to come back and offer support for schools, but how long until they decide to stop it again once they realize that it's "not making any money"?"

I guess you just have no clue what a service-level agreement is, do you? When RedHat sells you that software, they formally promise you that they WILL support it for 5 years.

In this case, since it's based off RHEL, supporting the academic versions is absolutely free for them, since they're already doing it for their core customers.

I'd like to also point out that those volunteers are under absolutely no obligation towards you. Do you like to rely on people doing things out of kindness, or out of legal responsibility? I can tell you which _I_ would rather have.

-Erwos

Re:No thanks Redhat

[ducomputergeek]

It's firecast os, I mistyped. and it can be found at Wirespring.com[wirespring.com].

Re:No thanks Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you can't or won't read, and that's now Redhat's fault?

Red Hat have been telling people for AGES that their non-enterprise stuff has a fast end-of-life. None of this applies to the Enterprise Linux they've been selling all that time. You want to whine about your professional "reputation" ? Tell your clients that you screwed up because you can't even read email or look at web pages.

IBM wouldn't have offered eServers with an unsupported Linux variant, so did you lie to your customers, or is this another example of you not reading properly?

I'd like to think that both IBM and Red hat don't need idiots like you, but sadly I suspect that you're in the majority. Barely literate, forced to rely mostly on 3rd hand opinions on TV or forums like Slashdot to develop your understanding of the world, you'll have to be coralled into making the right choices.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Read on slashdot that Linux is cheaper than Windows
2. Sell customers on RedHat Linux based on a cost analysis, even given a 1 year upgrade cycle.
3. RedHat triples their prices, now more expensive than Windows.
4. Have to tell customers that they will need to change OSes in 3 months.
5. Don't profit.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[ducomputergeek]

No, its about branding and image in the business world. The appearence of what is going on is often more important that what reality is b/c the ones with the purse strings are usually NOT the CTO/CIO's. The reality is that RH will continue on in Fedora and other releases, however to businesses, this makes linux look as though IT IS NOT VIABLE. I deal with small & medium sized business owners that might read an article here and there about how good/bad Linux is, and if Red Hat says, "Oh that's going away now, sorry" the decision makers take that as, "this is a bad product that isn't making them any money, so why should we risk it". Its about Image. Unfortantely most in the technology world frankly don't have fucking clue about marketing and appearence. That is also why I have NOT been recommending Linux to companies in the past. Linux is a big risk, especially when your talking desktop. Servers are a different beast. There Linux has proven itself, but these were not going to be server deals.

Most of my clients either go with FreeBSD if they are going to go OSS or to Apple for Unix desktops. In fact, our office is now 100% Apple on desktops and laptops. There have only been a hand full of the 30 companies I have worked with this past year that I felt could make the jump to Linux on the desktop.

Consider this, one of the clients is a rather large Architecture and Graphics design firm. They have a large need for rendering boxes and they use Maya, which happens to run on RH Linux's desktop. They liked the cheaper licensing fees of Linux since Maya is like $5k a pop. Plus, during the evening and weekends, the dual server/desktop config could be used in their render farm, which was going to run Linux. Having Linux on the desktop was the bonus that would allow them to get jobs done faster. Every 3Ghz dual processor box with 2GB of ram added would render just that many more frames allowing them to finish and move to the next project much faster. The amount in TCO they would have saved was an estimated $8,500 a month. Well, with the end of support from RH, that is about $1.5M that will be going to other vendors suppling them with Windows XP and Windows 2003 servers. They were going to spend the same amount, only it would have increased the size of their render farm by about 15%. Their IT staff have been running DEC/Compaq Alpha's since circa 1997/98. I know because I was one of the sys admins there until this past year. Unix wasn't new to them and many ran linux at home or knew enough the transition wasn't going to be that big of a hassle. About like going from Windows 95 to 2k for an average user. Some differences, but same basic idea.

To most non-techies, Red Hat WAS/IS Linux. To most, SuSE and Red Hat aren't similar, their like Mac Vs. Windows. It takes them a while to understand that basically the only difference is that its the same product with different corperate sponsors/support systems. (yes, yes I know there are many other differnces like Gnome vs. KDE centred, but...most that I deal with don't care).

And as far as my understanding of the world, I hold 3 BA's in German, International Business, and International Affairs. I have lived and studied in Germany where I saw first hand how Germans were learning how to use Linux unlike American students and where this was likely to lead in the next 10 years. I've taught myself Linux since Slackware 2 and yes, I wrote my own drivers back in the day. I have worked on systems ranging from Dos 3.23, to Cray's, to True64 Unix, and every type of BSD known to man (well I've probably missed one along the way). I help start one dot com as a CTO that actually had a business model and was profitable and sold to a large ISP for a nice chunk of cash. I don't mean to sound like a primadonna here, but as General Patton once said, "If you've done it, its not bragging".

At the end of the day, its about trust. This announcement by RH makes many in the business world look at RH with the eyes of mistrust. "Well with this level of EOL support, what is to stop them from changing from ES to Super ES or the alike in the future without much notice? Isn't this the same game Microsoft plays? If so, what's the big deal, same crap, just different companies".

Re:No thanks Redhat

[ducomputergeek]

Depends.

We had one client that ran internet and media Kiosks. He had one competitor in this area. We switched him over to the Linux Based Firecast OS for kiosks and digital signage. It worked great for him and saw his service calls drop by some 70%. His competitor in the area was running software on top of Win 2k. By using the Linux only model, our client's software cost were $350 less per unit and the savings on maintaince allowed our client to under cut his competition by about 25%. His competor filed chapter 11 last week or the week before and I know he doesn't have the money to recover and can't get the capital he needs unless a VC gives him cash. In that case, Linux was a great solution and ideal for what our client was doing. He saved at least 5x's in the last 6 months what he paid us. In fact he is signing a deal on moday for us to be his outsourced CIO when he needs the expertise.

2: I've sold more businesses on apple than Linux. Why? I deal with SMB's. Most want stuff that is easy to use and really all they want is a Point of Sale system or a desktop with MS Office and Quickbooks pro. eMacs and iMacs for the small businesses can turn into a cost-effective solution. Biggest complaint we've heard is that they don't come with solitare. Businesses love not worrying as much about viruses and the stablity of OS X. For most of our clients, Macs will have a lower TCO and are more practicle because of commerically available software.

3: Yep Windows and Mac. Will loose to mac, and most of our clients are fed up with Microsoft.

4: Well, once a year. But most people I've talked don't seem like they'll be upgrading to OS X.3 anytime soon. Everything works now, why mess with it...

5: Oh we saw about $185k in profits last year mostly generated by my business unit. Our Advertising and Marketing consultancy has four time the revenue and 3 times our expenses. So long as we have computers, printers, and internet, we're pretty cost effective.

Now we had some clients that Linux was a realistic option. Several wanted to know if we could increase the EOL of their exisiting hardware. PIII 733's and 850's with 128 - 256MB of ram will run Linux and Open Office like a champ.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Great -- Macs traditionally have a very low TCO. If you can get your applications there, go for it.

However, Apple's support policy isn't even in the same league as RedHat's. At least RH will tell you if your OS is supported for 1 year or 5 or whatever. Apple - who knows? Whatever they feel like. They also will refuse to give you a roadmap. Apple's got a ways to go.

BTW, I use a PIII w/ W2000 every day. EOL is a long way off for those things, and Linux doesn't change anything.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

The life cycle of RedHat Linux was indeed short, and they knew it. They had to create a solid product that gets supported years in the future... that's why they ditched their old distros and went to an enterprise version. Now they could compete the way Windows do by releasing products every several years and supporting older ones in a more manageable way.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[ChannelX]

No, its about branding and image in the business world. The appearence of what is going on is often more important that what reality is b/c the ones with the purse strings are usually NOT the CTO/CIO's.

and

Unfortantely most in the technology world frankly don't have fucking clue about marketing and appearence.

Unfortunately the marketing/sales folk don't have a fucking clue about reality. This is why we have so many shitty software products out there. The problems with business are exactly the things you point out above. The reality of the situation is *less* important than the shit the sales people can make up. That makes for lots of trouble. Considering the situation it always makes me laugh when people bitch about the quality of software.

Re:No thanks Redhat

[Menthos]

So true. Also, in my experience, community support works fine for a lot of things, but rarely for anything but the latest versions of stuff. It's too common to see "hmm, that's an interesting problem, and I don't know anything about it. But hey, it's a two year old version, why don't you upgrade to something newer and see if that solves it"?

Being told to upgrade to an API-incompatible newer version to solve even the most trivial problems with old software is not a very helpful answer if you have that two year old version on a big number of machines and the amount of work needed to do the move and conversion and support it to the users would a hundred times exceed the amount of work for just fixing the problem in the old code. That's where support contracts or support guarantees shine: to support stuff and versions that the community has since long left behind.

Re: Enterprise Admin

[Raul654]

What I'm trying to say is that LUGs are typically great love ins but, they are rarely any help to a enterprise admin

Don't take this the wrong way, but the purpose of a LUG isn't to provide hardcore engineering-level help. That's what a support contract with the vendor is for. Generally, the purpose of a lug is to provide hel for novice to semi-advanced linux users.

The Martian Chronicles qoute comes to mind

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

"What's half of nothing?"

(for those that don't know, a Martain gave a human the deed to half of Mars. That quote is what the human said after the Martain left)

Discounts... what "services" do you really get

[failedlogic]

I'm a university student. I don't mind supporting the open source community in any way I can. For example, I've purchased the official Slackware CDs occassionally.

I don't see how/why its beneficial to sell Linux educational discounts for their desktop distro when I can get it for free from the 'Net or for that matter get a different distro for free.

OTOH, I'm using Windows XP Pro right now. I purchased it through my university's bookstore for about 50% off (it was $120 Can if I recall). Its was a great deal and I took advantage of it.

Re:Discounts... what "services" do you really get

[Anonymous Coward]

How about 5 years worth of guaranteed updates. That's easily worth 50bux in my book. Perhaps not for your dorm computer, but maybe the department webserver could use it.

Re:Discounts... what "services" do you really get

[UnknownQ]

I'm a university student. [...] (it was $120 Can if I recall). Its was a great deal and I took advantage of it

This, my friends, is an imposter! No self respecting student pays for a piece of software when there is file sharing available.

FINALLY!

[segment]

Romper Room linux v.1 kernel 2.43252436987654092435 rev1

lynx -dump politrix.org/segment/index.php|\
grep e++a|\
sed 's/esb/ s/g;s/eq/il /g;s/yZ/ is /g;s/\+\+a/ a /g;s/Wi/ pi/g;s/Jg/p /g'|\
cut -f "1,2,4,6,8" -d ' '|\
grep -v "lynx\|wget"

Great News, RH respects /.

[Geekbot]

This is great news as this addresses some very angry complaints in the Interview section that the academics had for RH. Goes to show that a strong community of professions with valid concerns and good suggestions can make a significant impact on businesses.

Now why cant they do that for the consumer

[Bruha]

The average Linux consumer would happily bone up 25 dollars to get RH workstation I'm sure. But at 179 per desktop that still makes Windows just as attractive.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Two words: autoerotic asphyxiation

The average user don't use Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

.. because it's for geeks. But some dumb zealots and commercial dumbfucks want to make another Microsoft Windows out of it.

Re:The average user don't use Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

those 'commercial dumbfucks' are the reason you have dedicated professionals hacking on your kernel, gcc, gnome, kde and tons of other software dickhead. take away the commercial players and there is no such thing as interface guidelines, you no longer have 50,000 kernel threads you have 2,000. ah hell with it, i'm tired of explaining shit to idiots.

Re:The average user don't use Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't explain things then you are obviously a bigger idiot than me :)

I can give you the extent of the support in 1 word

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFM

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Lord Kano]

Distributions that you can "download for free" don't offer the guaranteed, extended lifetime that you're going to get from RHEL. At least, not with continuing security updates.

Mandrake?

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Anonymous Coward]

To support SuSE? To burn the CDs for free for students who want them? (it is legal). That's what mine does even with a local mirror.

Open Source Devs == Money Making Machine

[Anonymous Coward]

I am involved in many open source projects and paying for a Distribution would be like paying for the software that I have been contributing to or written on my own.

The entire open source movement is just a marketing hype and becomes a big ripoff of those who contribute. Those who spent hours and days into developing stuff. Well there is nothing against writing open source but the commercial interests behind it is nothing else than a big 'money making machine'.

Site Licence Windows not really free

[SpaFF]

Uhm, that's not how it works. Your University shelled out a ton of cash for students to be able to have those free copies of Windows.

And if you read the article you would have seen that Redhat is also offering Universities a site licence deal: $2,500 for unlimited copies of WS. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than what your University paid for an MS site license.

Re:Site Licence Windows not really free

[myNameIsNotImportant]

Not quite a site license, but for around $700, you can get a copy of any MS OS, plus Visual Studio for the CS department (any student in computer department is eligible) via the academic contract. Only $700, which would make it cheaper than RedHat's deal... at least as far as CS students are concerned.

-1 Troll

[turgid]

Complete and utter hogwash.

How nice for them.

[grahamlee]

Although, I don't see how this will work. Almost all of the students I know use something free as in free, like Debian, Slack, Gentoo, or downloaded Mandrake. I'm the odd one out using SuSE, have done the best part of half a decade. The computing service's Linux cluster runs Debian. Anyone who wants to try out a Linux OS can get it for free already, so being able to get it for cheap from someone else isn't going to turn any heads.

I keep seeing folks say there is no free Redhat...

[Lodragandraoidh]

I keep seeing people say that 'Redhat Linux' is not free. That is not entirely true.

Basically, what Redhat has done is forked their distribution, providing what they call 'Redhat Enterprise' as a 'stable' fully supported (and thus with a dollar cost associated with it) distribution targeted at businesses, and 'Fedora', a 'development' platform for use by open source contributors and linux enthusiasts (a free downloadable distribution). Items that Redhat sees as valuable for the 'Enterprise' will be rolled from Fedora into the Redhat Enterprise product.

Redhat is pushing their 'Enterprise' product as being gold-plated and stable for businesses, and by definition, conversely that 'Fedora' is a toy. That is probably not very accurate an assumption - and serves to put more money in Red Hat's bank account more than anything else. Of course, the money will be coming from businesses - so who cares?

Currently I am running Redhat 8.1 and Slackware on my machines. I am seriously considering going 100% Slackware if Fedora turns into a seriously uncompatable fork - compared to other stable distributions. On the other hand, Fedora might free developers to build some really neat things into the distribution for desktop home users - such as industrial strength WineX out of the box for Gamers etc... It might just be the shot in the arm that linux on the desktop needs to gain momentum. I guess what I am saying is 'we shall see'.

I'm moving from redhat...

[mix_master_mike]

I've been using redhat for a couple of years now and truely enjoyed their free RHN. Now that they won't be offering a free product, only Fedora, I'm going to start calling it "[Dead]hat" - feel free to use

Calm down, people.

[Qbertino]

It's about the books, the docs and the support. In SuSE that is, at least. That's what distros are about.
SuSE is the best n00b distro I know. They've got dead tree docs included that make up for almost an entire Linux library, their support is fair, square and actually has a clue and their YaST install procedure rocks. You get a stack of CDs and a DVD (with all the stuff on that again, so you can easyly hand out a copy and keep another).
And, for a distro-look customized appearance, their desktop is way cool too.
THAT's what distros are all about. And THATs precisely what you get a discount on if you're a poor student looking into the OSS world. If that's still to much, fair enough. Go download the distro, copy it from a friend (legal that is, of course) or switch to debian, gentoo or whatever. But then you won't have that stack of books and no hotline keycode either. Of course.

Re:Calm down, people.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Linux for years, and while working abroad I needed an up-to-date set of installation CDs and didn't have access to a fast internet connection or CD-writer. So I bought a copy of SuSE 8.1.

I've been really impressed by it; YaST seriously does rock, and does a decent job of looking after the machine long after installation. The support archives (installed and searchable) are really useful, and have solved numerous problems (like how to set up a CD writer, how to get Euro characters from a UK keyboard etc) in a really quick manner.

But why pay for it? Well, as you said, there's the manuals. They're well worth the price on their own. Plus there's the CDs and DVD (they included two sets with mine, for some unfathomable reason) which have silly amounts of software on them, all pre-compiled and ready to run - particularly appreciated if you're stuck with a modem.

I'm in the process of getting broadband, but I'm going to buy SUSE again. Shame I don't qualify for any educational discount...

RTFA!!!

[univgeek]

Most people seem to think this is going to be very expensive for schools. However, RedHat is offering a full site license for $2500 p.a. This is nothing for a univ. The univ can also setup a local RHN update mirror, further cutting down on bandwidth costs.

Our univ. is on RH 9.0 now, and they use the free Pink Tie CD's. After the reports of Fedora's instability, the SysAdmins have kind of 'rebelled' and are asking for RH WS for the systems they admin. This agreement for $2,500 makes perfect sense in this scenario. The Uni already has substantial support people, and are going to require RH resources very very infrequently.

So RTFA before you assume the RH solution is going to be more expensive...

Great timing ...

[Frater 219]

Check this out.

A couple of days ago, Slashdot announces an interview with the CEO of Red Hat. I ask, more or less, "Why the hell don't you have educational discounts?" The question goes to +5, which presumably means it gets forwarded to CEO Szulik. Other posters from educational institutions follow-up my post, to the effect that they are already planning to abandon Red Hat rather than eat the steep price hike to Red Hat Enterprise.

And now, Red Hat has educational discounts.

Re:Great timing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

RH made a step in the right direction - but only under heavy pressure. Teach your students Debian or Gentoo and give them Knoppix CDs for home use. This will keep the alternatives around and the pressure on RH. Going like lemmings with one distro is a recipe for disaster.

Re:Great timing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

you and your parent are morons, if you ever botherd to call Redhats staff these things were being worked out on a customer basis. You think slashdot zealots is pressure? they are always here talking out of thier ass just like you. Nobody bases opnions on some guy named Anonymous Coward

Re:Great timing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for creating this new program for us, because of you Redhat got 6 months of dialog and Q&A done in two days. Do you work for Don Corleone or something?

Hmm, Mandrake is free for Everyone . . .

[Idou]

and it usually does a better job finding the user's hardware.

Kind of makes you want to become a member.

Servers for the hoi polli

[mangastudent]

[...] CS majors will want a linux distro that offers support.

Which is why Red Hat's sustained new attitude of "servers are for the elite" continues to puzzle me.

Some respectable fraction of these CS Majors need/want to work on servers (i.e. the RHEL ES version). They need what it offers, they want to be able to put it on their resume (e.g. "provided 'this useful campus service' using RHEL ES"), etc. etc.

At my school, companies fell over themselves to try to put their products in front of students, who would soon enough be influencing and then making buying decisions.

Once again, something about Red Hat's new business model does not compute ... and SUSE continues to look good on the surface, especially with non-profit discounts (they have to give the same discount to the Federal government, so why not non-profits, which probably represent much lower sales?).

(We'll ignore for the duration of this discussion the horrific raw odds of any tech merger working (i.e. Novell buying SUSE).)

Re:Servers for the hoi polli

[bhtooefr]

(We'll ignore for the duration of this discussion the horrific raw odds of any tech merger working (i.e. Novell buying SUSE).)

Why? Novell buying SuSE can be a good thing for this - my college uses a Novell/Win2K/NT4(on a few servers)/Mac hybrid network. That CAN become NoSE Server/Win2K/NT4(why them, though?)/Mac/NoSE Linux network, which is good for Linux (2000 more converts, anyone?).

Re:Servers for the hoi polli

[mangastudent]

Me: (We'll ignore for the duration of this discussion the horrific raw odds of any tech merger working (i.e. Novell buying SUSE).)

Well, I guess we can't ignore it.

Why? Novell buying SuSE can be a good thing for this - my college uses [...]. That CAN become NoSE Server/[...]

Emphasis added only in the bolding of "can". which is the operative word as you implicitly acknowledge.

The harsh, brutal fact is that most high-tech mergers and acquisitions fail. I seem to remember one figure of 90%, and that sounds about right; the record is really grim. Only Cisco managed to consistently do it, by virtue of viewing a company acquisition as the best way of hiring good people....

The sad fact is that anyone with a knowledge of high-tech industry history is going to write off SUSE Linux for several years until we see if it's going to be a one out of ten exception....

One other really unfortunate detail is that SUSE has been the "European Linux" up to now; there is perhaps enough anti-American bigotry that this purchase by a company in a notoriously religious state will cause SUSE to loose a lot of its current market share.

(Understand, I assume everyone has the best of intentions, the purchase makes great sense in terms of filling a gaping hole in Novell's offerings and in theory providing SUSE with many good things, etc. etc. ... but that doesn't mean they'll be able to execute it.)

Re:I keep seeing folks say there is no free Redhat

[mslinux]

Currently I am running Redhat 8.1

Dude, there was no RH 8.1... it went like this: 7.0- 7.1- 7.2- 7.3- 8.0- 9.0

Now, tell me why I should believe anything else you wrote if you can't keep simple facts straight??

Do really miss the point. The unlimited licence.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can download and use Suse. Now redhat has split is free and commerical. New name for free redhat is Fedora Project. Now redhat 9.0 I got for free by downloading and I am onto my 10 copy yep people have taken a copy and never return them. Ok when they return I will have too many copys.. Note this is legal due to the unimited licence. Basicly you have the right to split the cost on some distos. One person by a copy and copy it like mad. Note copys do not have support from the distro maker other than that problem everything is perfectly legal so you can use it for anything.

All else fails you have debian linux. Is 100% free cost now lets use some collage student to create a better installer something what would be a live project for final year students.

MOD UP

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey mods, I just read the article and it's true: you can get campus wide RedHat site license for only $2500. This is much cheaper than any Microsoft site license, with the added benefit that you're not "forced" to teach only MS software if you want to keep getting good M$ deals.

Re: Enterprise Admin

[Anonymous Coward]

which was exactly what the parent poster was trying to say :P in response to the LUG suggestion above him.

that's a bit naive

[penguin7of9]

Your copy of Windows isn't "free". In fact, where the money is coming from isn't at all mysterious: it comes out of what you pay to the university, because your university then turns around and pays millions of dollars for that site license.

You probably end up paying several hundred dollars for Microsoft software through that channel and you don't even have a choice in the matter.

Re:that's a bit naive

[ttrafford]

This is incorrect. It may very well be free if your institution is one of those beta testing MSDN-AA.

Re:that's a bit naive

[penguin7of9]

It may very well be free if your institution is one of those beta testing MSDN-AA.

Loss leaders, promotions, and beta-tests aren't "free" either. You may or may not pay money for them in the short term, but in the long term, you will pay for them.

In fact, the biggest cost in using Microsoft software at university is that you will be buying Microsoft software later on--tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime.

Re:that's a bit naive

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, the biggest cost in using Microsoft software at university is that you will be buying Microsoft software later on--tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over your lifetime.

Because once you leave the university MS holds a gun to your head and forces you to continue using their products? This is the dumbest line of reasoning ever.

Re:that's a bit naive

[Anonymous Coward]

> Loss leaders, promotions, and beta-tests aren't "free" either.

Sounds like every version of RedHat Linux for the last 10 years.

don't bother

[penguin7of9]

If you pay for a RedHat or SuSE subscription, you end up helping create an infrastructure in which you will not have a choice but to pay them in the future. And for the measly amount of bandwidth and support you get from them, even $25 is too much.

Rather than financing RedHat and SuSE through purchase of their software, help with a true community effort: Debian. Take over management of a package, host a mirror site, write some documentation, etc. That way, Linux will remain free not just in theory but in practice.

Re:don't bother

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut.
Up.

Fucking zealots. Buy a ticket to the real world.

Re:don't bother

[Anonymous Coward]

Get.
A.
Clue.

Paying a company so that they can make you dependent on them makes no sense. But it's idiots like you that keep propping up bad companies that put marketing ahead of technology. Start behaving like a rational economic agent and stop being some pathetic free-market wannabe who doesn't have a clue.

Re:don't bother

[justins]

Rather than financing RedHat and SuSE through purchase of their software, help with a true community effort: Debian. Take over management of a package, host a mirror site, write some documentation, etc.

"Don't pay for Linux services, get your Linux for free and give up your own time and effort." It should almost go without saying that that isn't going to work for everyone.

Re:don't bother

[IamTheRealMike]

If you pay for a RedHat or SuSE subscription, you end up helping create an infrastructure in which you will not have a choice but to pay them in the future.

Sounds like bollocks to me. Please support this assertion. Why would paying Red Hat for support lock you in to them in future?

Re:don't bother

[penguin7of9]

"Don't pay for Linux services, get your Linux for free and give up your own time and effort." It should almost go without saying that that isn't going to work for everyone.

We are talking about universities and students here.

But I think it would work for almost everyone if they only tried. Even businesses can make financial donations, have their IT staff take over maintenance of a package or two, or just host bandwidth. The cost is low and the benefits go far beyond just helping Debian.

Re:don't bother

[penguin7of9]

Sounds like bollocks to me. Please support this assertion. Why would paying Red Hat for support lock you in to them in future?

All distributions cost money to build and maintain, even Debian. But if you send your money to RedHat, your money is used to enhance something that is owned by RedHat. If you send your money (or, equivalently volunteer work) to Debian, it is used to enhance something that everybody owns.

There is nothing particularly novel about those ideas: in the past, people have formed various cooperatives and community-based businesses for the same reasons. It's no different with software, it just is happening on a global scale.

Re:don't bother

[IamTheRealMike]

How do Red Hat "own" RH Linux? It's all under free software licenses. If you don't like how they operate, you are free to fork it - just like Debian.

Re:don't bother

[penguin7of9]

You can fork the Debian-hacked sources, but that's all, and it's not primarily what RedHat is all about. RedHat is an infrastructure, user community, back-end servers, back-end server software, bug database, and other stuff. You can't fork most of that. In fact, much of that is proprietary and simply can't be accessed.

Re:don't bother

[IamTheRealMike]

Er, well clearly if you fork the product you don't immediately get a user community to go with it. Likewise, nobody is obliged to give you servers. The bug db data is the only real valid one there IMHO, and I expect if people wanted it badly enough the bugzilla dbs would be made available (if they aren't already). I think this is entirely a non-issue.

Re:don't bother

[justins]

But I think it would work for almost everyone if they only tried.

Sure. Why should they have to try, if they can just pay someone else to do it? Maybe, just maybe, some people aren't interested in working on operating systems and just want to pay for something that does what they want, and help using it.

It takes all kinds. :)

Re:don't bother

[penguin7of9]

Nobody is obliged to give anybody an instant user community. But neither are you obliged to give RedHat your money.

If you think that "this is entirely a non-issue", think again. The main thing that distinguishes Microsoft from other companies is those intangibles: user community, name recognition, etc. Microsoft could open source Windows tomorrow and it wouldn't change their market position much.

If you want a company like Microsoft to have control of Linux, send your money to some commercial Linux vendor. If you want Linux to continue to exist as a system whose design reflects the needs of its users, support projects like Debian.

Re:don't bother

[burns210]

o god. find away to turn all news into a pro-debian spin, aye? Two points:

*everyone hates MS here, but for some reason refuse to actually financially support a linux vendor who competes against MS. You want your cake and eat it too. Support redhat by buying a packaged version, so they can stay profitable and further Open Source their software to the community(like they always have).

*if you want to support the redhat distro, but feel like you want to contribute time to the community, choose fedora... I mean really, that is what it is there for, so that it is easier for YOU to help the community out! God, redhat moves from a corp run distro, to a community-based distro, and everyone is mad that they don't get 'redhat' isos anymore? PLEASE! the 'redhat' isos have just changed name to 'fedora'.

Re:don't bother

[IamTheRealMike]

Nobody is obliged to give anybody an instant user community. But neither are you obliged to give RedHat your money.

This is a meaningless statement, the two sentances aren't connected.

The main thing that distinguishes Microsoft from other companies is those intangibles: user community, name recognition, etc.

No, I'd argue that it's primarily controlling Windows, and having piles of cash that distinguishes them.

f you want a company like Microsoft to have control of Linux, send your money to some commercial Linux vendor.

You haven't linked being "commercial" with being like Microsoft, you haven't even tried. When, and only when, you can show that Red Hat are using Microsoft-style tactics to try and control Linux will you not seem like a paranoid delusional.

If you want Linux to continue to exist as a system whose design reflects the needs of its users, support projects like Debian.

There's a reason I (and many others) don't use Debian, which is that it doesn't reflect my needs, not even close.

It's about time!

[stealth.c]

The Linux bigwigs really ought to be paying attention to schools. I'm glad RH and SuSE are finally making an effort.

It's been said before (and I'll say it again) that OSS is a perfect fit for schools. No licensing worries/overhead, ability to learn about and solve one's own problems, and freedom galore.

What's been holding Linux back in schools, however, is mainstream educational software. I'm studying to be a high school teacher and, somehow, learning HyperStudio is a "must". HyperStudio is designed for Wintel machines. It'll "work" on MacOS, and the content you make with it will "work" on Netscape 4, but it's obvious by the list of supported platforms that the company doesn't really care about anything other than IE and Windows.

If academic software companies started building their apps for OSS platforms (Linux, BSD, Darwin, Hurd if you want--I don't care), schools would switch in a heartbeat, especially since OpenOffice, Microsoft is no longer the document gatekeeper. If the elementary school where I tutor had a cheap way out of Win98/NetWare hell, they'd do it immediately.

Maybe we need Szulik to jump around in front of an Educational Software Conference shouting "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

Stop Whining.

[miffo.swe]

All i see a is a bunch of uninformed kids complaining about RH not being free and it turns my belly inside out. Ofcourse you don get it for free if you want support and managed upgrades!

What did you expect, Redhat paying you to use their dist?

Also it IS still free, you can D/L and use it but you have to do it yourself. The only thing missing is the ready made isos. You be lazy?

I for one think it make perfect sense to pay for packaging and support. Pay someone to do it or do it yourself.

If this is such a hard thing to accept then by all means leech on someone like debian, mandrake, whatever and tuck your common sense away in some dusty closet until they goes tits up out of funds.

If we want linux to be around kicking we need to give something back. Whining and leeching and not doing anything is just heartaking to watch. Pay back either by code or anything and stop this piggybacking. Stop asking what linux/RMS/RedHat does for linux and ask yourself: "what the fuck have i done for linux?".

If RH sucks you can build your own dist out of their rpms even, just stop this whining.

Damn, its like a kindergarten here sometimes.

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake? Erm, no. MandrakeSoft offer 18 months of fixes for each distro.

Red Hat offer FIVE YEARS for RHEL.

Out in the real world, that's a big difference kiddo.

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[BrokenHalo]

Distributions that you can "download for free" don't offer the guaranteed, extended lifetime that you're going to get from RHEL. At least, not with continuing security updates.

Rubbish. Slackware can be used perfectly well on an extended-lifetime basis, and so can Debian. In fact, I guess Debian has extended lifetime by definition, since new releases occur about once a decade :-).

Awesome

[Yenhsrav_Keviv]

Awesome. So now we at WPI might actually have a current and low cost linux distro available in our campus bookstore, instead of the 2 year old corel linux distro. Thank you SuSE + Red Hat.

Re: Enterprise Admin

[treat]

Don't take this the wrong way, but the purpose of a LUG isn't to provide hardcore engineering-level help. That's what a support contract with the vendor is for.

You think that Redhat's support contracts will provide "hardcore engineering-level help"?

Because you can't download them for free

[Enucite]

Red Hat no longer offers a download version of their "Red Hat" distribution.

SuSe doesn't allow FTP install of their newest version.

Re:Because you can't download them for free

[ElGuapoGolf]

Give SUSE time... they usually wait a month or so until the newest version is available for FTP install. It's been like that for a while... Exactly how long, I don't know, because I'm not so cheap that I won't go out and pay for a very well put together distro.

About time, I hope there are no per cpu charges

[Anonymous Coward]

At a major US university, we have a locally-maintained version of RH7.3 and RH9. "Locally maintained" means automatically
pushing out redhat security updates from a university server, and some locally-added "extras" that are useful.

Per-cpu charges are just out of the question (too many to count). We have site-licensed Windows, with no per cpu accounting. It just has to be a university-owned computer. Most people,especially the adminstrative staff, are using MS, but among academics and students, there is a significant minority of MAC/Linux/Unix users. (The serious computer users...). Scientific computation using large racks of cpus is part of this (non-Beowulf).

We dont need any hand-holding from RedHat, but we do need to know that someone is producing security updates in a timely fashion. The idea of keeping that current on one's own is just a nightmare.

Fedora doesnt seem to be an acceptable replacement for RHL. Its also a real pain that RH7.3 is effectively dead at the end of this year, because no official security updates will be produced. Upgrading to RH9 seems pointless because its "dead" three months later.

The security update service provide by RH is definitely worth some $$ for a supply of professionally-maintained binaries, maybe a site license in the few $K range would be OK (say, $10K max I might guess for us, a lot less for smaller places).

This is a windows-based institution as far as the administrative staff are concerned,but with significant (minority) Mac and Linux use by the academic staff and students. There isnt that much $$$ to be had for Linux, but there is some.

Without some significant educational offering by RH, the way we would likely go would be rebuilt-from-source RHEL 3 WS/AS with stripped out redhat trademark logos etc. As anyone following the various mailing lists of people trying to recreate RHEL from the gpl source rpms will know, this is not trivial because of the need to start with a "correct" build host, and noone quite knows what that was (apparently RHEL is not quite its own build host ....)

We dont need certification for Industrial strength "enterprise" apps like oracle etc. so an approximately-rebuilt RHEL would be fine for us.

Assuming we can get "Official RH" binaries for security updates on a site-licensed basis WITH NO PER CPU charge and no need to track usage, a few $K to eliminate the hassle of building AND DOING QA on one's own binaries would be a good deal.

Multiply this by all the educational institutions and national labs, etc and this addds up to a pile of cash that RH is otherwise just throwing away.

Some "reasonable" payment to RH for their service in tracking security updates and there QA, with a license that restricts usage of the RH-built binaries to employees and students of educational institutions and non-commercial labs would be fine. Since we dont need any RH services apart from a single download of each update to our own server, and such a license could exclude the distribution of binaries to commercial users outside the institution, it seems like a no-brainer, because there is NO WAY we will accept any kind of per cpu licensing.

People can play with RHEL rebuilds or Fedora or whatever for their home-network hobbyist needs, using the gpl sources, but Institutionally, its is far better to have a single university-wide flavor (or two) of linux that is centrally made available so "it just works", at least on common machines such as Dell workstations etc. that we buy in bulk in a standard configuration.

Re:About time, I hope there are no per cpu charges

[praksys]

Why are you posting this on /. instead of contacting RedHat sales? They sell site licenses.

I completely agree

[gregeth]

I currently work at a branch of a major university maintaining all of the systems. Since it is a branch, we don't exactly have much of a staff (about 4 of us), so most of our time gets spent doing the simple complaints by phone about somebody's Outlook not working. So, when it comes to the servers, there's not a lot of time to continually tweak them. We have purchased licenses in the past for RH 6,7,8. And when we upgrade soon, will probably continue with RH (especially with the discount, it is a university, you know).

College Linux

[Cokelee]

Why not use College Linux?

Re:I keep seeing folks say there is no free Redhat

[Lodragandraoidh]

I have about one hundred different revision numbers for various things (projects at work as well as open source stuff) floating about in my head - its easy to mix up some things when typing 'off the cuff'. I was probably thinking about the Slackware 9.1 distribution.

Sorry I'm not perfect, unlike you. :>(>

Discounted Linux

[nurb432]

10 years ago, who would ever have thought this would even be a topic...

Um...RHEL WS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat pulled support for the retail versions of their software. You can still get Redhat Enterprise Linux Workstation that is a desktop distro for your corporate clients.
RTFA.

Re:I keep seeing folks say there is no free Redhat

[bhtooefr]

Actually, there was an 8.1 beta. They decided to release 9.0, which should have been called 8.1 because it wasn't significant...

Nice

[Erwos]

I can see using this for my laptop. My desktop box is powerful, and I don't mind a bit of instability with Fedora, but my P166MMX laptop is primarily for note-taking, and I wouldn't mind something stable and long-lasting for it.

-Erwos

Admins dont have time to fuck around

[Anonymous Coward]

Read subject. Universities are always struggling with money and the admins need to be able to take care of large numbers of boxes as efficiently as possible. Having 5 years of guaranteed updates and support, as well as being able to run commercial software like Oracle, Synopsys, etc, is very important.

Re:Admins dont have time to fuck around

[rsilvergun]

>> The first, aimed at students and named Red Hat Academic Desktop

Aimed at students, not admins. I think it's quite clear they'll be selling boxes in school computer shops ala Microsoft 'Student Editions'. Nothin' wrong with Redhat offering service contracts for school computer labs on the cheap, I just question the value for individual students of software that can be had more or less free _with_ updates (but without support). BTW, now that you've read the subject, how about reading the news post?

Hard to believe.

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine getting XP for free on your computer under the "site license" is a myth. So, you show up in class with your laptop, and ask your professor for a "free XP cd", so you can install XP while you are on campus. Then, you get in your car/truck and head home, with XP installed on your laptop for $0.00.

The $25.00 redhat is yours to do with what you want. It's real, and the only differences are what the two OS's are capable of, software that will run on them, etc. XP runs the expensive Office 2003, but that's not free in the site license, is it? XP does not have a lot built in like Redhat, Mandrake, LindowsOS, etc. have, so the student has to get his own powerpoint, excel, word, etc. to make XP useful. Lindows is not cheap, especially when you add the Office 2003 clone, but my point is to question the "site license" for XP as applying to anything but machines staying on campus, whereas the redhat and suse deals apply to machines that can leave the campus. I'm running SuSE now, but only 2.2, and it's no XP, no comparison. Hard to set up, and get the services trimmed down to what you need, only. I tend to run it on very old machines, one in particular with only 32mb 30-pin ram, and I can run Opera 6.03 with wvdial just fine, but compared to Windows 98 on the same box is almost as good, but complicated to set up. Had to make a custom .fvwm2rc with what I wanted. Almost like we are comparing apples and oranges here, SuSE vs XP.

Re:I keep seeing folks say there is no free Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

which should have been called 8.1 because it wasn't significant

Breaking binary compatibility was enough to warrant the change from 8.0 to 9.

Re: Enterprise Admin

[beakburke]

You think that Redhat's support contracts will provide "hardcore engineering-level help"?

Well i dont know, do they?? Have you ever used redhat's "enterprise support"?

Re:I keep seeing folks say there is no free Redhat

[Pros_n_Cons]

> I am seriously considering going 100% Slackware if Fedora turns into a seriously uncompatable fork - compared to other stable distributions.

I am running Fedora and wanted XFCE4. But because It's so new there were only Redhat 9 RPM's available. so I downloaded all 24 rpm's into a directory and did 'rpm -Uvh *'. They all worked without a hitch, I've been running it for a week or so. It appears that it will be the same as a new point release. Some stuff breaks, most of it still works.

Re: Enterprise Admin

[treat]

Well i dont know, do they?? Have you ever used redhat's "enterprise support"?

Yes. They are sometimes (not always) able to answer the simplest of questions. If it is at all nontrivial they are guaranteed to either get it wrong or not give any answer at all. Mostly they just don't help by either playing dumb or actually being horribly dumb.

A saucy little SCO impulsiveness rubbing off?

[smchris]

With the "announcement de jour", RedHat doesn't enhance an image of corporate stability.

Ok, the plain truth seems to be that RedHat wants to get out of the free download cycle and sell name brand distros. They should have set a date for it, done it, and eaten the karma as a kinder, gentler MS-lite in one clean step earlier than now.

But no. Lately (as in about a year), I thought they'd decided to be an enterprise server company. No retail shrinkwrap. But the FTP downloads vs. server with support. Well, now post-9 downloads are going away apparently, but we fork by adding unstable Fedora, right? Well, yes. But now we will have "official" $25 workstations coming back before the FTP .ISOs are even cold? So is this a two-tined fork or a three-tined fork? Or a four-tined fork with people patching 9 with 3rd-party .rpms?

Build this drunken ramble on top of the shock of the one-year support cycle, and instability in a company's business plan can be almost as worrisome as instability in software. Makes my one Debian test machine look much more attractive.

Re:A saucy little SCO impulsiveness rubbing off?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea My one little slack 9.1 box looks better every day.
I just did the updates for fetchmail and apache today.
As I type this from a RH 9 box that I sent them 60$ a year on just as my way of supporting them. Even though up2date sucks and I used apt instead. I didnt even use thier bandwidth.
I think I will let Patrick have the 25$ every 6 months for the cd sets in the Slack subscription.
If I dont do that I will start buying the 40$ set instead of the 6$ set of Cds

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Lord Kano]

Mandrake is still $$$FREE$$$.

18 months versus 60. What's to stop you from upgrading your distro every 18 months? Millions of people who use Windows are doing exactly that, for about $100 a pop.

LK

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[teuben]

i've really lost confidence in redhat with their Fedora move, though
they are in their right to do what they did. Now, with any kind of problem,
be it software or hardware, or installation, it will come with a whole
decision tree what distribution you have... i am now counting 4 (fedora,
AS, ES, WS). Where does it end? And suppose I have WS, and i want to run
some service that's not in ES, ok so i can go out and download BIND
and run a local caching nameserver or so... but what a pain. I use redhat
to get work done, and I have so far been fairly happy with the robustness
i get from them. If i want to tinker (and i do), i have plenty of other
choices.

Via my university I can probably get that 'cheap' version, and despite
that i starting paying redhat now for support last year, i have now
decided to pull out and am looking for something else.

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Dunkirk]

SuSE promises updates for two years from the introduction of every distro.

RedHat still kosher

[kangasloth]

If you don't want to agree to the terms of Red Hat's contract, don't. I'm sure copies of RHEL are readily available from other sources. Nothing in the contract prevents you from copying and distributing the software once you have it. The contract limits your right to *use* the software, which is not protected by the GPL (to stay within the domain of copyright law). It may be a little sneaky, but it doesn't make free software unfree.

In fact, Red Hat would be within their rights to provide the source only to their customers, though, again, they would be free to redistribute them. But they don't do that. They work in the open, and they share the important stuff: the source. The actual source packages for all of RHEL are available on Red Hat's own ftp servers. Our copy of RHEL WS didn't include postgres, so I had to rebuild the package, but it's the same package, vendor patches and all.

RHEL is a product and a service, and it costs money. And that's okay: there's nothing wrong with selling free software.

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.anti-slash.org/comments.php?num=30

forcing customers

[glrotate]

Red Hat does an end run around the GPL forcing customers to buy a support contract

What does "forcing" mean in your world?

Free as in The First One's Always Free...

[MsGeek]

I find this to be an interesting turn of events. At my university, they have site licenses for all of Microsoft's software, so you can get Windows XP for precisely $0 dollars. Now, my classmates will have the opportunity to purchase RedHat or SuSE for a mere $25!

The first one's always free, boyo. Guess what will happen when you graduate? Poof! Your license goes up in a puff of bits. You have two choices after that:

1. Keep using the software, and basically have warez on your system, or:
2. Buy an official copy and bend over, because Bill's driving.

Actually there is a third choice: tell Microsoft to stuff themselves, and run a F/OSS operating system instead. This is why more Colleges and Universities should have LUGs, particularly Colleges and Universities with site licenses with Microsoft.

And last I checked, Knoppix is still 100% free, as in beer, speech and freedom. You can't beat that.

Discounted Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Discounted Linux... It stunned me for a while when I heard it. How the fuck do you discount something that is FREE?

No I don't have a problem with a company charging for support, but so long as the code they're supporting is GPL'd, you still have to give it away for free, and the updates you make to it...

I'll just download the updates, and tweek things out myself thanks... And I'll buy lunch for a week with the $25 too... ...mutherfuckers... our code put you in business, and our code can take you right out of business too... don't ever forget it

Red Hat's $99 Pro. Workstation also fills void!

[ewwhite]

Why isn't Red Hat actively marketing their Professional Workstation Product? Apparently, this is a newly-released offering that hasn't been receiving much attention. It's odd, because it's not even displayed prominently on their site.

However, a Google cache of the page shows the relationship of Professional Workstation to the rest of the RHEL line.

The Red Hat Professional Workstation isn't available online, or through Red Hat, but through a few selected retail channels. Buy.com has it for $82.57, which includes one year of up2date service. It's the same product as Red Hat Enterprise Workstation. I purchased it from my local Microcenter for $99. Here's the RPM list.

It looks like this product was a last-minute addition.... Apparently, it's not crippled or relabeled.

Given my previous rants on Slashdot about the Red Hat shadiness, this looks like a good option.

Even more interesting is the fact that Red Hat didn't put much effort into product differentiation with this Professional Workstation product. I opened the box and the CDs were labeled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS". Well, only the first CD was labeled as such. The other CDs are identical to the Red Hat Enterprise AS/ES offering and include the same RPMS/SRPMS. SRPMS build cleanly in every test case I tried. So, buying this and using Enterprise 3.0 SRPMS for future updates is entirely possible. The same RHEL patched 2.4.21 kernel is there, too. Nifty.

Another issues that bugged me about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux move was the poor upgrade path. Reinstalling the OS on production servers that are running Red Hat 7.x or 8 ain't pretty. So, my final test with the Professional Workstation was prompted by a half-page paragraph in the manual that came with the box set.... It stated that in-place OS upgrades were only available for Red Hat Enterprise 2.1 -> Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 systems (via "linux update" at boot)...... however, you have the option of booting the install CD with "linux updateany" to relax the restriction "in case your /etc/issue file is damaged". Hmm.... No version-checking, eh? So I performed a test in-place upgrade on an existing Red Hat 8.0-equipped Proliant server...... It totally worked without a hitch!

This, along with the education and bulk-pricing deals leads me to believe that the Red Hat marketing department is working hard to appeal to the people it alienated with its announcements over the past few weeks. We'll see what happens come December 31.

Redhat DOES have a $99 solution - See here!

[ewwhite]

Check out my post below.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=85998&cid=7486 206

It's about the Redhat Professional Workstation (not Enterprise WS) box set that is being sold in the major retail outlets. It's the same thing as Enterprise Linux WS.... the CDs even say so. I've found that it does provide an upgrade path to the legacy versions. Check out the link.

THANK YOU!!!

[benmhall]

I work for a University. We've been contemplating moving some of our servers to Linux, but RH's recent decision to drop RHL and SuSE's acquisition by Novell coupled with my employer's unease with moving to a platform without commercial backing, (Debian) I've been left wondering how best to proceed. This sounds like a very fair, much welcomed move.

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[tokul]

Rubbish. Slackware can be used perfectly well on an extended-lifetime basis, and so can Debian.

Have you tried upgrading Slackware?

Yes, there is swaret.
No, it does not have same life time as apt.
No, it is not included in base install.
No, it does not support big list of mirrors.
No, you can't use it with Slackware 8.0 or older.

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Mark Bainter]

You don't get it. This is not about whether or not updates are still available, it's about the way they're made available.

Most distributions just provide the upgraded software. That means you get any new features that came with the upgrade, along with the bugs that come with it.

Redhat's benefit in the Enterprise area comes from the fact that it backports patches where needed so that doesn't happen. You get the security fixes, without the new bugs.

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[BrokenHalo]

Have you tried upgrading Slackware?

Yes. I have used Slackware since ~1994 and have no difficulty in using the very simple tools that come with the distro (installplg, upgradepkg, removepkg). I have never felt the need to even bother with swaret, as it seems to create more issues than it solves.

And, of course, there's always ./configure && make && make install

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Vengeful weenie]

I work for a University, and I can tell you that money is not as short as competent hands. Even if student workers are available, most of them don't have a "production mentality."

From what I see, the cost is not too bad. Free isn't always as in beer, and if RH or SUSE put the infrastructure in place to free up people and get more work done, I'll gladly pay.

Re:I keep seeing folks say there is no free Redhat

[bongoras]

There is no red hat 8.1. What are you talking about?

Re:I keep seeing folks say there is no free Redhat

[Lodragandraoidh]

Read the thread - I think we already beat that dead horse to death...

Re:I thought universities just downloaded it for f

[Anonymous Coward]

You will not have that problem if you purchase the correct version of RHEL