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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."
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.
Skolelinux is a better option for most schools. Completely free.
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.
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
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.
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.
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Complete and utter hogwash.
Stick Men
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).
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!)
Actually, it's a re-labeled SuSE 9 Pro box. You get everything you get with SuSE 9 Pro, just it costs $30 less.
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.
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.
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite