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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."
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?
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?
"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...
Scratched Emulsion
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.
Local LUG
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
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.
Why yes I am paranoid! Thanks for asking!
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.
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'.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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.
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).)
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.
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!"
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.
HTTP/1.1 400
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.