Slashdot Mirror
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?
...Linux is free! :-)
c++;
"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.
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.
Local LUG
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
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.
Your debian THX, with full digital surround sound?
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
"I'll keep my debian thx for $0, after all that is the point of free software."
But not the point of Free Software.
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).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
.. yes, it was :)
Skolelinux is a better option for most schools. Completely free.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
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?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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!
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.
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.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
"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)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
Complete and utter hogwash.
Stick Men
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 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.
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...
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
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.
and it usually does a better job finding the user's hardware.
Kind of makes you want to become a member.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
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).)
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??
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.
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
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. 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.
You think that Redhat's support contracts will provide "hardcore engineering-level help"?
Red Hat no longer offers a download version of their "Red Hat" distribution.
SuSe doesn't allow FTP install of their newest version.
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.
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).
Why not use College Linux?
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.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
10 years ago, who would ever have thought this would even be a topic...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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...
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
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Well i dont know, do they?? Have you ever used redhat's "enterprise support"?
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
> 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.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
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.
With the "announcement de jour", RedHat doesn't enhance an image of corporate stability.
.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?
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
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.
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
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
SuSE promises updates for two years from the introduction of every distro.
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
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.
>> 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?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Red Hat does an end run around the GPL forcing customers to buy a support contract
What does "forcing" mean in your world?
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:
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.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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
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.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=85998&cid=748
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.
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
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.
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.
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.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
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.
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
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.
There is no red hat 8.1. What are you talking about?
Read the thread - I think we already beat that dead horse to death...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain