Redhat Reports 90% Return Subscription Rate

jasonbowen writes "In this article from ZDnet, Redhat claims a 90% return subscription rate for its Enterprise line. Sounds like Redhat is doing just fine providing a quality product for people that want to pay the money for it." (And for people who don't want to pay money for it, too.)

Comments

Why

[PktLoss]

Is this the result of corporations really beleiving in the quality of the product, and its usefullness in their corporation?

Or have corporations just not yet had the chance to fully investigate the red hat alternatives since the desktop line went kaput.

We have been QA'ing a new default burn for desktops for the past 6-8mnths, in the meantime, we keep purchasing what we had before.

If there is going to be a dip because of the drop of the desktop line I wouldn't expect it untill at least next quarter

Re:Why

[Libor Vanek]

Please - be clear on this - Red Hat CORPORATE (ENTERPRISE) desktop line is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and isn't kaput!

Re:Why

[AKnightCowboy]

Or have corporations just not yet had the chance to fully investigate the red hat alternatives since the desktop line went kaput.

We'll probably be stuck with it in the interests of preserving commercial support. Afterall, no vendors support a free distribution like Debian. If you want support for your commercial software products you're pretty much stuck with Red Hat, which will mean we'll be stuck buying Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since we also have this idea that everything must run the same distribution, the one commercial server app will force us to use RHEL on everything. It's going to get pricey.

Re:Why

[ajs]

I would expect that you will see Novell start to get traction in the desktop space in the next several years. But it will be a long and hard road for them. I think that RedHat got out of the desktop biz because they were starting to feel the pain of supporting hundreds of applications in such a fragmented way.

In the server space things are much more uniform. No one is really looking for RedHat to support the latest and greatest gaming libraries, sound stacks, 3D screensavers, etc. for server platforms.

Novell may have to partner with/be purchased by IBM before it's all over in order to get the programmer hours available to them to make this work.

Re:Why

[Mr. Slippery]

I think that RedHat got out of the desktop biz because they were starting to feel the pain of supporting hundreds of applications in such a fragmented way.

Since they sell Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS for the desktop, I think you're confused or misinformed.

Re:Why

[shaka999]

No, this is corporations wanting to be compatible with their software suppliers. I work in circuit design and most of the EDA tools support only Redhat Linux. If we want support for the EDA tools we have to run Redhat. The price for RHE is really a drop in the bucket compared to the other tools we run.

Re:Why

[Frymaster]

while we're being clear....

this is a return subscription we're talking about here. these are people who are already using rhel. this should not be interpreted to mean "all those people who were using rh 9 gladly upgraded to a more expensive version".

Re:Why

[pyros]

everything must run the same distribution

You could run AS or ES on the commercial server app, and WS or PW on desktops. That would give you the same distribution everywhere, but give you wider flexibility with the price scale.

Re:Why

[PktLoss]

Thank you for the clarification, thankfully you got modded up quicker, so people should see them both.

Personally, I think that giving users (wether end-users or technical) the opportunity to run exactly the same software at home and at the office is the only way to go. Otherwise you double the learning curve, and cut the pace at which one proceeds along it.

To be honest, I haven't looked into the fedora project too much, so I am not sure how similar it is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation.

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trolling, but...

didn't the redhat guy just said that windows is better on the desktop?

mac is death!

emacs sucks!

linux == communism

please remember, i'm not trolling!

Re:Why

[Libor Vanek]

If you buy RH EL WS ( heh :)) ) for office use you can use it also at home (or any number of computers anywhere - even you don't have to buy it, just that there are no ISO files avalaible, only RPMs).

Re:Why

[Golthar]

I don't know about you, but im getting the upgrade to Redhat ES 3.0 for free at my datacenter.
I'd imagine this also boosts Redhat's returns

Re:Why

[ajs]

Since they sell Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS for the desktop, I think you're confused or misinformed

Not at all, though I should have been clearer about my statement. When I say "the desktop" I mean the entire segment. That that includes so many different niches that Red Hat was being drowned by conflicting support needs. Gamers want the latest everything, business desktop users want stable MS-compatible office productivity tools, developers want a mix of latest tools and stable general purpose desktop, etc.

But now Red Hat only has to support the engterprise user. This is a group who can afford to pay for what they want and whose needs are more realistically limited. Read my original post. When I said "in a fragmented way" this is what I meant. RH has neatly cut the Gordian knot, and has made way for those who have more resources focus on the desktop as a whole.

I Miss RedHat Network

[DeckerEgo]

After months of therapy, I finally came to terms with the fact that I'm upset because RHN is gone. They locked my entitlements and prefs, and so now I can't manage the scores of machines I have deployed. I'm reasonably okay with the whole Enterprise-Fedora concept where there is one supported enterprise product and one free personal edition, but I just feel kinda worried about when my RHN subscription goes away for good and another buffer overflow exploit comes around.

Re:I Miss RedHat Network

[markxsd]

People will be prepared to pay for the RedHat "product". By product, we're talking about more than a Linux (and GNU) distro. We're talking about RHN, a support organisation and a certified platform for some of the industry's biggest Enterprise software vendors.

RedHat has earned (??) the reputation, rightly or wrongly, as Linux without the screwdriver. [And, more significantly, as Linux that can't get the CTO fired.] If an IT manager is splashing out $50k+ for Oracle 9i EE to run on a Linux cluster, he isn't going to worry about a few dollars more for RedHat licences.

Red Hat support, marketing and hours on the golf course with Larry Ellison is what you are paying for. If that's not appropriate or relavent to you or your organisation, then you should move to Debian or somewhere else.

Re:I Miss RedHat Network

[digitalhermit]

You have scores of machines that you're managing through the free service? RHN allowed you to manage these for free (maybe the cost of a demo subscription or a single $60/year fee that you bounced from machine to machine). It put a load on their servers for both the rhn-applet, the up2date, and the package information that's stored there. There's a $20 update service now until EOL that you can buy.

You have many other options -- you can use yum, apt, synaptic to upgrade your machines. If you have all these scores of machines in a single facility you can create your own yum/apt repository and have the machines check each day via cron. If you want a centralized view of the state of your machines then maintain a database of each machines packages. Periodically check the repository against the package database and send an alert if any are out of date.

For example:
rpm -qa --query-format "%{name}\t%{version}\n"

For each machine store this information in a mySQL table. Then as new packages enter the repository, store that information inside another table. You can then select packages based on name between tables then inform the user that a package needs to be updated. Or count the packages that need to be updated. This will give you 90% of the RHN functionality. Won't be as pretty but it works.

Or you can pay RedHat for this service.

Re:I Miss RedHat Network

[Anonymous Coward]

I run a small mail server; actually, it's in the configuration stage (thankfully). I use RH9 which installs postfix as a bizarre confusion of sendmail and postfix. Odd, but apparently this is the "right way" to do it as I found after some research. Not Red Hat's fault, though some documentation would have been delightful.

I remove postfix, things get easier. I get the latest RH sendmail update, 8.12.9 and install (this was on 11/22). Soon afterward, seeking documentation on sendmail.org, find a remote root exploit exists for 8.12.9. Download source and old-school install 8.12.10, which was a fun exercise.

It was easy work, but ... 8.12.10 and the patch were released on 9/17. This is two months ago! And it's a patch for a remote root exploit! !!! Can I 'trust' (non-cryptographic sense) RHN at all?

Going to be more careful now, check mitre, and whatever. It's clear that rhn advisories aren't enough (though it was fun to read that 'ls' was insecure).

And don't bother telling me to use postfix instead of sendmail. Postfix's benefits (true or not) are irrelevant here, as sendmail is still an actively maintained software with large installed base.

Re:I Miss RedHat Network

[ARC_RAF]

Just Use Red Carpet its just as good and still supports RH9.0,

Re:I Miss RedHat Network

[cowbutt]

Remember that Red Hat (wherever possible and sensible) backport fixes into older versions so as to minimize the risks in applying their updates. Thus the 8.12.9 errata that you installed may well have been just as secure as 8.12.10. You need to reed the Red Hat advisories to see what CVE/CERT vulnerabilities they fix. For more background on Red Hat's backporting policy, read this and this.

Incidentally, I gather Debian takes broadly the same approach. The alternative is to blindly supply the latest version, risking Microsoft-style breakage with errata/hotfixes.

--

Re:I Miss RedHat Network

[mt_nixnut]

I understand that many and maybe most people abused the RHN service. I wish they would have maintained service and just ended free RHN updates. Cutting Fedora out and making it into something as volitile as it sounds like it is going to be worries me. The Linux advantage has always been the freedom from EULA's. Entitlements for RHN were much cleaner and easier manage than any commercial EULA I have been involved with. Install without worries and $5 a month for all the machines that were critical. My personal machines I used apt for and did not use RH bandwidth. No harm no foul as far as I can see. And it increased the market penetration for RedHat. I honestly think that is how RH became the leader in the first place. I guess time will tell how good this is for RH and for Linux. (sigh)

Re:I Miss RedHat Network

[pyros]

It's totally permissible to run their Enterprise products on as many machines as you like without any RHN subscription or support contract. Just buy one copy, and install it everywhere. You can then setup a cron job to grab the errata SRPMs from ftp.redhat.com (which have been available for free since the first release of RHEL) to a local server, build them for your arch, put them in an apt repo, and rebuild the apt repo headers. Then have allyour local machines check against that in-house repo. You don't get the centralized, stateful admin interface that is the RHN website, but you could even build that yourself with a php/mysql solution.

Re:I Miss RedHat Network

[pyros]

I use RH9 which installs postfix as a bizarre confusion of sendmail and postfix.

That says to me you installed it wrong. I have postfix installed on a handful of machines, and there are no sendmail packages installed on any of them. There is a utility, name is something like redhat-config-smtp or redhat-config-mail or switchmail, that can switch all the important config files between sendmail and postfix. Perhaps you should look into it.

Subscription

[hcuar]

Isn't a yearly subscription the same thing Micro$oft considered for their software model, and people brought their pitchforks and torches?

Re:Subscription

[paranerd]

People brought their pitchforks to this weenie roast too.

... in droves.

Re:Subscription

[BenjyD]

Ah, but you see, Red Hat will give you support and ermmm... timely updates. Unlike any other distribution, where you just get the updates. I guess the main point is that for the kind of task you use a four processor machine for, a few thousand dollars isn't much to pay for peace of mind.

Does anyone have any experience with RedHat support? Is it worth the money?

Re:Subscription

[elodan]

The difference is that MS has a monopoly - moving to a rental type license will force millions of users to go that way whether they want to or not.
Don't like Windows/MS? Tough shit.
Don't like Red Hat? Use SuSE.

Re:Subscription

[dr-suess-fan]

For us, releasing a production redhat server for a
mission critical app would be a very tough sell in our organization. Our Unix team doesn't need support
generally, but then there have been times when we've
found a bug and were quite happy to open a case with
Redhat and ask them to figure it out.

It's not really about needing support or not IMO, but rather the opportunity to pass off an issue to someone in a better position to investigate.

My experience with Redhat support has been very
positive so far. The 'one who answers the phone'
actually knows Unix/Linux well enough to do some
preliminary research before escalating to back-line support.

For us, we're used to paying for Sun service at
a silver level and while this includes hardware, 799$US per year for Redhat support is a good
deal in our opinion.

HTH

Re:Subscription

[AndroidCat]

Considered? That's what Microsoft has always done, they just wanted to make it more official and a more predictable revenue stream.

You didn't think those version bumps every year or two were about bug-fixes and new features?

Re:Subscription

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft: you don't own the software, you pay a yearly subscription fee for the right to run it, and you pay extra if you want support.

Redhat: you own the software, and pay a yearly subscription fee for support.

Re:Subscription

[ThisIsFred]

Isn't a yearly subscription the same thing Micro$oft considered for their software model, and people brought their pitchforks and torches?

Some differences:

* RedHat is not a near-monopoly that charges almost $300 for just a license on their latest desktop OS.

* RedHat does not disable your operating system if you opt out of the subscription or upgrade your machine.

* A RedHat subscription includes support. Microsoft's license fees only include software updates.

Re:Subscription

[Politburo]

I guess the main point is that for the kind of task you use a four processor machine for, a few thousand dollars isn't much to pay for peace of mind.

Yeah and if someone had said that about Microsoft, they'd be flamed off the internet. In fact, they already have. Remember that Microsoft requires you to buy Professional Server or Datacenter Edition (I cannot recall) for machines with large amounts of memory and multiple processors. But that's not paying for peace of mind, that's being ripped off, I get it.

+1, Insightful? How about -1, Hypocrisy.

Re:Subscription

[mark_lybarger]

Redhat: you own the software, and pay a yearly subscription fee for support.

that implies that i could do what ever i want with it right? like install it on another machine if i choose? use it without that subscription service?

Re:Subscription

[terrymr]

Support is extra with all MS products. So I don't see how paying a higher license fee is paying for peace of mind.

Re:Subscription

[williamhooper]

Assuming:

1. You don't want RHN and Support for any of the machines (
2. read the agreement)

   
   You follow Red Hat's Trademark guidelines

Re:Subscription

[pyros]

like install it on another machine if i choose? use it without that subscription service?You can, that just means you loose the support license.

Re:Subscription

[haggar]

Yes, we had. Paid 1200 Euro (about 1350 US$) for one year usage of RHAS (redhat adv. server), and the support was laughable. OK, sure, the support guys knew some things, but they never told us anything we didn't already know, and most of the times we had to come up wth the solutions ourselves.

And one time, we never found a solution, no matter what. We decided not to use RHAS for our turnkey solution.

I work for a 50.000 Software/Hardware/Telecommunications company in Europe.

Re:Subscription

[pyros]

RedHat does not disable your operating system if you opt out of the subscription or upgrade your mac

Can you show me evidence that Microsoft has ever disabled someone's computer for failure to upgrade?

Re:Subscription

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

Does anyone have any experience with RedHat support? Is it worth the money?

I have just migrated from $c0 to RedHat ES 3. The initial disks were corrupt on shipment :-( that left a bad taste in my mouth. However, I called Red Hat support and the guy said "What do you want me to do for you?" I said I would be satisfied (their FTP server was not working either that day) if they got me new disks RIGHT AWAY. He actually said "OK" The next day I got a package from Red Hats Distribution people containing BURNED COPIES of the master disks...the very next day. That pulled me out of a tight spot. The following day the newly repressed boxed set arrived. Red Hats support was polite and thorough. (note I complained on Slashdot that day as I was waiting on the phone...this post cancels that :-)

Re:Subscription

[Laur]

RedHat does not disable your operating system if you opt out of the subscription or upgrade your machine.

Can you show me evidence that Microsoft has ever disabled someone's computer for failure to upgrade?

The parent is refering to XP product activation. If you change too much stuff in your machine, or try to move the install to a new machine Windows will lock you out until you call Microsoft to reactivate.

Re:Subscription

[pyros]

I guess I misread the statement, but I think my question still stands with minor editing. I at first thought of opt-ing out of upgrading to the latest release, which would be facilitated by a subscription model. The activation service doesn't fall into a subscription model service, so I'd still like an example of Microsoft disabling a computer for opting out of subscription updates.

Come to think of it, Microsoft doesn't even offer subscription updates. They're free. And what a shock, so are Red Hat's. So both offer free updates for their OS products, one happens to offer an advanced system to monitor and deploy those updates for an extra fee. The difference is that Microsoft wanted to move entirely to fee-based updates. Red Hat has consistently delivered free updates, albeit in source form. The original comparison would be valid if you could not get those free sources for the updates, which would violate the GPL.

Re:Subscription

[ThisIsFred]

No, and I won't bother to, because I never said Microsoft did so. What I was pointing out was that if you are on a subscription-based service, i.e. a maintenance license, you have to remove the software if you let your license expire from not paying the license maintenance fees. This is how Microsoft maintenance licensing works now.

Re:Subscription

[pyros]

No, and I won't bother to, because I never said Microsoft did so.

You implied it by stating that a difference between RedHat and Microsoft was that Red Hat doesn't.

What I was pointing out was that if you are on a subscription-based service, i.e. a maintenance license, you have to remove the software if you let your license expire from not paying the license maintenance fees. This is how Microsoft maintenance licensing works now.

To be pedantic, if the license says you must remove the software at the end of the license then it isn't a maintenance license, it's a usage license. But fair enough.

Re:Subscription

[combinatorics]

The two RedHat tech's I dealt with were surprisingly bright. But I agree that it's more of an insurance policy.

Re:Subscription

[sheldon]

Two differences...

#1. Microsoft actually paid to write the software they are selling, so it's obviously why they would need to recoup costs.

#2. Microsoft does provide support, or are you not aware of support.microsoft.com and Windowsupdate. They provide the support that everybody needs as part of the product price, the support that is not included is the speciality situations where something bizarre happens as a result of the particulars of your environment.

Redhat provides zero support unless you buy a support license. Except for Fedora, where they'll make updates available, just no tool to automate the deployment.

No, I understand why Redhat is doing what they are doing, and I simply point out that it is no different or any less moral or ethical than what Microsoft does.

This isn't a strawman, this is pure hypocrisy on the party of Linux supporters.

Re:Subscription

[ThisIsFred]

To be pedantic, if the license says you must remove the software at the end of the license then it isn't a maintenance license, it's a usage license.

Please forward that to Microsoft. It's their naming convention, not mine.

Re:Subscription

[EugeneK]

"Microsoft actually paid to write the software they are selling, "

are you saying Redhat didn't pay to write the software they are selling?

Re:Subscription

[sheldon]

Yes, that is what I'm saying. Over 95% of the software distributed by Redhat was not written by Redhat.

Kernel, all the GNU tools, KDE, GNOME, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

Re:Subscription

[EugeneK]

"Kernel"

do :

grep -e "E: [^@]*@redhat" /usr/src/linux-2.6.0-test10/CREDITS

"all of the GNU tools"
for gcc (for example), do
find gcc-3.2.2 -name "*.[h|c]*" -exec grep -H -i \
"redhat\." '{}' ';'

"KDE"
find kdebase-3.1.4 -name "*.[h|c]*" -exec grep -H -i "redhat\." '{}' ';'
"GNOME"


find gtk+-2.2.4 -name "*.[h|c]*" -exec grep -H -i "redhat\." '{}' ';'


I was pretty surprised just how many folks with redhat.com email addresses are in the source code of these projects. The KDE sample I took had a much smaller list than the GNOME sample (gtk+) but still they're there.

The point to draw from the above is that Redhat actually paid to write the software they are selling.

However, I would agree with you if you are saying that MS pays to write a higher percentage of software in its OS distribution than Redhat pays to write for its distribution, though I have no way of verifying that assumption since I don't have the source code for Windows. Where do you get the over 95% figure, and more importantly what conclusion do you draw from the difference in percentages?

Re:If they're doing so well..

[Erwos]

What do you think Fedora is?

It's not like RedHat just handed them a site and told them to get on with it. RedHat employees are very actively involved with the whole thing, and are contributing tons of code.

-Erwos

What's the difference ?

[alenm]

Well, they are commited to supporting the enterprise version of Redhat, but can anyone explain me if there will be a difference between the Fedora and Enterprise line other than the support and speed of implementation?

For instance will all the Oracle optimization still be in Fedora?

Re:What's the difference ?

[AchmedHabib]

And what is more important, will Oracle only be supported with Enterprise versions in the future.

btw. do you have a link to any information regarding those Oracle optimizations?

Re:What's the difference ?

[markxsd]

"will Oracle only be supported with Enterprise versions in the future."

I believe the answer is "Yes".

"a link to any information regarding those Oracle optimizations?"

The Linux page on OTN would be a good place to start.

Re:What's the difference ?

[StenD]

And what is more important, will Oracle only be supported with Enterprise versions in the future.

Well, that's an Oracle decision, not a Red Hat decision, but my guess? Yes, Oracle, and other enterprise software vendors, will support their applications on RHEL, not Fedora. Likewise, they're probably only going to suppport the Red Hat-built packages, not packages built with custom options from SRPMs or tarballs. That doesn't mean that you can't run on custom-configured systems, just that when you call for support, they're going to want to know if the problem also occurs on the supported configuration. Why? An application vendor cannot afford to test every possible combination of configuration options, so limiting support to a set of options blessed by Red Hat makes support practical. When a problem occurs with a custom configuration but not a "blessed" configuration, the application vendor may not even have the expertise available to determine if the problem is due to a Linux bug, rather than an application bug.

Re:What's the difference ?

[gl4ss]

the way i view it(in debian terms) is that the enterprise version would be 'stable' and fedora 'unstable'. so a lot of stuff would be easier to add first into fedora and test it there, and they don't have to be responsible for anyone if fedora gets broken because of this so that they can add more stuff just for testing purposes much more faster than they could if they were actually selling it(with support).

Re:What's the difference ?

[FatherOfONe]

I, and most have no problem with your statement, however please note that Oracle only supports EXPENSIVE versions of Linux. What has made Linux great is the ability to put a box in an organization (skunk works projects) and test it out. Then when it works you can look at putting it in production. What is needed is for these vendors to release a "free" but not supported version of their product that is EXACTLY like their enterprise version. This product should be just as easy to download ISO's as it always has been.

My big gripe is that with Microsoft/Novell/IBM/Oracle you pay for their development effort and their support. With RedHat you can't get their product without support, and they don't do that much develoment. They just package other peoples software and make sure it all works.

I wonder

[mental_telepathy]

based on the subscription rates, this doesn't seem to be a better deal than OS X's $999 unlimited client license. Yeah, the hardware is cheaper, but if you have 20-30 servers...

Re:I wonder

[thelaw]

(for those who don't know exactly what he's referring to, here's the link.)

i think you're misreading the apple license. it doesn't mean you can install it on as many servers as you like, it only means you can connect to it with as many file-sharing clients as you like at one time. kind of like the windows server line - the basic license only allows 5 clients to connect at a time.

red hat may turn out to be a better deal since they don't limit the number of clients that can connect to your samba server.

jon

Re:I wonder

[zulux]

kind of like the windows server line - the basic license only allows 5 clients to connect at a time.

Actually, if you have only one network card - you can't connect more that one computer at a time. Ethernet is a serial protocall - sure it switches really fast so it seems like everybody has a perment connection.

So unless you have 6 network cards or do somtihng really odd - Any computer can only server one other computer at a time.

Re:I wonder

[Jeremy Erwin]

Actually, if you have only one network card - you can't connect more that one computer at a time. Ethernet is a serial protocall - sure it switches really fast so it seems like everybody has a perment connection.

So unless you have 6 network cards or do somtihng really odd - Any computer can only server one other computer at a time.

ah, but, are you sure that will do the trick? The PCI bus will be shared among your multiple ethernet cards, and your six users will be each contending for use of a single CPU. Better get an 8 way server, just to make sure.

Re:I wonder

[Johnny Mnemonic]

The parent is absolutely misreading the license. You are correct: you can only install it on one, but the "unlimited" means that you can allow "unlimited clients" to connect.

Re:I wonder

[Dick Faze]

At this point its worth defining what we mean by "connection". 1) All machines can be connected at the same time even with the power off if you're looking at the physical "connections" 2) A TCP/IP "connection" can be maintained with great amounts of downtime between packets, so a non-stop data flow is not required in this case. 3) An application "connection", such as a map drive, can be maintained much longer than this without communication between the end nodes, yet it is still a valid connection. 4) Even with multiple PCI buses supporting the ethernet cards, system RAM is shared, so aspects of the lowest "connection" levels are handled serially unless you're REALLY lucky memory-bus-wise We need to resolve these important semantic issues before we can really get into the meat of this thing.

Re:I wonder

[Twid]

Actually, you're not *quite* right, but you're close.

Mac OSX Server comes with an unlimited client license with each Xserve (1U rackmount G4 server). There is also a stripped down Xserve cluster node specifically for clustering that comes with a 10-client copy of OSX Server.

You can also purchase OSX Server and install it on a G4 or G5 tower, or heck, even an iMac. It's $999 for unlimited clients and $499 for 1-10 clients. The unlimited version is not limited in any way under samba or otherwise. Unlimited means unlimited.

For support, you can purchase Applecare for the Xserve, which is basically a 3-year extended warranty, for $999. This doesn't cover configuration and installation. Frankly, OSX Server is easy enough to set up that I think a typical customer's best bet is to try to set it up themselves and then call support per-incident (I think $400 per incident).

But, for large companies there is also a cool new program for direct tech-to-tech helpdesk support. This costs $2,799 and provides two contacts for calling Apple, plus a quarterly collection of software tools. It's a really good deal for large customers.

OSX Server is really great. You get the power of BSD with the nice friendly Apple GUI on top for user management and such.

Re:I wonder

[shaitand]

All the parent said was that the license meant unlimited clients and did NOT mean you could install it on 30 servers for $999, you would have to purchase a seperate license for each server which is $30k not $1k. That's it. What he said differs from what you said in no way whatsoever.

Re:I wonder

[Twid]

oh please, I was a late poster and I haven't even been modded up. If I wanted to karma whore I could do better than that (and have!). :)

apt

[Anonymous Coward]

I've moved all my redhat machines (200+) over to apt.

As long as RedHat still posts updated RPMs in a timely manner, you can make a cronjob to check and update packages.

Re:apt

[phaze3000]

You mean the updates they won't be releasing after Dec 2003 (or April 30th if you're running RH9)?

I too am moving to apt, but dpkg too - I'm moving all the servers to Debian.

Re:apt

[ebbomega]

1) apt-rpm is a rather valuable tool. I'm pretty sure that's what he's talking about there. It's much more efficient at updating packages than RHN ever was, as this doesn't require any logging in or any hoops to jump through... just a commandline command and voila! Updated system.

2) Just because debian stable is thoroughly dated for desktop-like apps, doesn't mean that All debian package systems are that bad. Just re-point your apt repository to unstable (sid) and apt-get update&&apt-get dist-upgrade and huzzah! Modern operating system!

Stable is moreso designed for servers and the like, and not for the desktop. Unstable is more for home use.

Interesting thing to note is unstable's stability versus Windows.... =)

umm

[HBI]

This doesn't say jack about conversion rate from 6.x-9.x Red Hat to the Enterprise product though.

I am interested in that. You would assume that people who bought the enterprise product would pay for their support - otherwise why buy it?

Sounds like the bleeding obvious to me. They lowball an expectation and their analysis is proved flawed. This is news? Must be a slow day.

Re:umm

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Well, you see it has been show that 70% of the population does not understand statistics and there is a 1 in 10 chance that the next person you talk to does not understand probability. Then again, 85% of statistics are made up.

Re:umm

[jasonbowen]

I noticed somebody pointing out that it's been reported that it was ONLY 26K licenses. When you consider that the majority are probably servers and that there quarterly results have improved as a result of the enterprise line, they are making the correct decisions for themselves. Redhat has architected a great support and service model that supports Linux(imho). They are targetting what marekts they currently want to sell Linux right now and I agree with their analysis at this point. Linux isn't close to competing with Mac OS X or Windows on the desktop yet. Hardware needs to be detected and drivers installed seamlessly. IMHO one toolset needs to emerge as the standard. You want a bloated pig, run three apps that require three different tookit libraries to run. Right now Linux is a server/workstation operating system. All the big corporations that are now trying to go with desktop solutions are selling it in specific configurations, not as a Windows or Mac replacement. I think Redhat is making the right move.

Re:umm

[CryBaby]

I'm curious to see the conversion rates as well. I administer 8 (soon to be 12) busy servers running RH8 and RH9. Red Hat was installed by my predecessor and there hasn't been any reason to reevaluate that choice until now. Since I have to reinstall an OS on all of these machines (not sure if RH offers an "upgrade" install of RHEL, but I wouldn't take the chance even if the option exists), I took this "opportunity" to look at other distros and OS's. While my employer couldn't care less about the RHEL support/update fees (it's a large company), I could't help but think about what my employer is actually getting for their money.
After considering RHEL's offer of stability, support and paid upgrades, I could not justify even the ES price when compared to FreeBSD which already offers stability in spades, free upgrades, better built-in security features and excellent system documentation.
I have never even thought about turning to Red Hat for tech support, so I see the paid support as an unnecessary expense. My employer already pays me to administer their systems. I can't foresee needing Red Hat's help to do my job. If that day should ever come, we would be better off financially by paying an incident fee rather than paying for ongoing, unused support for a dozen servers.
In the final analysis, I can't find any reason to "sell" my employer Red Hat's EL as long as FreeBSD exists. I wonder how many other sys admins have gone through a similar process and dumped Red Hat entirely...

Re:umm

[dicka_j]

Obligitory Simpons quote:

Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that

Re:I guess I'm in the minority.

[Theatetus]

The same logic that gave us "virii" would yield "linuces". For that matter, I call the plural of "kleenex" "kleeneces".

Re:If they're doing so well..

[wa1ter]

The report doesn't suggest overnight riches for Redhat. It doesn't say anything about their financial position either. What it does say is that Redhat wants a new call center. This is most likely going to coast a fair bit so don't expect them to spend more time on fedora from now on (although from what I understood they are still actively involved with that as is).

Re:I guess I'm in the minority.

[morcego]

Actually, the correct plural form for "virus", in latin, would be "viri" (one "i" only).

PS: Can't get more off-topic than this :)

Doublethink.

[Performer Guy]

That is a pretty blatant example of doublethink propaganda. Red Had drops support and release for RHx, and we see an article singing their praises on how great a job they're dowing throwing Fedora over the fence because they can claim some customer retention on the Enterprise front.

No it's not a great job, the reasonably priced support option is gone, and there's nothing they offer between outlandishly expensive enterprise support and free no support. For an Operating system they mostly package, not author, they are doing a really bad job at providing affordable support options or stable releases that the ordinary user might want (like the vast majority of Linux users using RHx who were abandoned). Of course they have explicitly said they're not interested in that business, (probably abandoned to protect margins in the Enterprise business). Why anyone would pretend this is all rosy and RH are doing a great job after leaving such a gaping wound on the Linux desktop is beyond me.

Re:Doublethink.

[div_2n]

If you see a huge gap in the market, stop complaining and fill it. There is little that is more silly than someone that complains about a problem yet offers no solutions or desire to find a solution.

Complaining does nothing to solve a problem. It only adds to it.

Re:Doublethink.

[Junta]

Exactly why I think SuSE has a great window of opportunity, their 'Professional Linux' distribution is still reasonably priced for the support offered. And frankly, once one looks past previous RedHat training experience, a lot will realize that SuSE does quite a few things better.

Re:Doublethink.

[Performer Guy]

In this instance my post wasn't complaining about RH, it was complaining about the propaganda saying RH was doing a great job. Since I have complained on other occasions about RH and what they've done with this move in the past I will respond to your comment on filling the gap, Perens and his latest Debian derived effort looks like it might be a contender, or SuSe might offer an alternative (let's see how the acquisition pans out). That's the beauty of Linux, you have a choice, it still doesn't make the unilateral withdrawal of affordable support and stable releases for the largest distro (in my neck of the woods) a pleasant experience, and it sure doesn't mean they're doing a good job (at least for thos users who were let down).

Re:Doublethink.

[peter_gzowski]

Where's the "gaping wound"? Let me check... hmmm... Holy Christ, my Mandrake Update still works! Surely this black hole that RedHat has created has caused SuSE's auto-update feature to break down! What's that, SuSE users? YaST still works? Oh...

We were using RedHat 8.0 in my lab, and now we have to switch distros. Not a big deal, we've got choices. I don't like RedHat's Gnome-y desktop anyway. Users who want what RedHat no longer provides will get along fine.

Re:Doublethink.

[shaitand]

Except the other desktop distributions had gapping holes in configurability, or sucked in terms of hardware detection (the only ones that don't suck use redhat's detection)

Re:Doublethink.

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

No it's not a great job, the reasonably priced support option is gone, and there's nothing they offer between outlandishly expensive enterprise support and free no support.

What a bad company, they dropped a line with no profit return and simply committed a handful of 70-110K $ developers to a free project. Damn them. Why won't they support my 8 PCs with Red Hat 6.2 that I burned (not bought). Linux is free (like speech) you want free like money go play with Minix or something.

Re:Doublethink.

[Pionar]

For an Operating system they mostly package, not author

Redhat has authored many things not only just for generic Linux, but also for RedHat Linux specifically. Nice GUIs for network controls (redhat-config-network, redhat-control-network), different utilities for system management, and a binary distribution system. Oh yeah, they just run off some cds and box it up.

Re:Doublethink.

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

It *was* good business. And cheaper than hell for them, even if they paid bandwidth for every leech user themselves

First, I will wonder aloud (and offtopic)why your comment got scored 0. That is a very good response. My point is that as you say it *was* good business. Boards and CEOs must always move beyond things that were good business and into greener pastures. I disagree with the cheaper than hell comment as I run an IT shop and know what kind of costs I have (much less than RHs). Remember, putting together a distro is a LOT of work (try doing an LFS once if you haven't). They pay for the developers who organize the distro as well as the bandwidth. Then sales of the boxed product are balanced against cost of development.
You are right though, you and your 8 boxes contributed to their growth in many intangible ways and some probably tangible as well.

Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL

[weave]

You could look at this the other way, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL. The way the RHEL license/contract reads, if you decide not to renew, you have to remove RHEL.

What's the renewal rate for Microsoft? 99.999%?

Yeah, I'm not too happy with ole Redhat these days. Our enterprise RHN subscription runs out December 11, but I still can't get any info about the alleged rumored educational version of RHEL out of them. Christmas holidays would be a perfect time for migrating our servers to RHEL Academic, but I fear they are going to shaft us on this one as well.

It's almost like they don't have a well thought out business plan and are making it up as they go along. All of this should have been mapped out several months in advance, giving customers the ability to plan their own migrations. The Academic piece was just forgotten about and filled in a week or so ago, and it's still vaporware.

Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL

[teg]

You could look at this the other way, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL. The way the RHEL license/contract reads, if you decide not to renew, you have to remove RHEL.

No, you just don't get support, updates and new releases.

Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL

[justins]

You could look at this the other way, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL. The way the RHEL license/contract reads, if you decide not to renew, you have to remove RHEL.

How does that work for a product that's made up of GPLed software? Does RH include some non-GPL stuff that they use to keep a hold on people?

Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL

[weave]

No, you just don't get support, updates and new releases.

I reread the agreement hoping to tell you that you were an idiot, but the egg may be on my face. Where it does say that the annual payment will be automatically invoiced each year unless explicitly terminated, I couldn't see anywhere where it says you have to remove software if you don't remove.

My bad. Touche.

Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL

[Anonymous Coward]

In looking at the Contract I recently recieved when I signed up for RHES 3, the only part I found about removing software is if you have a "Red Hat Network Proxy Server and Satellite" (Subscription agreement, Section II, Subsection B, Item 1).

If you have a proxy server or satellite and your subscription ends, you must remove and destroy all RHN code in your possesion.

Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL

[Junta]

Actually, though it may seem bad, it doesn't say that much about dissatisfaction. That 10% of non-renewed subscriptions represents dissatisfied customers and customers that will stick to their current release level of RHEL and don't see a support need that warrants a renewal. I would daresay at least 10% of those customers could represent those with a really strong internal IT dept that has never called Redhat for anything and therefore the chances are low that they will do it again. And the chance they would want to risk a migration within a year of their entire infrastructure is low. Of those 10%, I would wager a good chunk will return in a couple of years when they feel the need to upgrade.

Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL

[PeteQC]

If you want a good academic Linux, why dont you go with EduLinux. It's a distro based on Mandrake 9.1 and modified to fit the needs of schools and others educational institutions!

Re:Or, 10% of businesses abandoned RHEL

[Laur]

Wow, you got a +4 informative just for admitting you were wrong! Just goes to show how unusual that is, especially on /. ;)

Now fully OT

[Theatetus]

Depends on what declension we're pretending "virus" would be. If we go with second declension, it would be "viri", with 4th, it would be "virus" (long "u"). I like "vires" since the word comes from "vis". "virii" seems to come from the idea that it's an altered second declension like "vir", which is silly but no more silly than any other retro-latinization we do.

Re:The money issue

[ewwhite]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=85998&cid=7486 206

Red Hat Professional Workstation is $99

Consider All options

[nurb432]

Be sure to look at FBSD. It comes from a controlled 'organization' and does everything Linux can do in the server room ( and most any need on the unix *business* desktop too.. ). And has a 10 year trackrecord.

You don't have to worry bout them changing there licensing on a whim..

Re:Consider All options

[BiggerIsBetter]

And Solaris x86 for that matter.

My experience 3 years ago

[div_2n]

I dunno about now but three years ago I was trying to get a sendmail (don't ask) box up and running for a client and was a complete newbie to Linux. I purchase a one time incident for like $250 and spent about 3 hours on the phone with them. They put me on the phone with their e-mail admin and he helped me get it up and running.

I will probably fork out the dough for the enterprise version for my home machine simply because I think Red Hat is great at what they do, play nice as a community member and produce quite a great product as far as I can tell.

There is no louder way to vote than with your wallet. As for me, I vote for Linux and Red Hat seems like a great company to push for. Don't forget they didn't hesitate to fire back at SCO. I will gladly help fund that effort.

Re:My experience 3 years ago

[AKnightCowboy]

I will probably fork out the dough for the enterprise version for my home machine simply because I think Red Hat is great at what they do, play nice as a community member and produce quite a great product as far as I can tell.

You work for Red Hat don't you? If you're going to fork over almost $200 for the basic unsupported workstation version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux then I have some land in the Florida everglades you may be interested in purchasing. Why don't you try another distribution for a month? Are you afraid that Red Hat isn't really doing anything spectacular enough to charge such outrageous prices? Debian or even Mandrake do exactly the same thing for $0. You can buy them if you want, but nobody forces you to in order to get updates.

Re:My experience 3 years ago

[div_2n]

No, I don't work for Red Hat. I have nothing to do with them except for running RH9 on my home station. I just don't have a problem paying for it since they are putting the effort into it.

As for support, I will get the RHN and that is sufficient for me. My time is important and I like having an easy way to install updates. I am sure other ways are easy but this one happens to be easy as well.

Only 26,000 units of RHEL so far - that aint much

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got it on fairly good authority that they've only gotten 26K RHEL subscriptions. Which is nothing compared to their "real" installed base, presuamably in the millions. My company is compelled to upgrade our EOL systems, but we have no plans to renew after that. We have to pay RedHat to buy us time such that we can migrate to another, reasonable, affordable distribution like SuSE or Debian. We're working directly with our hardware manufacturer, who already supports SuSE, to get Debian supported as well. RedHat Linux is a great product attached to an immature company, and doomed-to-fail business process.

But what do I know,

-edfardos...

Too complicated

[Seby123456]

90% return rate on the support line - doesn't that just mean no one can figure out how to work the thing?! ;)

Re:Too complicated

[QuasiCoLtd]

I don't care if you're Linus Fricking Torvalds, if you run RHE on a mission critical production machine you ALWAYS buy support. Of course, a few of that 10% probly still buy or get support, just not from Redhat

Re:Too complicated

[Bombcar]

Actually, if you're Linus Frickin' Torvalds, you ARE the support... :D

Re:If they're doing so well..

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they can contribute some code to make it actually work on my machine. I know, I know, it's easy to run out of memory (or so it said)during install when you only have 512M of RAM and 6G of HD space just for Linux.

Why do I think that I should have just used the entire HD for XP? Hmmmm....

At least Mandrake does install, and only crashes every other time I shut it down. Boy, that sure beats my crappy, unstable, one-crash-per-month-or-two eXPerience, when it gets used 98% of the time. I know, I probably misconfigured something by clicking that "Mozilla" icon.

fedora...

[uidzer0dotorg]

what exactly is better about the purchased version?

Re:fedora...

[FedeTXF]

If it breaks, you can call some RH engeneer and he'll help you.
If you have to stay up allways, then you need that red phone.

Re:fedora...

[Junta]

Well, for one support.
For another, Fedora is becoming their development platform with little regard to having to support or promise stability. So while bugfixes will be applied to the distro, you can bet an equal amount of broken feature enhancements will come in to offset stability benefits. Like running Debian unstable, essentially, but likely to be more bleeding edge and off the beaten path (i.e. the X based init, the kernel with nptl support, and a host of other things that are neat, but not well tested in Fedora).

So if you want to stay redhat-ish, on your servers and workstations for other people you support, RH enterprise is cool, but for your own desktop if competent, I would say the Fedora 'releases' are neat and any breakage can be worked around by an expert.

Of course, I think SuSE has the most appropriate business/pricing model in terms of being competitive against MS. SuSE professional is reasonably priced compared against what the actual cost of an MS OS license is for a workstation, whereas Redhat is really really expensive in the Workstation context. I'm quickly becoming a SuSE fan.

Re:fedora...

[Kludge]

If you're running a commercial server system and you want predictability rather than great features, go w/ the purchased version.

If you actually like new, usable software (desktop) go with Fedora. It's very nice, very slick. Except for the missing pine...

Re:fedora...

[TimButterfield]

Well, for one support.

Maybe. At $179 (WS) and $349 (ES), the 'Basic Editions' do not include support, at least according to this page.

As much as I hate to admit it...

[Trolling4Columbine]

...RedHat is still, hands-down, the most well-supported distro. out there.

Even without RHN's impending disappearance, there is simply a greater volume of knowledge out there for RedHat users.

While the expiration of a valuable resource like RHN is a bit discouraging for the OSS movement in general, there is simply no other distribution out there with as large a user and knowledge base as RedHat.

Upgraditis

[Space cowboy]

This is about the *existing* RHEL users keeping the product...

I suspect a fair few RH9 people (like me) are now evaluating their options. There are several distributions out there that the non-enterprise peeps can take a stab at before they decide to fork out for the RHEL edition.

There are a couple of advantages that RH offer - they are the de-facto standard, so if you use qualified software from a supplier, chances are it'll be qualified on RH, not debian...

They also offer support, and I've had to use it when installing on troublesome motherboards, but once something is installed, I'm reasonably ok on my own, so this isn't such a big deal for me...

The business imperatives to stay with RH are significantly less than with MS, so I would say 90% is a good figure, despite MS probably being able to claim higher than that. There is more choice on the linux OS, that's all there is to it...

Random thoughts...

Simon

Re:If they're doing so well..

[Anonymous Coward]

If they are doing so well as the report suggests, maybe they can dedicate some more time to developing the free (money) ones as well, to entice new people to Red Hat who might be buying the enterprise additions.

Hint: RedHat is a corporation. Corporations like to make money. They've tried the "Free as in $0 to entice people to pay for Linux" route for years now. They're scaling that back significantly, and putting more effort in the purchase-only version.

Do you think it was working well for them, and they decided that it would be a good move to become less profitable? I mean, I know that you know a lot more about the economics of free software than Red Hat does....maybe you should send them an email explaining the obvious.

Forking out the bones.

[Zapperlink]

I personally would fork out the bones for a quality product expecially one that involves linux community. I think if those that had a problem with the way something is done should definately join up on the development crews and submit bug errors and feature requests.

Re:If they're doing so well..

[corebreech]

Here's the thing... I put Red Hat on my system with the expectation that it's going to be around for some time. By pulling support for the product, they're costing me time. Why should I make the same mistake with Fedora?

They screwed up here, big time. There are lots of distros out there to choose from. And that's exactly what people are going to do: choose from these other distros.

OTOH, I wasn't comfortable with RH's dominance in the industry to begin with, and this bit of bone-headed thinking on their part combined with Novell/SuSE addresses this to my satisfaction.

Re:Debian!

[arabagast]

erm.. wrong: "WE LOVES IT.

these goddamn hippies, can`t even speak gollumish.

You forgot some...

[hendridm]

Debian... It just works.
Debian... When your job depends on it.

Speaking strictly on the server of course, not on the desktop :)

Hope Gentoo Doesn't Learn This Stuff...

[kaltar]

I Hope that gentoo don't start charging money for sync as redhat did with up2date. That will make me cry!

Re:Hope Gentoo Doesn't Learn This Stuff...

[Gunfighter]

If they do we'll just fork the project (as one team already has).

Or you could say:

[Surt]

1 in 10 redhat customers is so dissatisfied with their product that they are not maintaining their subscriptions.

That's a horrific customer loss rate.

Re:Or you could say:

[HiThere]

Do remember that this is only a statistic on their Enterprise customers. It doesn't say anything about the Red Hat Professional or Red Hat Personal edition users...Oops!, those are 100% gone.

(Well, not really. Some of them probably shifted to some version of Red Hat Enterprise, where they will be counted as new customers rather than renewals.)

The only statistic that I'm certain of is this one: "I'm gone." But it doesn't sound as good as I expected. I thought they would have a short-term increase in enterprise customers.

The problem is that they cut out a the editions that were at the base of their popularity among new users. And among repeat individual customers. If it was a money looser, then they should have looked for ways to improve it to break-even status, not just dropped it.

Well, that's history. Congrats to SuSE, Debian, and Mandrake on their new customer base.

Re:Or you could say:

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

1 in 10 redhat customers is so dissatisfied with their product that they are not maintaining their subscriptions.

Probably, you could say that 8 out of ten people do not know / or understand that it is a subscription service and thus don't pay. 1 out of ten were not prepared to migrate and unable to perform technical tasks related to ...well, anything. Finally, 1 out of ten may actually be so upset about the product that they left. Those are all hypothetical numbers but so are statistics in general.

Re:If they're doing so well..

[bvdbos]

I guess it will be a businessmodel like sun is doing with staroffice/openoffice.org... nothing to be afraid of imho.

No, probably just tired people

[greygent]

People tired of having to go through the process of creating RHN demo accounts for EACH machine just so they can install the security patches to vulnerabilities coming out, apparently, several times a week, as of late.

Hell, even Microsoft doesn't force you to go through a lengthly (or much of any, besides activation) registration in order to use Windows Update. It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late.

Now that Red Hat is becoming more popular, I see these problems only getting worse.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[BadBlood]

It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late.

Number of vunerabilities, perhaps. Severity of vulnerabilities, no.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[bfg9000]

It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late... Now that Red Hat is becoming more popular, I see these problems only getting worse.

That's all part of Gentoo's MasterPlan(TM)! We're going to let Red Hat have all the Gnu/Linux Marketshare in order to make them act like a virus honeypot, leaving us little guys in the clear!

Re:No, probably just tired people

[avdp]

Two different business models.

MS: you pay dearly for the software, they throw in the Windows Updates for free.

RedHat: we give you the software, you pay yearly subscriptions if you want the easy Windows-Update-like RHN.

The fact that RedHat had demo accounts in the first place is to their credit. It's really hard to feel bad about the fact that it's a hassle to abuse the demo account concept (by signing up for an account for each machine). And also, you don't need RHN to get updates anyway - you can always download them from their errata page.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[freeweed]

Hell, even Microsoft doesn't force you to go through a lengthly (or much of any, besides activation) registration in order to use Windows Update.

No, they just charge you $400 for your copy of Windows first.

It also seems like Red Hat is neck and neck with Microsoft concerning number of vulnerabilities, as of late.

Number of vulnerabilities != severity of vulnerabilities.

Show me something as damaging as the RPC holes on RH. It has to be installed by default, you cannot just turn off the service blindly without breaking things, it has to lead to root access on the machine, and it also has to somehow bypass iptables in order to get into the machine in the first place.

Show me that, and I'll re-evaluate your post as being anything other than a troll.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[altmel]

Where the hell do you get $400? At the most the full version of XP Pro is $200.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[burns210]

why not just use 'yum update' in a cron job? Fedora is moving it's repository to use yum and apt for upgrades, and it works great for me.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[greygent]

I'm talking about servers, mainly, and I definitely wouldn't use Fedora on a production... well anything.

I haven't seen yum referenced in Red Hat documentation, everything I've read refers to RHN.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[freeweed]

Red Hat charges $349 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES, per their website. This price includes a FULL year of updates for free. Uhm, wow.

The grandparent was talking about demo accounts. Which are used when you HAVEN'T paid for support. Which happens when you get RedHat for free.

Any remote root exploit, of which there have been several.

Really? Find me one. Read my criteria and point it out to me. It'll be news to RedHat users to know that their systems can be compromisd by sendmail or openssh exploits when they're not even installed or running.

Uhm, ever heard of firewalls? Ever heard of IPSec policies under Windows 2000? you probably haven't, but most competent 2000 administrators have, and they use them.

Again, thanks for not reading. I'd love to see a Windows install that had a firewall enabled by default. Really I would. A properly administered machine is irrelevent to the discussion, as the number of vulnerabilities discovered becomes meaningless if you're keeping it up to date.

The grandparent was trying to equate exploitability of Windows and RedHat. Properly administered, both machines are equally secure, so it's a moot point. Problem is, if you're not perfect, you're a lot more likely to get nailed on Windows than on RedHat.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[avdp]

I was talking about the RedHat Linux (soon to be defunct) product line, which it seems is what you were complaining about (the fact that changing your one free entitlement around was sooo tiring).

However, it still hold true for the RHEL. They just don't make ISOs available to you. They'll send you a CD with your first year subscription. If you get a copy of the CD from someone else, good for you. You can install and use it and won't be breaking any laws.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[greygent]

The subscription is $799 a year. I can get a copy of Windows ____ Server for cheaper than that. Granted, that price doesn't include more than a handful of CALs.

If I get a copy of the CD from someone else, who will support it? Granted, the Linux volunteer community kills Microsoft in terms of support, but legally speaking, who?

"I got this unsupported CD-R copy of RHEL from a friend, and we're going to use it to run our mission-critical server" doesn't cut it at most larger places.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[burns210]

well, yum is a port of the package management software used by Yellow Dog Linux. it uses all rpms, and in pretty handy. may want to try it on a spare and see how it works, but it is deffinetly an optiton for upgrades. it also does dependency checking and all that jazz: YUM

and your other point about fedora... ya, it had a slow (buggy) start, but don't give up on it, give it some time and see how it does. personally, i think it is going to be a huge success in a year's time.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[avdp]

It's worth noting that aside from the only 5 CAL your Windows xxxx Server license comes with, it also doesn't come with support (at least not with a SLA). That's extra, and not cheap. The $799/year from RH is the support contract, the software is free. Yes, I understand it might appear to be a bit of a technicality.

To answer your question, legally speaking, nobody. But then again, legally speaking, if you read your MS EULA you'll notice that they legally have no responsibility whatsoever to do anything, and have no responsibility if anything bad happens to you as a result of using their products. Of course, I suppose you could sue MS in case of problems (good luck with that).

Don't get me wrong, I am not happy that the "regular" RHL went away, I will miss it, and I will change to another Linux distributor, both at home and at work. I was just addressing the technicality. RHEL is still GPL, and is therefore still free. The fact that this project exists illustrate the point.

But again, I was originally just addressing your rant about RHN and the free entitlement.

Re:No, probably just tired people

[avdp]

Also you can get RHEL ES for $349 if you don't need the phone and web support. You get the updates and the RHN subscription.

I know, it's more than free. But I thought I'd set you straight anyway.

Re:The money issue

[Mr. Slippery]

Red Hat Professional Workstation is $99

Very interesting! I wonder why they don't market this more. Seems like a perfect fit in between RHEL and Fedora, good for the small office, or for someone who runs RHEL at work and wants to have the same software at home.

Re:If they're doing so well..

[ePhil_One]

What do you think Fedora is?

A product with even less QA than RH9.

Redhat wants to scare business users into buying their "Enterprise" line. There is a group of users for whom Enterprise makes perfect sense, companies that want a nice stable product that doesn't upgrade every 6 months; that the group they founded it for. They soon started advertising that it was more stable (it was). From there, they morphed to advertising that the other product was "less stable" (rare you see a company dissing their own product, esp. as less stable was still pretty damned stable).

When folks still didn't flock to spend hundreds more on Enterprise, they "handed off" the product to the good "Fedora" folks. Now, its an intriguing idea, but its going to have to prove itself. Will they get caught up making sure they have the latest cool stuff and overlook the stability issues that might raise? How well will the new QA process work?

Its sort of a scortched earth policy with a twist; people were happy in those fields when they lit them up, some might run to their enterprise field, but a lot more are going elsewhere. And unfortunately, lots of CxO's are going to point to this and say "Thats why we cant have Linux".

If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then whiteboxlinux.org might be for you. It's RHEL with all of the trademarks etc removed, currently being sponsored by a public library in the US. It's available free of charge.

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[Realistic_Dragon]

And they have asked not to be linked to on slashdot... guess that's why you posted it as an anonymous coward!

From the website:

(One immediate problem will be bandwidth. The Beauregard Parish Library is a small parish (county) library in rural Louisiana with a single lowly T-1 connection to the world. Even with BitTorrent, serving up six or seven full ISO images will get insane very fast if the word spreads very far. So PLEASE! For the love of all that is Good, Holy, Just and generally pleasing to the Great Penguin, DO NOT SUBMIT THIS PAGE TO SLASHDOT!!)

The Google mirror is here for the curious who want to view the site without killing their bandwidth.

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[Dick Faze]

Also, you can have the 3.0 Enterprise product by compiling the source yourself, so if you don't want to pay for support, dont. Somebody posted a link to a site that tells you how to do it. Maybe they could again......

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[HiThere]

After reading the story at White Box, appearantly you CAN'T build RHEL by compiling from source. It's a lot more involved. Compiling from source will give you most of it, but you have to patch up afterwards (and before hand? I read it a couple of days ago, so the details are a bit fuzzy. I seem to remember that you need to track down some packages on the web before you start.)

White Box Enterprise Linux is a much better solution, because they've done the preparatory work.

OTOH, I've been pretty satisfied with Debian (Libranet Linux), and generally prefer it currently to either Mandrake or SuSE. But if you need "Enterprise" features, the software you need may determine your distribution. E.g., Oracle won't be validated under White Box Enterprise Linux any time soon...even though it's nearly identical to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So that probably means SuSE.

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[a.ferrier]

However, as it says on the whiteboxlinux page... "One immediate problem will be bandwidth. The Beauregard Parish Library is a small parish (county) library in rural Louisiana with a single lowly T-1 connection to the world. Even with BitTorrent, serving up six or seven full ISO images will get insane very fast if the word spreads very far. So PLEASE! For the love of all that is Good, Holy, Just and generally pleasing to the Great Penguin, DO NOT SUBMIT THIS PAGE TO SLASHDOT!!"

Ah well. Another one bites the dust.

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

If you need an enterprise OS, then you can afford an enterprise OS. I find it a shame that someone would simply go through and remove the trademarks (which RedHat allows and even gives instructions in their license for it). To those companies using it I hope you get to see why people say, you get what you pay for.

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[93 Escort Wagon]

I wonder just how long this "White Box" product will be available. That is, how long will it be until his boss finds out he's using the library's equipment for an unrelated purpose?

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[Isaac-1]

Sometime it would be nice if slashdot readers would do a little research before speaking. What makes you think that a Library that is running 70+ linux machines currently on RedHat, would consider this unrelated. It even says on the White Box page that the primary reason for it to be developed was for internal use.

Ike

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[jmorris42]

> If you need an enterprise OS, then you can afford an enterprise OS.

But what if you just need an OS with a support window longer than six months? That was our situation, we needed a successor to RH7.3 which goes off support on Dec 31. Turns out we weren't alone either, the response from just telling a couple of people two weeks ago has been bigger than anything I had imagined.

> I find it a shame that someone would simply go through and remove the
> trademarks (which RedHat allows and even gives instructions in their
> license for it).

Why? RHEL3, as a collective work, is released under the GPL with the exception of their registered trademarks. So you find it a 'shame' that I am redistributing GPL software under the terms and conditions of it's license? And I went far beyond the minimum required by their license to remove the association with Red Hat so that nobody in their right mind would mistakenly assume White Box is a product of, sponsored by, etc. of RH Inc.

> To those companies using it I hope you get to see why people say,
> you get what you pay for.

To those of us who understand what Free Software is really about, we already know. We are getting the software we wished RedHat had found a profitable way to sell us with the understanding we have to now take responsibility for maintaining it ourselves. It is more work but less than the effort of migrating. RHEL itself was never an option though. It just doesn't make sense to pay that kind of money annually for public access workstations and $250 EPIAs at library checkout stations.

In public statements I had said for years that one of the main attractions was control of our own destiny. We could upgrade or not on our own timetable. That if Red Hat did something we couldn't abide we could just pick our ball and go home. Turns out an even better option was to take THEIR ball and play without them.

I might have bought a license for RHEL AS on our primary server, but that RHEN EULA scared the hell out of me when considering I wasn't going to be buying for the workstations, and plus, if I was going to be rebuilding from scratch anyway.....

The GPL is truly a wonder of the modern age, right up there with the Magna Carta, the US Constituition and the other great works of liberty. RMS can be a prick sometimes, but history is going to remember him long after thee, me and even Red Hat are all long forgotten.

p.s. Just an update on the /. effect. This thread is far enough down that no visible damage is happening to our site as I write this. Only 184 hits with slashdot in the referrer field.

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[vickir]

Since John is developing White Box for us to use on the library's computers, his boss already knows and approves. Signed, His Boss

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

Why? RHEL3, as a collective work, is released under the GPL with the exception of their registered trademarks. So you find it a 'shame' that I am redistributing GPL software under the terms and conditions of it's license?

I don't find it a shame that the license works. However, the Enterprise packages have a LOT of development and testing done to them. To have whitebox available dilutes the ability of Red Hat to use the Enterprise package profitably, that is where I take issue. I am glad that people Debian etc....put out Distros. I am glad that I could make an LFS box if I wanted to. I am glad that you can download RH9 (though marginally I object to that). Definitely I am for the Fedora project. But enterprise is a major work and support should be shown by those who have need of such a package. Making it was not free despite the use of free components. I probably have more understanding of free software than you assume that I do. I disagree with how some people utilise the fact that it is free but basically applaud the liberty to do so.
After reading more about it though, I do agree that their should be a different licensing scenario for you and I hope that this get's addressed soon because the more I think it about it, the more that your 'distribution' (which I consider to be near theft under the premise that "the license" allows it regardless of conscienability) is really the fault of Red Hat. Were they more thorough in addressing various licensing needs then they would be selling their distro to people like yourself.

Re:If you want RHEL but can't afford it...

[Dick Faze]

Found it! This link http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/rhe l-rebuild.htm shows you that you CAN build RHEL by compiling from source.

+1 Effort, -1 Clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

> red hat alternatives since the desktop line went kaput.

Kaput? No. Overpriced? Hell yes. (More like out of their fucking mind - desktop Linux can't cost more than Windows yet)

Re:If they're doing so well..

[Znork]

"I put Red Hat on my system with the expectation that it's going to be around for some time. By pulling support for the product, they're costing me time."

Most of the more-or-less free distributions have the same problem. Fast release cycles and rapid EOL'ing. Both Mandrake and SuSE run on similar life cycles; this whole thing is not news.

You can make the same mistake with Fedora, or you can make the same mistake with pretty much any other distribution.

Re:The money issue

[Spoons]

Red Hat Professional Workstation is $99 [redhat.com]

Scroll down to the bottom of the page and check out what is not included. Here is the one that make this product useless:

# Renewable Subscriptions -- Customers looking for supported environments or deployments for longer than 1 year should consider Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

So, what are you supposed to do after 1 year? No admin in their right mind would deploy the Workstation product.

Re:If they're doing so well..

[Avihson]

I'll bite at this troll....Karma's just a number!

Post the machine's specs, and you know the community will help you. Post as an AC and make non-specific allegations of incompatibility, and you get a cookie from Ballmer&Gates, and heaps of scorn from the /.ers who have enough on the ball to make things work or ask for help with unusual problems.

You obviously do not want help, or more likely have never been within 10 meters of a Linux machine. I have Fedora running flawlessly on a 1999 Gateway Solo laptop, 128mb ram, full install with room to work on a 5gb partition, win98se and Win2K bloating the rest of the HD.

So why do I have to create profiles for a docked LT, networked LT and Dialup LT in W98 and W2K? Using Rh8, 9 and now Fedora the OS automagically figures out the hardware config on boot and only loads the ethernet module when docked or when I install the PCMCIA card.

Linux user since 1994, Redhat user 1996-2003. Fedora user 2003--
Not a RH fanboy, I use freeBSD on the firewall, RH 9 on the server, Fedora on the Workstation and I still have a game machine with MS loads. I also have 2 development boxes that have Debian and SuSE on them right now, I'm not afraid to try them all. I also carry a Knoppix 3.3 live CD so I have a stable OS when I am working offsite, and can't use the laptop for political reasons.

Re:The money issue

[ewwhite]

Since it's the same product as Redhat Enterprise WS/ES, I'd simply build the SRPMS of the updates that are released for Redhat WS/ES once the year subscription is up. My guess is that they won't leave you without an upgrade path to a renewable subscription. Even if they did, buying another box for $99 is less than another $200-$400 yearly subscription fee.

and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[dummkopf]

think about it: RH claims 90% of their customers are loyal because they are keeping their subscriptions. the important question is:

How many customers of RH did actually pay for a subscription before the change? And from those how did not pay (but were loyal Rh customers), how many are sticking with it?

The ones who paid before the kaboom do not care in spending bick bucks. The users who supported redhat but could not afford such a pricey OS definitely will not stick with it -- as it is the case in Academia! If RH were smart, they would offer site licenses for academia and big clusters.

I am willing to be my officemate (he is a good catch) that from the RH users who did NOT pay in the first place, 90% will switch to another OS if RH does not offer something "in-between". How about also releasing this information, RH?

(As one always learns in statistics: the outcome depends on HOW you present the data, and not what it actually looks like...)

Fedora QA

[Avihson]

Totally useless anecdote, since it is just my experience, but I had a hard power outage when I was upgrading from RH9 to Fedora Core1.
On reboot, to assess the damage to the FS, I found that Fedora was installed, all of the applications were operational, except for the specific app (sameGnome) that was being installed at the time. I rebooted with the CD's, continued the upgrade of the selected apps and have a fully functional machine, including sameGnome. Try that with Win2K or XP.
I guess the QA is ok, better than commercial. I may try replicating the incident this long weekend, I have a Debian test box I can upgrade to RH9 and compare RH/Fedora QA testing.

Re:If they're doing so well..

[Dick Faze]

Admittedly, I've talked to only a few that we've done work with since this has happened, but the CxO's we have spoken to have welcomed this differentiation as "the thing that makes it a real product". Non-technical management doesn't want their kid's MP3 server running the same OS as their Oracle server - and if they see it, they're not going to question the kid. This has been a problem in the past with our suggestion of Linux in the past, its too cheap. The biggest stumbling block is the mistaken belief that something Free cannot possibly be as good/reliable/stable as a commercial product. They're happier now. The only people running don't matter to RedHat the company, because if those people get into a position to recommend a commercial solution to a client, they'll be back to it in a heartbeat.

or not

[TimButterfield]

On the Support Options page, you can buy the 'Basic' server addition for $349 and do not get support. You get updates, but no support.

Re:or not

[haggar]

I'm glad I can find a RH employee I can reply to:

our experience with you guys has been terrible. Starting from the "availability" of your sales personnel (before the buy) and the technical preparadness of your techsupport people after the buy, it has been unpleasant. Let me tell you what you missed: 1 to 4 million US$ a year. We were going to use RHAS for our products for the telecom market, but now we're sticking with Sun and HP/HP-UX. There's even Linux on the roadmap, and it isn't RH.

I guess you're not interested. Oh well, good for you, I guess. As for us, we're much more than just a part of that 10% who didn't renew.

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[williamhooper]

How many customers of RH did actually pay for a subscription before the change? And from those how did not pay (but were loyal Rh customers), how many are sticking with it?

How are you a "customer" if you didn't pay? How is Red Hat losing money if people that don't pay them continue not to pay them?

Re:The money issue

[williamhooper]

Yet, admins "in their right mind" would deploy RHL 8 and RHL 9 with the same 1 year life span?

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[dummkopf]

your question makes sense and does not. if i use redhat and am happy, then i will recommend it to others, potential paying customers. if i am not happy, i will make bad publicity for them. it is a matter of the definition of "customer", but if you provide me with a service, regardless if i pay for it or not, i am your customer.

Re:We are ready to pay for quality

[ewwhite]

Try "linux upgradeany" on a test 7.3 box when you get the RHEL CDs. It will allow you to update any version to RHEL.

Interpreting this number

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had the opportunity to work with Red Hat's Advanced Server in a large corporation. Red Hat has done an extremely poor job of support, only providing excuses why they don't want to provide support - eg., for a kernel issue triggered by an httpd compiled to support more than the shipping one that has a compiled-in limit of 256 connections, they refused to look at the kernel issue (it doesn't ship on our CD, so any issues relating to it, even a bug of ours, we won't support, reproduce it with something that ships on the CD and we'll talk, otherwise, it doesn't scale to support this type of problem). Meanwhile, kernels 2.4.10 (basically, any else's version of linux) contain the fix. Likewise for ethernet drivers which were supposed to be supported. The answer was "you're downrevved, upgrade!" (on their product whose selling point was a 3 year lifespan, and for which updated, working, and "void Red Hat support" drivers exist)

Yet, even after shipping a distribution which hasn't worked very well, and having them give the run-around instead of support, the business still keeps the support contract. Why? Because it's a blanket requirement that the software used have support. Perhaps in case the sysadmin and engineering teams weren't able to pull together and work around Red Hat, they would be better posisitioned to "have my CEO call your CEO". Anyway, 90% retention doesn't mean Red Hat is doing a good job or that everyone is pleased. It could mean they're still not sure about switching to SuSE because they're not sure how badly Novell is going to mess it up.

What about wanting to pay for a consumer

[Anonymous Coward]

It really pisses me off that when people complain about the disappearance of Redhat Linux (consumer version), everyone assumes that they wanted a freeby?

I ALWAYS paid for RH linux, because it was stable and did what I wanted, and had supported updates.

Fedora does not meet this requirement, and I don't need a corporate version.

I want to keep paying and getting RH linux.

But Redhat screwed me. Why should I do business with some that treats me that way?

Re:What about wanting to pay for a consumer

[RedHat Rocky]

An AC on target, will wonders never cease.

Redhat has yet to answer the SOHO masses who are wailing "What about us?". These folks certainly can't afford $1000 per cpu, yet they are willing to pay something for services they perceive as valuable.

I'm a perfect example. I have 10+ servers, I don't need hand holding, I have never called Redhat support, but I certainly do appreciate security updates. Am I going to pay $1000 per machine for that? No way!! What's my option, Redhat?
*sound of crickets*

Redhat, whose history of comminication is poor at best, seems to think doing all the work, making a plan and then making a press release of the latest licensing options is enough.

NOTE TO REDHAT: STOP IGNORING FOLKS. TAKE A PAGE FROM GENTOO AND ANSWER THE DAMN QUESTIONS.

Re:What about wanting to pay for a consumer

[williamhooper]

I'm a perfect example. I have 10+ servers, I don't need hand holding, I have never called Redhat support, but I certainly do appreciate security updates. Am I going to pay $1000 per machine for that? No way!! What's my option, Redhat?

First off, what are you talking about? The only two options close to $1000 are the $799 ES Standard edition (I thought you didn't need support) and the $1499 AS Standard (what does your SOHO do that requires the AS edition?).

If you bother to look, you will find that most of your servers can probably use the $179 basic edition of WS. It includes Apache httpd, Samba, and NFS servers. ES would only be needed for servers that require more (bind, dhcp, vsftpd, etc.) and has a $349 basic edition.

Re:What about wanting to pay for a consumer

[grotgrot]

Funnily enough I emailed their sales during the RH8.0 timeframe. I explained that I already had the CDs (downloaded from a mirror) and would just like to pay them for the software. The only thing they had on their web site was a boxed set they would have to send to me which I didn't want or need. Their answer was, sorry we have no way of accepting your money.

Re:What about wanting to pay for a consumer

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a perfect example. I have 10+ servers, I don't need hand holding, I have never called Redhat support, but I certainly do appreciate security updates. Am I going to pay $1000 per machine for that? No way!! What's my option, Redhat?

Apart from RHEL AS/ES/WS (which can be a little pricey), there is also Red Hat Professional Workstation. It's based on RHEL3, and contrary to what the name suggests, it includes most server daemons.

Mod parent up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, and it's only tracking existing RHEL customers, which is probably a very tiny group compared to the number of companies who have purchased ongoing RHN/Up2Date support for their Red Hat 7.x - 9.x systems.

I suspect that more like 75% of their existing Red Hat Linux customers are looking for a new distro. I have 200 up2date licenses myself, and my employers are looking at a huge upgrade nightmare. We are already managing binary imcompatibilities in our existing upgrade process, as well as things like incompatible back-end databases in Red Hat's OpenLDAP releases. We still have two systems on Red Hat 6.2, because we weren't finished the upgrade to 7.3 when Red Hat rapid-fired the abortive RH8 and soon-to-die RH9 out the door.

Red Hat claims that these actions are a response to customers desiring more stability in the release and support cycles. But their actions in regards to Red Hat Linux have been tremendously disruptive and destabilising to their large customers who have been paying to run Red Hat Linux.

There are lots of us out here. Many of us will not go to RHEL because we're afraid RH is torpedoing their own business model by alienating their previously loyal customers.

Good point

[FreeLinux]

While there is no licensing requirement to remove your old Red Hat software, as others have pointed out, you are still correct. It is likely that you will have to remove your old Red Hat software because without purchasing an upgrade and subscription you will no longer be getting updates and this is unacceptable in an enterprise production environment.

That means that the more accurate way to view the statistic is that Red Hat has lost 10% of its existing customers. Now, the story doesn't say what their new customer subscription rate is compared to previous new customer subscription rates so, we aren't able to see the big picture. Is Red Hat's subscription customer base growing overall or not? I hope for their sake that it is growing. But, at my company, anything that causes a 10% loss in the existing customer base without massively increasing the new customer rate will result in close scrutiny and the likely termination of those responsible.

Free software gives you the freedom to shop around

[jbn-o]

[T]he reasonably priced support option is gone, and there's nothing they offer between outlandishly expensive enterprise support and free no support.

Perhaps you should recognize the support value of free software is in its ability to go around to other programmers and ask how much they will charge you to change this software. One can't do that with proprietary software because there's no source code to fix and there's no license with terms that allow changing the program to suit my needs.

You should start a business supplying support to all the Red Hat users who were "abandoned" by Red Hat. You wouldn't have to do any programming, you could create a referral service connecting free software users with free software programmers. Something like Pricewatch, but for programming expertise. This way you'll get the support you desire at the best price the market has to offer.

Re:The money issue

[HiThere]

That's because you didn't read the license.

The price isn't terrible, and currently it includes four upgrades (I believe four sets of CDs). But the license says that you can only install it on one machine, or its void. Also you can't install any software that isn't a part of the distribution that you buy, or it's void. Granted, this is a support license, so that's not terrible, and certainly compatible with the GPL. Merely unacceptable for my needs.

P.S.: I don't know that their support would be any better than before, but so far it hasn't been any help. Whenever I needed assistance it turned out to be "We don't cover that". E.g., about 4 years ago I was having trouble getting ppp to work, and they didn't cover that "we only cover installation". I finally downloaded wtty on a different computer, and got THAT to work, but ppp stayed broken until the next release. (I was really disgusted with MS to consider THAT an improvement.)

Re:The money issue

[shaitand]

rhl 8 and 9 had renewable subscriptions. They came with one year but after that year was up you could renew for another year. With this once that year is up you CANNOT pay any sum of money to keep it going.

I KNOW!!!

[pr0ntab]

I just select and middle click in Mozilla.

Re:The money issue

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

Show me the money!

linux not a desktop os?

[asciiRider]

red hat is going after the enterprise - but didn't linus start developing linux so he could run unix on his 386 desktop?

Re:linux not a desktop os?

[jas79]

Don't tell anybody, but there are people working on desktop PCs in enterprises.

Try OTN

[commander salamander]

OTN is what you're looking for. Free downloads of eval versions of pretty much anything they've got. Registration required, of course :)

Re:The money issue

[williamhooper]

Try again:

Red Hat Linux -- Red Hat's policy for Red Hat Linux distributions is to provide maintenance for at least 12 months.

The RHL 8 and RHL 9 products were EOL after 1 year.

Re:If they're doing so well..

[haggar]

Strangely enough, I agree with you completely. In addition, our experience both with RH sales people and techsupport was regrettable, and they aren't going to get our business.

SuSE was the otheroption. Perhaps it will be re-evaluated.

multiple RHEL installations

[David Jao]

It's totally permissible to run their Enterprise products on as many machines as you like without any RHN subscription or support contract. Just buy one copy, and install it everywhere.

I hate to be negative, but I do not actually think that this is legal.

Look carefully at the RHEL EULA. Here are some quotes, emphasis added:

The term "Installed Systems" means the number of Systems on which Customer installs the Software. The term "System" means any hardware on which the Software is installed, which may be, without limitation, a server, a work station, a virtual machine, a blade, a partition or an engine, as applicable. The initial number of Installed Systems is the number of copies of the Software that Customer purchases.

If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance...

Of course Redhat is not allowed to impose this EULA on third party GPL software, but the problem is that not all of RHEL is third party GPL software. A lot of it is third party free software under licenses other than the GPL. Moreover a substantial fraction of the GPL software in RHEL is actually owned by Redhat themselves.

So, ironically, the only way to install RHEL on multiple machines without support is not to buy RHEL and compile your own copy.

Re:multiple RHEL installations

[pyros]

Good point. I believe that was the impetus behind Pink Tie Linux from cheapbytes.com, that and the trademarked artwork and logos.

Re:multiple RHEL installations

[williamhooper]

It was all about trademarks. It is also the same reason we have 'Fedora' instead of 'Red Hat Free Beer'.

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[RedHat Rocky]

That depends on what you consider payment.

For years I've used Redhat, yet never paid a dime for the distro itself. However, I have gone out of my way to supply others with Redhat CDs, help if them when needed it and recommeded Redhat to customers looking for an alternative to Windows.

I've also spent a lot of time on the Redhat mailing list, answering questions for the most part as well as getting some answers myself.

In my mind, Redhat got to be the distro of choice not because it's rock solid (there have been plenty of bumps on the road), but partly because there is a large community of people using Redhat who are willing to share their time to help anyone get Redhat working for them.

How is Redhat losing money by pissing on us "non-money" folks? Do you have any idea how much GOOD word of mouth is worth?

Re:If they're doing so well..

[williamhooper]

You forgot you were on Slashdot. Red Hat's EOL policy is evil. Mandrake's similar EOL policy isn't discussed.

Well, that explains it.

[karmaflux]

So THAT'S why demo users have to renew every month.

Moving to SUSE

[xxScoobyxx]

We have over 100 RHN servers that we maintain. We have been building RH processes and customising our own business distro for 5 years now. Once April rolls round bad news. So we have no choice but to either upgrade(rebuild) to enterprise and fork out $1700NZ per server or change to a different distro. Giving only 4-5 months notice sucked. Downtime, risk and labour costs to our customers for no additional return. Customers and ourselves are not very happy with RH. If they let RH9 run its normal support life cycle and then did this it would have given us a reasonable period to change everyone over. Just waiting for our SUSE download to finish. Hope they don't get greedy as well.

Re:Moving to SUSE

[williamhooper]

If they let RH9 run its normal support life cycle and then did this it would have given us a reasonable period to change everyone over.

WTF are you talking about? RHL9's EOL date was announced the day it was released and hasn't changed.

Re:Moving to SUSE

[xxScoobyxx]

So your saying we've all known about this since the beginning of the year but we ALL waited until the last few weeks to start bitchin about it? We check EOL for all products we supply and none of our team picked this up until recently thanks to /. If your right then we missed it, a first, and everyone else did as well judging by the recent /. bitchin that prior November we havent seen.

Re:Moving to SUSE

[williamhooper]

Even if you are truly silly enough for Slashdot to be your only news source, you still missed it.
Red Hat Announces Product EOL Calendar
Posted Jan. 27, 2003

Redhat 9 was released March 31 (to RHN subscribers anyway, everyone else April 7).

Looks like it is time for your eye exam.

Wow Bigger, heavier, and costs more

[Isaac-1]

You may have jumped the gun a bit here, but the official plan was to make Whitebox Linux public later today, as the Library will be closed for the next few days due to Thanksgiving, and any slashdotting would have a minimal effect on other users. Also there are now a handful of high bandwidth ftp mirrors.

Ike

KRUD

[bfg9000]

Just a little note for all those left in the cold by Red Hat's recent moves; Kevin Fenzi has a paid subscription service where they supply a customized version of RedHat with all the paid errata and updates and a bunch of extra apps. They also have krud2date, an excellent updating tool. He's doing the support Red Hat doesn't want to do. Check it out - if you're worried about support for your RH system (and you are actually willing to pay for it), it may work for you.

This blatant karma whoring post brought to you by bfg9000 and the number 7.

Re:KRUD

[williamhooper]

Yep, they have stepped up to the plate and decided to sell support after RH's EOL. Oh, btw, they also understand how much work it is (prices for support until July 2004):

1. 
   KRUD 8.0 Updates $500.00
   KRUD 7.3 Updates $500.00
   

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[williamhooper]

Well, I still see plenty of action on the Fedora lists, so it doesn't look like that's going away. Someone using Fedora at home will probably still recommend RHEL. Fedora is to RHEL as RHL was to RHEL. Either way they aren't going to be 100% the same.

Good word of mouth doesn't pay the bills. 90% of their current Enterprise customers think Red Hat is doing a good job... Don't you think that might contribute some good word of mouth?

This is the same flawed logic that gets posted here in stories about RIAA. "I tell everyone about it and show them how to get it for free, so it should be free to me because I'm doing advertising for them".

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[valkadesh]

If RH were smart, they would offer site licenses for academia and big clusters.

That's what they're doing: Linux leaders offer education discounts

Re:The money issue

[shaitand]

Niether rh 8 nor rh9 are EOL yet... there are still updates for both being released. I'd argue that's better evidence than a quote that is a guarantee they will support them for a MINIMUM of 1yr and nothing stating anything about a MAXIMUM of 1yr. They are cutting 9 off early but will either be refunding or continuing to support existing contracts for their remaining term. As stated by redhat's CEO.

Short Notice

[codepunk]

The only reason is the short notice and most places do not have time to migrate to something else. We will likely renew as well but will move to another distro during this period. It is going to look good on the books for a year but after that watch the crash.

Re:The money issue

[williamhooper]

OK, since you seem to be having trouble with math, I'll make it simple:

RHL 9: Released March 31, 2003
RHL 9: EOL April 30, 2004

How is supporting it for 13 months "cutting 9 off early" when they stated before it was released it would get a minimum of 12 months of support?

If your RHN subscription runs beyond April 30th, you get a copy of RHEL WS w/RHN until the end of your subscription. But since you have a paid RHN account you've already read the FAQ that tells you that, right?

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[dummkopf]

i have been in contact with redhat directly about this. what they say to the media is not quite what they tell the customer: "we do not endorse RHPW and so cannot give you any info about it". as for site licenses, no official word yet...

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[dummkopf]

nice post... not just "good word of mouth". if you actively are participating in mailing lists and filing bug reports (like i used to do) then you are actually rewarding them for a product. money is not the only currency, but i guess we are the only two who think that way.... : )

Yep.

[Per Abrahamsen]

The difference is that Red Hat is not a monopoly.

For Microsoft, the only significant competition for their new products is their own old products. Going to a subscription based model they eliminated that.

If you are unhappy with Red Hat, there are plenty of others who will be happy to sell you mostly the same product. I will for one, but you would not like the price.

Red Hat isn't the only player

[Per Abrahamsen]

I'm happy they have found a profitable niche, and also that they don't attempt to own the whole market.

Red Hat is *not* the Microsoft of Linux, they *don't* have a monopols moral obligation to serve the needs of everybody.

There is no gapping hole, there is a business opportunity for someone. Maybe SUSE.

Re:The money issue

[shaitand]

ok wait a second, you had to register with RHN to get updates. For each machine you got a 1yr subscription for free. After that 1 year you had to renew the subscription. As far as I know support contracts were a seperate thing, perhaps something was included with the boxed set but certainly not the download edition. You could most definately purchase another year subscription. I did this with rh8 in fact, although I moved to apt and never used it again about a week after doing so.

You could go through another source to get updates
of course, or download them individually. I did this with freshrpms. But that doesn't mean there wasn't a subscription service to get windowsupdate type updates from redhat which could be renewed!

Re:The money issue

[shaitand]

The only one who has said that I myself have a paid anything at the moment is you. Not that it applies or is relevant to our current conversation in any way.

Nor does taking 4 words out of context and disputing them, despite the fact that your overall argument is aligned with my overall message. I fail to see what exactly your trying to accomplish here? I myself said that redhat was going to honor existing subscriptions. My point was that 12months MINIMUM did not mean 12 months was the MAXIMUM length of time redhat linux was supported for. Thankyou for FURTHER CLARIFYING MY POINT.

Please READ my post before arguing next time.

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[RedHat Rocky]

"Good word of mouth doesn't pay the bills."

In the words of the Jedi Master, "...that is why you fail".

RHEL hasn't been around long enough to get good word of mouth. There are still plenty of issues that many companies have yet to experience:

1. Vendor support of RHEL, especially older releases. Just because Redhat will support the relesase for 5 years doesn't mean all the third party vendors will. Which means a forced upgrade if your vendor chooses to drop support for the version of RHEL you're on. How is this different from RHL? IT'S NOT and that's the point.

2. Third party software, open source even. How many projects are going to be willing to jump through hoops to put RPMs for RHEL out there? How many will continue that support for 5 years? Time will tell, but at this point there is no way to tell.

3. With Redhat being the primary fixer of bugs, what impact will the RHEL have on fixes? More and quicker? Slower and less? Again, only time will tell.

Re:and again: the looooosers are... ACADEMIA

[williamhooper]

1. Read some mailing list archives. A lot of companies still only support RH 7.x. Software companies will LIKE having less releases to support. Hell, that is part of RH's reason for RHEL.

2. People that buy RHEL aren't going to be running out and installing random things from the Internet. With that said, if it is open-source, rebuilding isn't that hard.

3. Red Hat has always been the primary (ONLY!) fixer of bugs for their release.