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Red Hat News: Edu Prices, Progeny Support for 7.X
thx2001r writes "According to News.com, Matthew Szulik (perhaps driven by recent slashdot questions in this regard) of Red Hat has set educational pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation ($25 per year for students) and (RHEL AS) server ($50 per year for the schools). Here are the details of the versions available at educational discounts." And for business users wary of Red Hat's high-priced Enterprise version (and happy using an older version), iroberts writes "Beginning January 1, 2004, Progeny will offer software updates for users of Red Hat(R) Linux(R) 7.2 and 7.3. Pricing is $5 per machine per month; or a flat rate of $2,500 per month for unlimited machines. The Fedora Legacy Project is discussing how this will impact their work."
I still dont understand why we cannot distribute the cds. If Redhat does have an 18 month product release cycle, why cant someone just post the ISO? I thought the GPL allowed for that kind of thing.
...because of up2date, it's just too good to manage to live without it, it automatically detects updates for installed software, downloads, and installs them, works great when a security patch is released.
I remember that it saved me the hassle when sendmail bug was discovered a while back...
The IT section color scheme sucks.
I've been using Red Hat 8 in a lab setting with 16 workstations and 1 server for over a year now, with no complaints ... well, no BIG ones.
I've only been using 8 because it's more user-friendly than 7.3, and the software still works on 8 (it doesn't on 9... still testing Fedora). Of course, I asked them about Educational pricing a few weeks ago, but they never bothered to give me a REAL price... they actually told me that for 17 computers, it would be over $3500 per year. So, of course, once I spend a couple weeks testing Fedora and making sure almost everything works on it, they announce this, and now it looks like I might not have to upgrade after all.
BTW, I'm VERY happy with Fedora so far. It's very user-friendly (priority #1), secure (#2), and compatible with the software (#3). However, the University I work for is preparing to have a meeting for which version of Linux to standardize on and get support for... Red Hat (I'm assuming Enterprise), SuSe, or Fedora. Does anyone think SuSe would be a better choice than Fedora? I'm not really even considering RHE...
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
I'm surprised there hasn't been much info in the way of RedHat Enterprise Rebuild Projects. There is both a mailing list and a few projects that have succeeded.
c .at/
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org/ was the first freely distributable RedHat Enterprise 3.0 Rebuild
http://www.caosity.net/ was the second project to finish and distribute.
The mailing list archive is @ http://www.mail-archive.com/rhel-rebuild-l@uibk.a
Frankly, all it takes is a quick script to download, rpmbuild --rebuild updatepkg.src.rpm and install. I would recommend against doing this on machines that will be running Oracle or what not, but for most uses, this is an awesome approach the likes of which is impossible with proprietary software.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Open source is affordable again.
Okay, so that sounds weird. Specifically, I was disappointed when RedHat announced that 9 was the last of the bunch. Not that I didn't understand, but I've relied solidly on them for some time.
There was no way I could afford Enterprise, at least not up front; after all, I run a very small personal server. With this announcement, it's a good feeling to know that I'll have future upgrades to look forward to and not have to pay through the nose to make them happen. Here I was looking for a new open source distro (you know, planning for the future) and the RedHat team came through again.
Bravo!
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
I have several customers (as well as my own servers) who run Linux web / mail servers (many of them on RH 7.3).
/mo are well worth it.
7.3 is a strong, stable platform (IMO) and updates for $5
= Grow a brain...
Thats cheap for education. we should complain red hat gives alot to the open source community.
Some software money can't buy. For everything else there's Micros~1
Progeny proves that with Free Software, even if the original vendor goes out of business, or stops supperting it, if there is demand for support, you won't be left out in the cold. This is a very geed thing.
I have switched all my computers in my company away from Red Hat. Mandrake 9.2 for the desktop, Gentoo for the server.
SCO's discount student rate of 642$ per Linux installation?
Though todays announcement shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's followed Red Hat over the last year, I think it was a very poor move.
Yes, I do understand producing their "Red Hat Linux" product was expensive, and hurt their bottom line. They should have never split their product in two to begin with. Maintaining both RHL and Enterprise Linux was too much of a burden on the company. It reeks of bad management, much like the Mozilla project does (They are trying to develop no less than three different browsers at the moment, possibly more depending on how you count--and Netscape just cut them lose, so they're severely understaffed... you'd think they'd make consolidation efforts--but this is another tirade).
What they should have done is modularize their base product, and sell add-ons. They retain all of their users, all of their mind share, only have to develop one product, AND it can act as a stepping stone into your Enterprise-level services. Hell! They even had the infrastructure to do a single core product all laid out with Red Hat Network. Sell an Enterprise Web Server channel add-on to Red Hat Linux 10 for Enterprise-level prices, and so on. It would have been beautiful. Really.
It would have also provided their Enterprise customers with ten-times the amount of testing of the core OS. This is not to be underestimated. Much as Linus renames a kernel from e.g. 2.5.79 to 2.6.0-test1 when he wants (free!) wider testing, Red Hat now has a user base one-tenth the size to "test" their releases on. And problems that aren't caught in relase QA (many just can't be) will now HAVE to affect (high-)paying customers. There's no free users to take 90% of the falls.
Red Hat produced the de facto Linux distribution in the United States AND they were in the black. There was nothing to stop them. They provided a free, high quality alternative OS. People were switching to Linux, and switching to Red Hat. It was working. But apparently not fast enough for them.
Windows users have no highly visible, high quality alternative now. (No, it's NOT necessary to chime in with your favorite distribution.) What's good for Linux was good for Red Hat, and this is unquestionably bad for Linux, medium-term, at least.
Fedora does NO ONE any good. It's pseudo-managed by Red Hat, but with no guarantees, no support, no Red Hat Network, no Enterprise add-ons, and regular Joe-Schmoe developers fucking it up (cf. Debian). And the mix of open development and corporate bureaucracy, neither with any vision, is sure to pull and tug at it in no general direction, making it nothing more than a poor Debian clone. I wonder how long until Red Hat cut's it lose completely.
Where I live (Louisiana State) you can legally get Windows XP from the University for 10 bucks.
$5/month might not seem like much, but... if I was getting that much from everyone using the binary updates I'm building for FreeBSD, I'd be very very happy.
IMHO, anyone who thinks it costs anywhere near that much to provide binary updates is still thinking in VC-inflated, height-of-the-bubble dollars.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Even if you stop supporting your product someone else can easily step in and support it instead. Nice to see the theory in action.
I stole this Sig
Jobs has APPROPRIATED free software for his own personal enrichment
Damn me for replying to trolls but..
Apple has used BSD licensed code within the BSD license. Actually, the fact that they return code back to the open source community goes beyond the terms of the BSD license.
Trolling is a art,
You might be more interested in using Fedora than paying 25 bucks a month for RHEW. It's what I use and it seems just as stable as any of those other linux distros out there (debian, slackware, etc.) Not to mention it is more on the bleeding edge than Red Hat's enterprise products, making it ideal for desktop use. Sure, a new version comes out every 6 months, but the upgrade is free!
RHEL is only for servers and workstations that perform *mission critical* tasks and have specialized requirements.
Why the hell would anyone want to do that? I always laugh when I get sucked into a link and end up staring at the Big Red Void. If you can't handle goatse or tubgirl you should just read disney.com
Nope.
The $25 and $50 price is for individual (that is, student/faculty/staff) academic purchase only. If you're an institution, it's $2,500 for a base package (so you can run your own RHN and save redhat's bandwidth) and then add on WS at $25 each and AS for $50 each -- OR -- add on a site license for $7/FTE for WS and $7/FTE for servers. So a full site license is $2,500 + $14 FTE, which for my joint would cost $10,620 a year.
And, for all of this cash, all you get is permission to make copies of this 99.5% open source software and not a drop one of support.
Maybe some students who pay the $25 or $50 a year will start running ftp sites (and mirrors) with the RedHat generated upgrade rpms for the non-RedHat software that is GPL'd.
RedHat just keeps trying to sell stuff that eventually has trouble selling.
and Netscape just cut them lose
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh
But I can't help but feel abandoned. It feels like my choices are to upgrade to Enterprise, which is more than I need and expensive, or find another distro, which I don't want to do either. It kind of pisses me off, because I chose RH because of up2date (among other things).
And now Progeny can keep me up to date for $5/month. OK, I'll consider it, but that's still 10 times what I was paying RedHat. Ouch.
In higher education, apparently only widgets cost money.
I wuv you!
IMHO, RH is a waste of time and money. We are very happy with Debian. Very stable and updates could not be easier.
see subject.
As I understand it, the whole Enterprise Linux push was not about adding in additional software. It was more about creating a slow-moving target for enterprise software developers like Veritas and Oracle. Developers could feel more comfortable that whatever product they were pushing would be deployed on the same platform in their customer's data center as was used to develop the product.
Sure - there were also some tweaks and bits of different software involved. But that didn't seem to be the push.
But then, I never looked under the hood of RedHat Enterprise Linux. Maybe the salespitch I heard didn't tell the entire story.
i'm in a similar situation over here. we have two servers, 10 workstations, and some rack systems. all i really want is access to the updates. i dont want support, and i dont want to pay to install redhat on each computer. i'm ok with paying them for access to the software (os and updates), i just dont want to pay for each computer i want to install the os on. that is unless, of course, i'm going to update each computer from their server, but this isnt necessary for us.
-- john
nooooobies.
We're all paying for monthly services as long as any of us are watching Cable TV, Sat TV, phone lines, cell phones, etc. We're now hitting the age where paying for monthly software is going to get common, as long as its affordable. I'm willing to pay a small monthly fee to keep my boxes updated, patched and secure. This does for RedHat or Microsoft -- any software you use on a very regular basis could use money for their quality of service. Of course, in life, you always get what you pay for.
Can anyone find and point me to a definitive package listing for the various flavors of RHEL?
I don't mean a relative listing, like a table of information that includes a short line of "includes this, this, and that" I mean a complete listing of all packages and versions, such as was provided with previous versions of Red Hat Linux.
I know Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are different products, but how can one make an informed choice about the three versions of RHEL without knowing exactly what packages they do and do not include?
Look at it this way - why not put our efforts where they give back to us in the best way?
They may be distro specific (kudzu) but they have always been open-source.
Now what they are doing is using trademarks & support. You can redistribute, use, etc etc Red Hat Enterprise, but if you don't pay for it, and/or if you put it on more than one computer (period, they had a problem of multiple installs, and the one with the problem was always the paid for one.) If you do however, you can't call it RedHat, due to trademarks. Also, no binary RPMs are provided to non-paying customers, but source RPMS are.
I would add in gentoo, as it is also all based on OSS/GPL. It is also one of the easiest to use with new software that often there isn't a rh/deb/etc package, and if there isn't writing ebuilds is easier than writing rpms. (Honestly can't comment on debs, except by heresay which is that they are tougher than both.)
Slack may be included as well, but I can't say I am positive about that.
Red Hat has always been a good Open Source Company. I always figured it would come down to a RH ("Always Open") vs Caldera (bundle proprietary) some time in the US, just not in the way it has.
What I don't understand is why they blew up their RHL line without having really throught through the structure of the Fedora project a bit better. I headed over their all excited, but ended up not liking the contribution model much.
As it is, it's still awkward to contribute to the distro, they may are may not be using these giant queues, etc etc. I actually think that the fact that RH engineers are still involved means it could have really rocked, but the at the moment I don't have the greatest of feelings about things.
Isn't up2date as well or better accomplished using "apt-get update" under debian? It's much better and there's a lot more software covered by it than up2date.
Not to mention debian has always been free and there are now many ways to install it painlessly. Knoppix and debian-installer (sarge/sid) are most notable of the free ones. Sure it's "unstable" but they're using the same software they use in the so-called Stable versions of every other distribution.
M$ still offers free updating to Windows 98.
-hb - RH 7.3 Professional user - who's already paid his $60 to RH less than a year ago.
"perhaps driven by recent slashdot questions in this regard"
Don't pride yourselfs too much. It wasn't because of you. As you reported earlier RedHat was going to do this already, but a timeline hadn't been set, until now.
You misspelled "communist".
greed or good?
...students can buy WS for $25 and schools AS for $50? I see nothing that stipulates students can by only WS... It looks by the linked page that either can purchase either..... god knows this student is heavily interested in one of each; looks like my RHN subscription cost just went up $10 (used to be $65 for one RH9 subscription) a month, but I think I'll live.
i on/indiv/
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industries/educat
Linux is way outta hand now with companies such as RH, etc. So much for it being free as in beer, it's now free as in money.
Costs next to nothing to make, but costs your life to get it.
Now it's at the point where a lot of these over commercialised Linux distro's will have to be pirated.
It's unfortunate that the Linux people have been following M$'s footsteps for so long without realising it yet they bash MS because it's trendy to do in the Linux community - atleast for those without intelligence. If you bash MS, you should also bash RH for the same reasons.
Even MS funds various researchers, RH takes what's free and makes it not as free.
I agree 100%. Apple, like Microsoft, uses BSD code, because it means they have the option of forking the software to suit their own purposes. That's why Mac OS X is now the #1 fork of BSD, putting FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc, even further into "niche" territory.
1. Linux and RH are reaching such a size that makes possible competitive business among Linux distros, like this case. Brilliant move, BTW. (And yes, I've seen those stats about Debian's huge market share).
2. A guy, for the first time, said he can run Mozilla on Windows as an argument that Windows can have "cool" tab browsing, too (OS News, Sun x Microsoft desktop). Up to now, it was "Linux can, too"; now it is going to be "Windows can, too".
Indeed, I feel the turning of the tide.
now if redhat could just get Broadcomm to release their drivers, or hell, write some of their own...i would ponder buying this. Our university uses the Dell D600 and that is the only thing keeping my linux down!
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
...has a complete copy of Red Hat Enterprise Advanced Server v3 available for download via bittorrent.
You're not supposed to distribute RedHat products unless you remove all their logos, but otherwise there are no redistribution restrictions (but the suprnova copy does appear to be in violation).
I guess that tells you where I stand.
It says quite clearly in the firstboot app when you load RHE that redistribution of RHE is allowed as long as you remove all Red Hat logos.
I downloaded RHE from suprnova.org. I like the new LVM changes very much.
I hope someone steps up to commit to providing redhat9 updates, soon... i'd happily continue to pay the 60 dollers a year for the updates and enjoy the break from having to learn FreeBSD which is what we are intending to switch to because 9 is EOL so soon.
No way i am going to try and manage any servers without a clear, easy and cheap or free security fix path.
By the way, FreeBSD is kinda cool and i'm starting to like it... so far all the software we used on redhat is available. I think redhat 9 EOL is going to mean EOL for redhat, as i can't be the only guy out here just tryign to run a (few or more) stable hosting servers as reasonably cheap as possible.
redhat should refund a few dollers for the updates they will not be honoring, as we just paid for a few more servers before thier "annoucment".
>Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (formerly, Advanced Server) is provided to
customers under a subscription agreement. The agreement consists of
principally two parts, an end user license agreement to the technology
(RHEL) and a subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Network for one year.
The measurement for how many subscriptions to RHEN are required is
based on the number of servers on which RHEL is deployed. The
subscription to RHEN is a precondition to the delivery of RHEL, not a
restriction on the use, modification, or redistribution of RHEL, all of
which are governed by the EULA. A subscriber is not required to use
RHEN, although that is the only mechnism we provide for deliver of
errata, patches, security fixes, etc., for RHEL. We do not provide a
license to RHEL other than as a part of the overall subscription
agreement. This approach has been reviewed by the Free Software
Foundation, and they have indicated to us that it does not violate the
GPL, upon which the EULA is based.
My Comments: Based on the EULA which is based on the GPL, this says to me that only one copy of WS/AS/ES need be purchased, and then many more can be copied within the organization? As long as you weren't connecting to the RHEN as it would be a violation of your original subscription. So as long as you are willing to maintain updates yourself or from some other 3rd party, it would seem alright to me to terminate the subscription....note that my assumption is that copying to multiple machines is not the same as distributing.
Please don't take this as my legal advice, as most times i don't have a clue, this is just a response i got directly from RedHat...so make your own assumptions.
yuk yuk
As far as I remember, RedHat has never shipped non-OpenSource software on there core disks.
I didn't know Netscape 4.x was open source.
Maybe it is me, but I don't understand what everyone is complaining about... People are mad because Redhat move their free corporate run distro, to a free community run distro... This is what is praised about in debian, that it is community run(that and apt)...
Fedora is potentially everything and more of the free Redhat Linux distro... give them some time, but I have faith this is going to be a GOOD move.
I would add in gentoo, as it is also all based on OSS/GPL. It is also one of the easiest to use with new software that often there isn't a rh/deb/etc package, and if there isn't writing ebuilds is easier than writing rpms. (Honestly can't comment on debs, except by heresay which is that they are tougher than both.)
.deb packages is extremely easy; making good .debs is a little bit harder, and making Debian Policy-compliant .debs is a lot more difficult.
.deb, at least from my experience.
Just FYI, making
Any tarball which you can do "./configure; make; make install" to can be made into a
Section 2.4 of the Debian New Maintainer's Guide covers what needs to be done for the initial package. Section 9.2 covers new upstream versions.
I maintain a couple of semi-useful packages (all other people's software) for Debian unstable on my own at http://www.crystalwind.org/debs/. They're not 100% policy-compliant, but in my limited testing, they don't seem to mess anything up.
Jay (=
Just use SCO. The company is very helpfull, and willing to offer all the support you need. I love SCO.........**going into convulsions**.
Life is not for the lazy.
Since when do newbie list-trolls make /.?!
The author of the link admits to being new to the list and was speculating. The follow-up pretty much says that they had already been there/discussed it and that it was probably not gonna happen.
Slackware has it's own automatable update mechanism also, swaret. It even lets you update from other sources, such as linuxpackages.net or random sites from the mirror list (or of course to just use the official slackware ftp site if you prefer.)
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines yet?
You sound like somebody who doesn't have a clue as to how many developers Red Hat has. If I remember correctly, 7 out of the top 10 kernel developers work for Red Hat. Many, many other packages have *significant* contributions made by Red Hat employees. Red Hat does a *lot* more than just take Joe Blow's GPL'd package and package it into an RPM.
Do you also realize that Red Hat has more developers working on Fedora than they did on Red Hat Linux?
Let's also not forget that Fedora IS free. RHEL isn't, but you are getting a level of support that Fedora doesn't give you.
If Fedora would offer me a path to upgrade from RH 9 to Fedora, I would.
If I have to rebuild a new OS, and move my webserver to that, then I will probably go with Debian or Slack.
Can anybody list the distros that will allow version upgrades both remotely and without having to format a drive?
Thanks.
-S
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Red Hat 7.X series support ends as of december 31st. That's less than a month away. I had one production 7.2 machine, and its been upgraded as of two days ago. Since Red Hat announced end of support, anyone running 7.X who gave a shit has been thinking about what to upgrade their systems to, and how to get it done by the end of December. And since that date is so close, a lot of those systems are no longer potential progeny support customers.
Now, maybe they announced this awhile back, and I am just now hearing about it via slashdot, lord knows slashdot is known for being the super fast news source, but if this is indeed a new developement, its a bit late.
I won't be needing their service, I'm upgraded, had I know three days ago, I might have thought otherwise.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Oh dear.
After insulting the intelligence of their entire developer base (not to mention openly scoffing at their hard work and commitment) did Red Hat honestly expect people to flock to Fedora in droves? You've got to be kidding me..We're penguins, not friggin' LEMMINGS.
The whole damn thing with Red Hat stinks like ass and catfish, to the point where I will intentionally avoid doing what Red Hat would like for me to do. I'd even go so far as to say that anyone who pursues contributing code to Fedora is performing the equivalent of dropping their pants, spreading their cheeks, and hanging a sign on their nutsack saying "FREE AS IN BEER" with an arrow pointing up. Anybody who comes along, particularly Red Hat, is gonna take advantage of your willingness to get porked.
By {participating in/contributing to} Red Hat's 'Cousin Oliver' pee-on project, you're effectively agreeing to be kicked out of a playground you helped build, and forced to make do with a cat-shit filled sandbox down the street. Red Hat is our work, not theirs.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but, if someone comes along and says "Oh, hey, thanks for building our skyscraper, kids! It's really quite lovely. As a thank you, we've graciously provided you with a cat-shit-filled sandbox down the street so you can continue making us rich, giving us beautiful things while getting nothing in return, not even the right to say you contribute directly to the project you helped build. Have a nice day, security will escort you to the parking lot."
Remind yourself that without us, they wouldn't even have a product to sell in the first place.
My advice? Let Red Hat go stale. Literally. Don't make an effort to contribute to Red Hat's distrib, or any other distrib which Red Hat directly benefits from (i.e. Fedora)..Move your efforts into helping build a competing distribution, one who's popularity would ultimately detract from Red Hat's dick-play. Ultimately, you cant prevent them from taking your work, obviously, but you can sure as hell make life difficult for them.
I never thought i'd say this, but, fuck this sandbox bullshit. I'm going Debian.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Sorry, pad're, but the casual *nix lusr wants to be on NO bleeding edge. He has an "appliance function" nailed down for his TUX_box, and will happily pay $60/yr to use a 6-month old well tested Linux version. RedHat screwed that lusr indabutt for reasons known only to them.
1.Get apt-rpm
http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/
2.This following will be the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fedora.list:
#--
# Apt sources.list from http://www.xades.com/proj/fedora_repos.html
# Fedora Core
rpm http://download.fedora.us/fedora fedora/1/i386 os updates
rpm http://download.fedora.us/fedora fedora/1/i386 stable unstable testing
# Livna 3rd party packages with questionable licenses -- use at your own risk
rpm http://rpm.livna.org/ fedora/1/i386 stable unstable testing
# Dag Apt Repository for Red Hat Fedora Core 1
rpm http://apt.sw.be redhat/fc1/en/i386 dag
#--
Now do apt-get dist-upgrade
And you will have Fedora Core 1 from Red Hat 9.
When Red Hat announced their new plan, they explained that:
1. Fedora is the development distribution which is maintained similar to Debian. It is intended to be bleeding edge (which is what half the RH users wanted). It is also intended for _anyone_ to use as the basis for creating a boxed distribution (one of those distributions being RHEL, of course).
2. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is their production version for Red Hat's commercial customers, whose main interests were stability and support (for which they are willing to pay).
But Red Hat went on to assure everyone that everything in RHEL is Open Source, and can be redistributed, EXCEPT FOR CERTAIN TRADEMARKS AND NOTIFICATIONS. Red Hat provided information on exactly which files would need to be removed or changed in order to make a redistributable copy of RHEL. Thus, Red Hat continues to support the Open Source approach.
And at least one group has taken Red Hat at their word, and created a distribution which is a free (as in beer) and redistributable copy of RHEL. As required, it doesn't have the Red Hat trademarks, and it is not called Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That distribution is called White Box Linux:
http://www.beau.org/~jmorris/linux/whitebox/
So you can forget all the FUD about Red Hat, because they remain completely faithful to the Open Source community.
That's $25 per year there, chum. And it's not quite correct to say RHEL is only for mission critical tasks and special requirements; it's a slower-moving target (than, e.g. Fedora) for third-party developers. If you want to install anything from Oracle or IBM or what-have-you, you're gonna have the possibility of support if you use RHEL, while this may not be so for Fedora (or Debian, or Slack, or Gentoo, or ...). That is, of course, not to say that these folks' products won't work on other distros!
IOW, you personally might feel the cost is only justified for those purposes, but that's not necessarily the intent.
Well go ahead and register it then. What are you waiting for? Then you homos can stop polluting slashdot with your garbage.
As to your assumption of RedHat living off of community work, note that much of this work (GNOME, etc) was funded (in)directly by RedHat. It is they who have often given to you, not the other way around.
You don't seem to understand what RHAS is and how it is marketed in any case. Since the emphasis has been placed on stability over freshness, the distro would likely not appeal to you, so I am not sure why you begrudge them.
RedHat has made continued support of many open source projects a key part of their business plan. I am grateful for this and more to the point I find Fedora to be a nice distro.
Prior to the Novell acquisition, Suse was viable but fading from the public perception of prominent open source firms. I would expect that to change quickly. First I would expect Novell to drop the Suse name - it has no brand or literal cachet to English speaking customers. Also expect Novell to ditch KDE. Their acquisition of Ximian is a clear indication of where they want to go on the desktop.
My Mistake, it was redhat 4.2 that I bought the box set of.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
don't click it
Please parent down to -1 for trolling, the parent is not an insightfull comment, the person writing the parent comment is a moron, Red Hat does more for the opensource community than you think, I could name a number of distributions that don't do nearly as much!
My university uses two main linux distributions. (Redhat and SuSe.) But the new fedora/ws release ting scared them. any price over 50$ is to much. Espesialy since m$ gives competative prices to that.
But with this pricing schema, they start looking for the money to pay redhat. 25$ is not much, 14$ is even better. And best of all, they can offer a stable distribution of linux to the students. (Maybe even automatic installation for the users.)
Therefore this is a good for the promotion of linux. And to those who claims the software is free: Yes it is free, but 99% of the users don't want to make "linux from scratch" or "debian" them selves. (Not even admins want to admin that).
PS: This university has 17500 students and 2500 employers. (Which only gives redhat at most 1-2m$, which is peanuts in the big picture.)
Uhhhhh....... why would u do such a tihng ??
What Red Hat did in the past is not as important as what they are doing now. If you want to judge by history, then honestly judge them with the histories other software companies who exhibited the same behaviors. The inevitable conclusion cannot be a positive one -- especially concerning a company hoping to survive in the realm of Linux. It is hypocritical to claim Red Hat is doing something acceptable while holding other companies to higher standards. Stating they've contributed this and that to Linux; and so Red Hat's behavior is okay is the point. If they were doing nothing wrong, then why must they be apologetically defended using their goodwill credits from the past? Those credits are being spent fast. The fact that so many of you parade them as being a great community member despite their having announced at sites such as News.com their intention of abandoning us demonstrates clearly the degree of denial. In fact, Red Hat doesn't even bother to make announcements at Linux sites anymore -- too many "free loaders" like us after all. This great community member no longer has time for you unless you spend most of your day "touching base" on conference calls concerning the people who actually work for a living. On their mailing lists, they've literally been laughing at the fact people who try to build from their sources will get "pieces". "If it breaks you get to keep the pieces" to be exact about one of them. It sure is funny, isn't it? Surely that doesn't suggest what it sounds like, right? Go read for yourself, for it is guaranteed to outrage. The statement that other distributors will feel empowered to take the same actions is exactly what should chill everyone to the bone.
I loved RH too. There comes a time when we must move on, and bury our lost friends. I'll miss them, but I will not live lies if that is required to keep them alive.
-- Thomas Corriher
"Bowie Poag" rears his ugly head again. Here's some of the other "Informative" things this troll has had to say in the past:
s t/ 2002-December/msg00245.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-li
This is a great way of explaining a key benefit open source - use the Red Hat 'hood/bonnet on car welded shut' example, then say 'what if the manufacturer goes out of business and you have nowhere to get the car serviced?'.
No, really, i don't.
What do you mean, RH would send a package? Do you mean they'd release new software, or newer versions of software?
For the most part, RHN gave me a lot of backported fixes, but rarely (if ever) a new version of the software itself.
I think I'm getting lost in the semantics here.
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
Debian? That's so yesterday. Gentoo is the way to go these days.