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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.
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.
the guys at redhat deserve a few bucks for their great work, don't they?
The IT section color scheme sucks.
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.
wait until it OOPS' your kernel on your most critical machine. you'll change your mind then.
beside apt-get works better, and is free
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,
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.
they sure do. i bought boxed versions of 5.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.3 and 8... and i bought bob young's mediocre book "under the radar".
but now that they've yanked the standard distro to try to force me to upgrade to rhel or downgrade to fedora, they'll never get another cent from me.
sorry. my consumer dollars are earmarked for gentoo and freebsd now.
2 1337 4 u!
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.
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.
"Red Hat is our work, not theirs."
1- Bullshit.
2- don't do that
Keep pretending that RedHat has, until now, all about the community, making things free, and not out to make money. While you're at it, make sure you pretend that throwing a desk on a kid's throat is self-defense, and that the easter bunny will bring you a hanakuh gift, too.
The fact is, RedHat did nothing more than raise prices and change their direction. You don't think Suse and others will do the same ? RedHat has made more inroads in terms of credibility than any other distro, and that means good news, whether you admit it or not.
Don't be so dramatic. Fedora *is* RH9, and for the people who had support contracts for their enterprise version, nothing has changed. Complain all you want, but don't be so hyperbolic about it.
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.