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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'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
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...
$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
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.
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.
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?
They don't distribute the binaries via download, except through RHN if you purchase a subscription. They cannot keep the source to themselves though, so they put up all the source RPMS.
.src.rpm files, making it more difficult to rebuild them all and build with the cd making scripts, etc. But RH was at least nice enough to make it reasonable for the dedicated enthusiast to get it running. Anyone who doesn't want to go through all that will probably be happy with Fedora despite its (IMHO) minor growing pains.
I suppose if they wanted to be real ultra pricks they would release all the source in some other form than
The only downside to this method is each time a security update becomes available you'll have to rebuild the rpm's yourself, which really sucks if you're a business, but if your joe home user you might not mind.
Your math skills aside, I completely agree with your sentiments. I was completely willing to pay RH $60/year to access updates via up2date. I feel as a home user, $60 is completely fair.
I decided to cut bait and go with SuSE 9.0, which I find that I like better. They have basically the same update mechanism and there doesn't seem to be a maintenance fee (yet?).