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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 $5
= Grow a brain...
Progeny proves that with Free Software, even if the original vendor goes out of business, or stops supperting it, if there is demand for support, you won't be left out in the cold. This is a very geed thing.
SCO's discount student rate of 642$ 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.
$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,
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.
In higher education, apparently only widgets cost money.
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?
Incidentally, I got the ($7+$7)*FTE speech as well.
It is obvious they'd like universities just to pay $14*FTE as it is actually vaguely in the noise for a large university. However..
It makes absolutely no sense to purchase the enterprise edition AND the workstation edition since the two versions are exactly the same except for a few additional rpm's stuck in the server versions. Since in essence you are basically paying get proxyable (via the $2500 proxy server license) security patches it makes more sense for any university to just purchase to the ES version and turn off the services you don't need.
-bloo
Are they selling it to students or the public at that price?
At many universities Microsoft gives a very large academic discount to students studying IT (if the university computer labs have a Microsoft academic partnership). The CDs typically look like OEM versions, but they are upgrade/oem with really weird license restrictions (you can only install the software once, you can't reinstall it -- AFAIK you can reinstall normal XP distributions around 5 times before you have to call the Microsoft activation people).
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.
1 year = 12 months
Progeny cost = $5/month
RHN cost = $60/year
12 months x $5/month = $60/year
Did I miss something on the website that's screwing up my math?
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
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?).
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 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 (=
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.
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
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.