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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
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
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.
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,
Do you have some proof of this?
As far as I remember, RedHat has never shipped non-OpenSource software on there core disks. They have included supplemental stuff, which has been clearly marked as such and is never needed to install or use RedHat. RedHat has actually been one of the best contributors for admin tools to the Open Source community. Take a look at their PostgreSQL tools, all Open Source, which ship with their Postgres based DB Server. Unlike Suse, they never used any gimmicks like shipping a closed source admin tool to keep the iso's from being copied. Debian is the only other major distro that has upheld the Open Source community spirit as well as RedHat in my opinion, and Debian is non-profit.
I'm making that statement on the amount of work contributed to the community balanced against "offenses" to the Open Source ethos. RedHat's track record does not deserve such harsh cynicism, I think they've earned the benefit of the doubt.
If RedHat is changing this in their new Enterprise class distro's I'd like to know, but quite frankly I've yet to see RedHat do anything that wasn't friendly to the Open Source community. BTW, you know if any other distro had contributed as much as RedHat has they'd crow a lot more about it.
For the record, I've been using various distros since '95 and though my memory isn't always the best, but you're going to have to dig up some cold hard facts to change my opinion of RedHat.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
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!
It's the RedHat trademarks that are used to control re-distribution.
If you want to get the source, strip out the RH trademarks, compile/build everything, etc., you are free to so do.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!