Posted by
michael
on from the switch-to-debian dept.
jeremy writes "In a followup to his original interview, Jeremy Hogan discusses some of the reasons Red Hat had for EOL'ing RHL, future licensing options for RHEL (including free devel copies), the most common Fedora misconception, his take on UserLinux and more."
Fedora is redhat
by
DeadSea
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They just changed the name and stopped offering telephone support. Given this, I downloaded the ISOs, burned them, and upgraded my Redhat 9 box to Fedora.
I have to say it looks great. It took a bit of prodding to get it running. I had a bunch of "3rdParty" software (3rd party to redhat that is) that I had to reinstall (Java, jhead, openmoz, openfb) etc.
I also had to tweak my XFree86 config file to add some higher resolutions (I don't know why 800x600 was the biggest by default).
Then I had to switch back from sawfish to metacity window manager. Sawfish just doesn't seem to work with the gnome desktop switcher panel. Metacity is much better now, it allows me to define the keyboard shortcuts that kept me on sawfish for redhat 9.
The best part about Fedora is no more filling out a survey every time I want to download patches using up2date. Now it just lets me on. No subscription or anything. It is now officially a better product to me just because of that.
mirror
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'll bet vBulletin won't last 10 minutes....
Followup Interview with Jeremy Hogan of Red Hat ( post #1)
With all of the recent Fedora and RHEL news, I thought another interview with Jeremy Hogan was in order. He was kind enough to agree to get badgered again. Thanks Jeremy.
--jeremy
###
LQ) Now that the dust from the RHL EOL/Fedora announcement has settled a bit, what are your thoughts on how it played out?
JH) As well as it could have in many respects. We had an awful lot of users putting Red Hat Linux (across many versions) all over the place. But it was all still Red Hat Linux by name to them, so to see that name go, is to see the whole thing go. And on came the "Red Hat throws out baby, keeps bathwater" headlines.
LQ) Did it go as planned?
JH) There was a lot we couldn't plan for, but mostly.
LQ) Do you feel that in the long run the lack of a freely downloadable RHL will hurt the "Red Hat brand"?
JH) No, I think Fedora will develop it's own distinct brand attributes, and people will gravitate, or opt-in to the solution that suits them.
Again, with RHL you had both worlds under one name, so now it's easy to tell in a lot of respects what you should use if you want a freely downloadable (and I'd add installable, ISO'd etc) since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available for download as well.
We still have gaps to fill in the small business/home office end, but developers can have Fedora, or get RHEL for free in an upcoming program. The new education program has some great pricing, we have a great pricing incentive on ES/WS right now for those c/o price, so you see the initial complaints being addressed. In the end, I think it will strengthen the brand.
LQ) How has the announcement affected Red Hat internally?
JH) Our culture mirrors the community reaction. It ran the gamut, as you'd expect. I think folks internally thought very long and hard about how this was going to work out. This is part of a bigger plan to really promote our strengths and the strengths of open source technology while identifying and addressing the gaps.
LQ) What is the consensus from the average Red Hat employee?
JH) Well, we've known about it internally for some time, so it's down to execution for us.
LQ) Was the backlash from the Linux community a bit stronger than was anticipated?
JH) Yes and no, I think people got too alarmed by Matthew Szulik's interview. I think it was mis-interpreted starting with the article's headline and on it went.
I'm surprised that some of the people who missed the "free as in free *and* free" RHL ISOs on ftp, did not opt for Fedora.
And I think I'm always surprised at the skepticism toward Red Hat. To me Linux advocates bashing Linux advocates does Microsoft's work for them. It plays into the FUD that we are an angry mob.
LQ) What misconception(s) do you see most often?
JH) That's it's only about money for us. It's really an overt effort on our part to keep things in balance, you donate a million dollars to defend the GPL on one hand, you develop your markets on the other.
LQ) Reading between the lines a bit, a recent comment from Mr. Szulik seemed to indicate that he felt consumer desktop Linux was sufficiently immature that Red Hat doesn't want to offer it, but when it does mature enough Red Hat will get into that market. Any comments?
JH) The consumer desktop is a pretty big market, and we already have a chunk of it, but it's fickle, it's full of folks happy enough, or used to what they have. It's full of people using technology because they have to, or using an OS because it came installed. A number of things have to be right to really get into that, technological superiority, as we've seen is not enough or else OSX would have the desktop. (I've decided to make it a tradition of plugging OSX in these interviews.)
Windows isn't even as seamless as some folks make it out to be as far as hardware and tech support, i
Re:I guess I am lucky...
by
Russ+Steffen
·
· Score: 5, Informative
some slightly more advanced notification would have been nice through the usual Red Hat channels.
The EOL dates for 7.x were announced almost a year ago. People just noticed them again when the Fedora stuff was announced.
What more were you expecting? A singing telegram? Carrier pigeon?
Re:Fedora in production
by
iggymanz
·
· Score: 2, Informative
it's too early to tell, what with first non-teest release, if Fedora will be stable, will really track the RedHat commercial products, or be anything other than a testbed for RedHat for things that may or may not work.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
burns210
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Redhat open sources all their tools for this reason... unlike, say, Suse, who keeps their claim to fame app to themselves... Read into it what you want, but Redhat is an opensource company trying to make a profit, and build a community around their product...
I say, good for them, I will be running Fedora for quite a long time.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
hubertt
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Quoted from the very same page: * Available with Standard Edition support.
And what is "SE support"? Quoted from http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/features/:
"Enterprise-class support
Red Hat Enterprise Linux products include a full year of support with varying service levels depending on your chosen subscription option."
So what you're paying is one year of full tech support.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The whole idea is that your paying for the engineering and QA that go into keeping a product supported for 5 years.
Spoken as someone who hasn't even looked at Fedora.
As part of the Fedora beta process, I would say that the Rawhide snapshot that became Fedora Core 1 probably went through more testing than any other. This was helped by creating a yum repository out of Rawhide so testers could easily see when things were updated.
Now, if you actually bothered to install Fedora, you will find that it is just as good as the "Red Hat 10" everyone was expecting it to be.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
bobbozzo
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In addition to WhiteBox, there is another RHEL knockoff in the works: cAos -- Community Linux
-- Nothing to see here; Move along.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You need to learn to read. The $349 includes no tech support. That's no web support. That's no phone support. If you want to pay more for Standard Edition, then, yes, you get some limited support.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
hubertt
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Damn, you're right! I need to learn:-) Here is the clear comparison of various RedHat options. It seems you're getting binaries only for 349 with no dedicated tech support.
Re:Red Hat / Fedora confusion
by
weave
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I can't tell from their site what it takes to do this. Do you have to buy the base product for $2,500 and then add the server licenses for $50 each, or can you buy them separate? If the former, then if you only have 4 servers, it's $2,700.
And, with all that, you don't get ANY support and I'm back to counting and keeping track of number of installs. All stuff "free" (as in freedom and beer) software was supposed to get me away from.
Re:Red Hat / Fedora confusion
by
0xA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah that's the way I'm starting to feel too. I feel like I'm playing the "I need 250 windows server cals and 52 TS cals and..." game I used to go through with MS. The sad part is that now MS icensing is dirt simple for me because of the EDU package we have.
That's kind of strange isn't it.
Re:Enterprise class: RHEL: Yes, Redhat: No
by
Crispy+Critters
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"the lawyers are terrified of "subscription" software (so how much is it next year, or in three years?)"
How much if any subscription software is there in RHEL? The update and support service is by subscription. If you decide not to pay RH any more, you can still use any GPLed software for as long as you like. Red Hat can't hijack GPLed code any more than SCO can. The kernel and the basic system are yours forever.
If you don't need or use the proprietary stuff in RHEL, then you can stop paying Red Hat, keep using the software, and handle updates yourself. People are wetting their pants at the thought that they might need to install a program from a tarball or (heaven forfend!) create their own rpm.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to say it looks great. It took a bit of prodding to get it running. I had a bunch of "3rdParty" software (3rd party to redhat that is) that I had to reinstall (Java, jhead, openmoz, openfb) etc.
I also had to tweak my XFree86 config file to add some higher resolutions (I don't know why 800x600 was the biggest by default).
Then I had to switch back from sawfish to metacity window manager. Sawfish just doesn't seem to work with the gnome desktop switcher panel. Metacity is much better now, it allows me to define the keyboard shortcuts that kept me on sawfish for redhat 9.
The best part about Fedora is no more filling out a survey every time I want to download patches using up2date. Now it just lets me on. No subscription or anything. It is now officially a better product to me just because of that.
Followup Interview with Jeremy Hogan of Red Hat ( post #1)
With all of the recent Fedora and RHEL news, I thought another interview with Jeremy Hogan was in order. He was kind enough to agree to get badgered again. Thanks Jeremy.
--jeremy
###
LQ) Now that the dust from the RHL EOL/Fedora announcement has settled a bit, what are your thoughts on how it played out?
JH) As well as it could have in many respects. We had an awful lot of users putting Red Hat Linux (across many versions) all over the place. But it was all still Red Hat Linux by name to them, so to see that name go, is to see the whole thing go. And on came the "Red Hat throws out baby, keeps bathwater" headlines.
LQ) Did it go as planned?
JH) There was a lot we couldn't plan for, but mostly.
LQ) Do you feel that in the long run the lack of a freely downloadable RHL will hurt the "Red Hat brand"?
JH) No, I think Fedora will develop it's own distinct brand attributes, and people will gravitate, or opt-in to the solution that suits them.
Again, with RHL you had both worlds under one name, so now it's easy to tell in a lot of respects what you should use if you want a freely downloadable (and I'd add installable, ISO'd etc) since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available for download as well.
We still have gaps to fill in the small business/home office end, but developers can have Fedora, or get RHEL for free in an upcoming program. The new education program has some great pricing, we have a great pricing incentive on ES/WS right now for those c/o price, so you see the initial complaints being addressed. In the end, I think it will
strengthen the brand.
LQ) How has the announcement affected Red Hat internally?
JH) Our culture mirrors the community reaction. It ran the gamut, as you'd expect. I think folks internally thought very long and hard about how this was going to work out. This is part of a bigger plan to really promote our strengths and the strengths of open source technology while identifying and addressing the gaps.
LQ) What is the consensus from the average Red Hat employee?
JH) Well, we've known about it internally for some time, so it's down to execution for us.
LQ) Was the backlash from the Linux community a bit stronger than was anticipated?
JH) Yes and no, I think people got too alarmed by Matthew Szulik's interview. I think it was mis-interpreted starting with the article's headline and on it went.
I'm surprised that some of the people who missed the "free as in free *and* free" RHL ISOs on ftp, did not opt for Fedora.
And I think I'm always surprised at the skepticism toward Red Hat. To me Linux advocates bashing Linux advocates does Microsoft's work for them. It plays into the FUD that we are an angry mob.
LQ) What misconception(s) do you see most often?
JH) That's it's only about money for us. It's really an overt effort on our part to keep things in balance, you donate a million dollars to defend the GPL on one hand, you develop your markets on the other.
LQ) Reading between the lines a bit, a recent comment from Mr. Szulik seemed to indicate that he felt consumer desktop Linux was sufficiently immature that Red Hat doesn't want to offer it, but when it does mature enough Red Hat will get into that market. Any comments?
JH) The consumer desktop is a pretty big market, and we already have a chunk of it, but it's fickle, it's full of folks happy enough, or used to what they have. It's full of people using technology because they have to, or using an OS because it came installed. A number of things have to be right to really get into that, technological superiority, as we've seen is not enough or else OSX would have the desktop. (I've decided to make it a tradition of plugging OSX in these interviews.)
Windows isn't even as seamless as some folks make it out to be as far as hardware and tech support, i
The EOL dates for 7.x were announced almost a year ago. People just noticed them again when the Fedora stuff was announced.
What more were you expecting? A singing telegram? Carrier pigeon?it's too early to tell, what with first non-teest release, if Fedora will be stable, will really track the RedHat commercial products, or be anything other than a testbed for RedHat for things that may or may not work.
Redhat open sources all their tools for this reason... unlike, say, Suse, who keeps their claim to fame app to themselves... Read into it what you want, but Redhat is an opensource company trying to make a profit, and build a community around their product...
I say, good for them, I will be running Fedora for quite a long time.
* Available with Standard Edition support.
And what is "SE support"? Quoted from http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/features/
So what you're paying is one year of full tech support.
The whole idea is that your paying for the engineering and QA that go into keeping a product supported for 5 years.
Spoken as someone who hasn't even looked at Fedora.
As part of the Fedora beta process, I would say that the Rawhide snapshot that became Fedora Core 1 probably went through more testing than any other. This was helped by creating a yum repository out of Rawhide so testers could easily see when things were updated.
Now, if you actually bothered to install Fedora, you will find that it is just as good as the "Red Hat 10" everyone was expecting it to be.
In addition to WhiteBox, there is another RHEL knockoff in the works: cAos -- Community Linux
Nothing to see here; Move along.
You need to learn to read. The $349 includes no tech support. That's no web support. That's no phone support. If you want to pay more for Standard Edition, then, yes, you get some limited support.
Damn, you're right! I need to learn :-)
Here is the clear comparison of various RedHat options. It seems you're getting binaries only for 349 with no dedicated tech support.
And, with all that, you don't get ANY support and I'm back to counting and keeping track of number of installs. All stuff "free" (as in freedom and beer) software was supposed to get me away from.
That's kind of strange isn't it.
How much if any subscription software is there in RHEL? The update and support service is by subscription. If you decide not to pay RH any more, you can still use any GPLed software for as long as you like. Red Hat can't hijack GPLed code any more than SCO can. The kernel and the basic system are yours forever.
If you don't need or use the proprietary stuff in RHEL, then you can stop paying Red Hat, keep using the software, and handle updates yourself. People are wetting their pants at the thought that they might need to install a program from a tarball or (heaven forfend!) create their own rpm.