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."
This is Redhat ES recompiled with all the redhat copy righted logos and stuff removed. It's almost done (release candidate #2). And it's free.
I haven't found any interviews where Redhat comments on the possibility/inevibility of people doing this. I remember a reference made some time ago (that I can't seem to find now) by some RedHat officer about the UnitedLinux people being able to just download the sources to RedHat Linux and they would have their widely adopted Linux standard. So I suspect they must have anticipated something like this.
I know I have.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
yiantsbro
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually if everyone plays nice this is the situation many have wanted. For instance, if you take Windows XP sure a more corporate type of area would want to pay for the OS/support. However, why couldn't it be free for home/educational/non-profit type use?
With this setup you have the best of both worlds. "Profit" areas that can pay, want to pay (for a certain level of comfort and support) will pay. This will allow further development/enhancement to the OS.
Other groups that don't need that comfort level (or can't pay) can use basically the same (non-branded) OS.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
DA-MAN
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> Re-compiling it or re-packaging does not bring the added value you get for that 349 USD or so.
Actually the $349 gets you the following:
# Easy ISOs: OS, Source, and Documentation ISO Images # Red Hat Network Update Module Service 1-year # Quarterly OS Updates # Available via download only
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
flacco
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Re-compiling it or re-packaging does not bring the added value you get for that 349 USD or so. This added value is the technical support - and that's a basic idea behind earning money on GPL-ed software.
ok, so where's the "technical support"?
we have a number of the $60 up2date subscriptions and have decided to take two basic RHEL subscriptions for the time being. i've posted queries a couple of times on the redhat-sponsored lists asking for help when the red hat how-to's failed me (stuff like getting ldap auth over ssl to work) and gotten zero help.
i mistakenly thought that perhaps RHEL came with some conveniences to make enterprise stuff easier to do, or at least some feedback from the lists.
that's just my take on it. i know i'm not a linux *god*, but if i were i wouldn't need tech support or convenience tools to begin with. given that userlinux and debian-enterprise profess the goal of providing turn-key simplicity for mid-level admins, i'm watching them very closely.
-- pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Re:Redhat ES3 - White Box Linux
by
DA-MAN
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> then we win! we will have no money thrown into development. YAY IDIOTS!
Linux was doing just fine before RedHat came out. RedHat is not the only one developing for Linux. IBM is still pumping mad cash, so are many other companies. SuSE/Novell, Cisco, IBM, AMD, Intel, OSDL, etc are all developing linux into a bigger and badder platform every day. You are very ignorant of Linux if you believe that RedHat == Linux.
A company that turns it's back on the majority of their userbase deserves to die a quick and painful death. RedHat has done quite a bit for the community, but I mean they turned their back on even the certified RedHat Admin's. Even Microsoft doesn't have the balls to drop the relevence of a certification until after the new one has gained major ground. MCSE for NT4 was around still after 2000 was available. Once you piss off the Administrators of your software, you're going to be in a world of hurt.
I guess I am lucky...
by
Chicane-UK
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That I work for an educational establishment.
When I read about the December EOL for RH7.x (currently in use on our two large DNS & DHCP boxes) I was a bit miffed - some slightly more advanced notification would have been nice through the usual Red Hat channels.
But the information on educational discounts for RHEL Server (I forget which edition) has helped ease that pain a little. Its actually cheaper than the usual yearly subscription to the RHN, and of course it has a longer lifespan. And conveniently, the description issued for the ideal kind of role for the server edition they were releasing under an academic discount was almost exactly all those systems were used for.
I'll be filling out the purchase order, and resuming the usual business with Red Hat. Slackware nearly got in (especially now that it has swaret), but this has turned the decision back around:)
-- "Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Fedora in production
by
tellurian
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
"Fedora is for developers, contributors, beta testers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts."
Not if you ask any of us who use it in production:-)
Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't make it my payroll server but for other simple services like web hosting, mail serving, and basic office functions, it's more than worthy as a production OS.
Enterprise class: RHEL: Yes, Redhat: No
by
Masarand
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The underlying reasons for dumping RHL are sound, but the process has confused and discouraged enterprise customers.
A big company I know would have willingly paid for RHEL, but found RHL was free and had great application support, so they went for it (but struggled to understand Redhat's business model.) Now they have over 100's of machines deployed and Redhat suddenly pulls the plug with no migration path. Despite internal pressure to dump Redhat they are looking at RHEL, but the lawyers are terrified of "subscription" software (so how much is it next year, or in three years?) To make things worse, Redhat have the longest licence agreement I've ever seen for this kind of product. Oh, and the Redhat sales people are less than helpful.
Red Hat / Fedora confusion
by
0xA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I work for a largish Canadian University in the electrical engineering department. We have a fairly large deployed base of Red Hat workstations in labs and various research areas and most of the support staff uses Red Hat on our workstations. Some of the other departments (Computer Science for example) are big users as well.
Given the EOL of Red Hat 9 we've been working on just what we're going to do in the future. We talked with Red Hat about licensing and got back some really strange answers. There is the $2500 base site license that also requires a per FTE (full time employee or equivilent) fee of $x. This sounded pretty good until Red Hat told us that we needed to pay for every FTE in the University or have each department get it's own license. There is no way for the EE and CS departments to license together.
I can kind of understand wehre they are coming from on this but it really is a deal killer for us. Why would we license evey employee of the University for RHEL when only a small fraction actually use it? On the other hand, we've been looking at Fedora and it looks like we'll be able do deplaoy and manage it well. I don't really see why many organizations would go for RHEL given the current situation.
Re:Red Hat / Fedora confusion
by
guacamole
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
RedHat just announced that RHEL WS is available for $25/per year and AS for $50/per year without requiring you to purchase the base package. You don't get phone support but that's still a pretty good deal if you just want a stable computing platoform, updates, etc.
Re:Red Hat / Fedora confusion
by
0xA
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You're confused, I'm confused, so is the RH sales guy. None of this makes sense any more.
Re:Fedora is test-ware
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I have absolutely nothing against RH stopping support for the RH distro. The problem is their feint with Fedora. If they have simply said that their financials require more focus on RHEL, I would be fine with it. Perens pointed out what's wrong with Fedora right after the RH announcement. The fact that they continue to spin it, is insulting to the intelect of their customers and (former) friends.
Though I like fedora...
by
jensend
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My two biggest complaints with it are:
1. RH, in its current state of transition and confusion, is aiming Fedora at the non-existent "bleeding-edge corporate desktop" market and thus continuing the RH8 and 9 trend of dumbing it down. Returning to techie roots should involve returning to the more sensible and *more usable* kind of interface we saw in earlier series before people got into the "usability" kicks.
2. Package management. Good grief. It starts with the install: there is no way to select individual packages for installation. After installation, the graphical "install packages" program, which has all sorts of problems up to and including frequent segfaults for many users, still doesn't allow individual package selection either (and hasn't since RH8). Its segfaults and the increasingly common RPM hangs result in locking problems and rpm db corruptions which require, at best, a rpm db rebuild, and at worst enough repair that a total reinstall is recommended instead. Ah, for the days of rpm 3.x and gnorpm! (Man, I miss that program- I've felt for some time that RH failing to put resources into it to keep gnorpm up with the move to gtk2 and later rpm versions was their worst move at least since GCC "2.96".)
What I want to know about Fedora: Support
by
sid+crimson
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So, Fedora looks interesting. It's the next version of Redhat (v.10) and attempts to continue the "free beer" side of Linux while separating this from the Enterprise offering.
What I want to know is: will security updates be offered in the same timely manner Redhat has offered them before? Their FAQ on the Fedora site is a little ambiguous. Quote their site:
Q: What is the errata policy for The Fedora Project?
A: Security updates, bugfix updates, and new feature updates will all be available, through Red Hat and third parties. Updates may be staged (first made available for public qualification, then later for general consumption) when appropriate. In drastic cases, we may remove a package from The Fedora Project if we judge that a necessary security update is too problematic/disruptive to the larger goals of the project. Availability of updates should not be misconstrued as support for anything other than continued development and innovation of the code base. Updates will be available for two to three months after the release of the subsequent version; that is, updates for Fedora Core 1 will be provided for two to three months after the release of Fedora Core 2, and so forth.
Red Hat will not be providing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for resolution times for updates for The Fedora Project. Security updates will take priority. For packages maintained by external parties, Red Hat may respond to security holes by deprecating packages if the external maintainers do not provide updates in a reasonable time. Users who want support, or maintenance according to an SLA, may purchase the appropriate Red Hat Enterprise Linux product for their use.
..it sounds like they may not offer timely updates. Or maybe I'm just too sensitive to the [market|lawyer]-speak...? I work in a nonprofit, and am attempting to replace Wintel with Lintel. Redhat has the name, and therefore my boss' attention. If Redhat is no longer available... then he may no longer bite.
He doesn't know what "Fedora" is.
-sid
Re:Ahemm. Cough! Cough!
by
mmcguigan
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think it is so weak of a response. Anyone can name some piece of hardware or some function that any given operating system will not support, especially "out of the box". Plus, the items you mentioned are specialty items in the sense that the majority of users do not have them.
"When they buy the newest game or some random piece of hardware, they expect it to work. "
This is likely true, the problem is that it doesn't just work in any system out there. If you buy Apple hardware for an Apple computer it will just work, but any random piece of hardware? No. In MS Windows most hardware is supposed to work, but how often have you heard of it not working out of the box?
What do you do when it doesn't work? Call the support department? Return it when you are unsuccessful?
That is pretty much exactly what I do when buying products for any of the OS's I support. It is up to the hardware manufacturer to make their product work.
I just think that RedHat should stick to answering for their own products instead of generalizing their products as the state of Linux in general. They evaluated their system and found that it wasn't good for the desktop. Therefore they make a press release that Linux is not ready for the desktop, but they will let us all know when it is. They didn't evaluate all Linux desktops to determine this. They evaluated RedHat Linux as a desktop to determine that all Linux is not ready, which is not a fair evaluation of Linux on the desktop. RedHat Linux is not the only Linux. Wouldn't it make more sense to let us know when they have their product ready for the desktop?
Even if you don't think Linux is ready now, don't you think it is reasonable to say that someone besides RedHat could have desktop linux ready before RedHat? Is RedHat going to let us all know when someone else has it ready or when there product is ready?
Hope you understand where I'm coming from. I've been a user of RedHat Linux since 4.0 and I still use it as a server; however, I stopped trying to use it as a desktop a long time ago.
BTW: I don't have an ipod so I don't know first hand, but the ipod pretty well works without much problems I hear. Lindows is supposed to have a one click install and debian testing can use:
Slashdot Mirror
But the software is GPL, so I would like to hear a RedHat person comment on this:
http://whiteboxlinux.org/
This is Redhat ES recompiled with all the redhat copy righted logos and stuff removed. It's almost done (release candidate #2). And it's free.
I haven't found any interviews where Redhat comments on the possibility/inevibility of people doing this. I remember a reference made some time ago (that I can't seem to find now) by some RedHat officer about the UnitedLinux people being able to just download the sources to RedHat Linux and they would have their widely adopted Linux standard. So I suspect they must have anticipated something like this.
I know I have.
That I work for an educational establishment.
:)
When I read about the December EOL for RH7.x (currently in use on our two large DNS & DHCP boxes) I was a bit miffed - some slightly more advanced notification would have been nice through the usual Red Hat channels.
But the information on educational discounts for RHEL Server (I forget which edition) has helped ease that pain a little. Its actually cheaper than the usual yearly subscription to the RHN, and of course it has a longer lifespan. And conveniently, the description issued for the ideal kind of role for the server edition they were releasing under an academic discount was almost exactly all those systems were used for.
I'll be filling out the purchase order, and resuming the usual business with Red Hat. Slackware nearly got in (especially now that it has swaret), but this has turned the decision back around
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Not if you ask any of us who use it in production :-)
Don't get me wrong. I wouldn't make it my payroll server but for other simple services like web hosting, mail serving, and basic office functions, it's more than worthy as a production OS.
A big company I know would have willingly paid for RHEL, but found RHL was free and had great application support, so they went for it (but struggled to understand Redhat's business model.) Now they have over 100's of machines deployed and Redhat suddenly pulls the plug with no migration path. Despite internal pressure to dump Redhat they are looking at RHEL, but the lawyers are terrified of "subscription" software (so how much is it next year, or in three years?) To make things worse, Redhat have the longest licence agreement I've ever seen for this kind of product. Oh, and the Redhat sales people are less than helpful.
Given the EOL of Red Hat 9 we've been working on just what we're going to do in the future. We talked with Red Hat about licensing and got back some really strange answers. There is the $2500 base site license that also requires a per FTE (full time employee or equivilent) fee of $x. This sounded pretty good until Red Hat told us that we needed to pay for every FTE in the University or have each department get it's own license. There is no way for the EE and CS departments to license together.
I can kind of understand wehre they are coming from on this but it really is a deal killer for us. Why would we license evey employee of the University for RHEL when only a small fraction actually use it? On the other hand, we've been looking at Fedora and it looks like we'll be able do deplaoy and manage it well. I don't really see why many organizations would go for RHEL given the current situation.
I have absolutely nothing against RH stopping support for the RH distro. The problem is their feint with Fedora. If they have simply said that their financials require more focus on RHEL, I would be fine with it. Perens pointed out what's wrong with Fedora right after the RH announcement. The fact that they continue to spin it, is insulting to the intelect of their customers and (former) friends.
My two biggest complaints with it are:
1. RH, in its current state of transition and confusion, is aiming Fedora at the non-existent "bleeding-edge corporate desktop" market and thus continuing the RH8 and 9 trend of dumbing it down. Returning to techie roots should involve returning to the more sensible and *more usable* kind of interface we saw in earlier series before people got into the "usability" kicks.
2. Package management. Good grief. It starts with the install: there is no way to select individual packages for installation. After installation, the graphical "install packages" program, which has all sorts of problems up to and including frequent segfaults for many users, still doesn't allow individual package selection either (and hasn't since RH8). Its segfaults and the increasingly common RPM hangs result in locking problems and rpm db corruptions which require, at best, a rpm db rebuild, and at worst enough repair that a total reinstall is recommended instead. Ah, for the days of rpm 3.x and gnorpm! (Man, I miss that program- I've felt for some time that RH failing to put resources into it to keep gnorpm up with the move to gtk2 and later rpm versions was their worst move at least since GCC "2.96".)
What I want to know is: will security updates be offered in the same timely manner Redhat has offered them before? Their FAQ on the Fedora site is a little ambiguous. Quote their site:
He doesn't know what "Fedora" is.
-sid
I don't think it is so weak of a response. Anyone can name some piece of hardware or some function that any given operating system will not support, especially "out of the box". Plus, the items you mentioned are specialty items in the sense that the majority of users do not have them.
"When they buy the newest game or some random piece of hardware, they expect it to work. "
This is likely true, the problem is that it doesn't just work in any system out there. If you buy Apple hardware for an Apple computer it will just work, but any random piece of hardware? No. In MS Windows most hardware is supposed to work, but how often have you heard of it not working out of the box?
What do you do when it doesn't work? Call the support department? Return it when you are unsuccessful?
That is pretty much exactly what I do when buying products for any of the OS's I support. It is up to the hardware manufacturer to make their product work.
I just think that RedHat should stick to answering for their own products instead of generalizing their products as the state of Linux in general. They evaluated their system and found that it wasn't good for the desktop. Therefore they make a press release that Linux is not ready for the desktop, but they will let us all know when it is. They didn't evaluate all Linux desktops to determine this. They evaluated RedHat Linux as a desktop to determine that all Linux is not ready, which is not a fair evaluation of Linux on the desktop. RedHat Linux is not the only Linux. Wouldn't it make more sense to let us know when they have their product ready for the desktop?
Even if you don't think Linux is ready now, don't you think it is reasonable to say that someone besides RedHat could have desktop linux ready before RedHat? Is RedHat going to let us all know when someone else has it ready or when there product is ready?
Hope you understand where I'm coming from. I've been a user of RedHat Linux since 4.0 and I still use it as a server; however, I stopped trying to use it as a desktop a long time ago.
BTW: I don't have an ipod so I don't know first hand, but the ipod pretty well works without much problems I hear. Lindows is supposed to have a one click install and debian testing can use:
apt-get install gtkpod