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Progeny To Offer Support For Red Hat 8.0 and 9
zerocool^ writes "In a previous story it was noted that Progeny would offer support to Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 customers facing an End of Life deadline of 31 December 2003. Progeny has updated their 'transitional software' offerings to include support for Red Hat 8.0 and 9 for $5 per month, per machine. This is great news for IT folks who are faced with the choice of a new OS or abandoned 1-year-old software."
MS has stopped support for their old stuff and nobody can help. When Redhat stops, other companies can step forward and help (hopefully, even profit).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This and the IBM Linux commercial, among other things make me feel good that these companies actually want to help out Linux.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
As the current situation proves, what Red Hat sells has value. Because anyone can step up to the plate and make things work, someone will. Because Red Hat has something of value the company will continue to have value, even if the worst things you might say about what they are doing were true.
Of course, they have not really dumped anything. The last two interviews that Slashdot had with Red Hat CEOs should have cleared up all of this FUD. People are not in anyway left with such a poor choice as abandoning 1 year old software or moving to a whole new OS. I don't feel like treading all of that ground again, go read the interviews. Let's just say that I know people running Red Hat 6 without security or performance problems, it should not be hard for individual users to transition to Fedora and corporate users are going to have their needs looked after as always.
We can contrast the situation with Micorosoft's EOL for win98. In that case the "support" was not worth much to begin with as you were still rooted once a year like clockwork. Who's going to pick up the "support" for systems like that? They are going to go the same place Win 3.1 and win 95 systems have gone - liberated or trashed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
there's more than a shred of truth to that quip about Google....
Let's say you spend $30,000/year for unlimited patch access and you have a 4000 node linux server farm that has an expected usable life of no more than 3 years.
That's $90,000 for "lifetime" patching of 4000 machines or a $22.50 uplift on purchase price of each individual machine for lifetime patching.
Redcarpet licenses cost a whole lot more than that!
I can't wait for Progeny to offer their patching services for Redhat Enterprise Linux 3.0... oh wait... isn't Redhat Planning on making all of their money from Support?!?
Poor Redhat...
I'm not telling anyone to do it themselves. I'm saying they CAN do it themselves (this is an option they don't have with Windows)
They also have the option of getting support from any other vendor willing to sell it (which is also an option they don't have with Windows).
As long as there are customers wanting support, and there's no technical or legal hurdles preventing someone from providing support, someone will provide it.
The above choices are for *perpetual* support--you can keep getting support in this manner until the sun blows up.
All of these choices are unavailable on Windows. So what does switching to Windows get you? Either you get no support at all from anyone, or you get vendor support from Microsoft until they EOL the product, and then you get no support at all from anyone. Tough choice.
Since all heavy-duty nerds (that could handle mostly every kind of problem) have moved from RedHat (newbie distro) to Debian (zealot distro) it's pretty hard to get decent help on harder RedHat problems.
That's completely false.
Meanwhile, who would pay for user support when all you need is /join #debian on irc.debian.org, ask your question and at worst get redirected to the right RTFM.
This support is more about updated packages than someone at the other end of the phone. RedHat's planning to stop releasing security fixes, errata, or new feature (like new hardware support) RPMs for these distributions. You absolutely need those to run it well, whether you buy them from someone or build them yourself. Building them yourself would be a lot of work. Progeny feels there's enough people who want to buy them from someone to make a profitable service out of it. So they're offering one.
Actually, RedHat's CEO said in a recent interview that this was profitable. They just want to focus on the enterprise market, which is where the big bucks are. Progeny's picking up their scraps, I guess.
I have a heavy commitment to Redhat, without it I don't have to upgrade a server, I have to upgrade many of them. I am not going to spend thousands on Enterprise Redhat, that would be the very reason I went for the "free" OS in the first place. I tried the switch to Debian on one of them and after some mucking around got it going adequately. As someone who's lived their entire linux life in Redhat land, Debian's a nasty shock. The install process is a nightmare and all the conf files are in different places. BUT you live and learn and it's not that hard... after all, that's what google's for! :)
On the other hand, i stuck the Severn disks into my one of my redhat 9 servers and said 'upgrade'. I know this will get rebuked but it worked perfectly. So i put it in a few more. Now i've got about 4 Redhat-9 boxes, 1 Debian box and 3 Severn boxes. All work fine and to be honest, which do i prefer? Severn...
My point? Give it a shot - it's free and it's basically identical to Redhat 9 (with Apt + Yum built in).
Whats to stop someone with 1000 boxes running their own apt suppository (i know, i prefer this term, seems more errr accurate) from paying $60 per annum for a single box with every package installed, and simply copying the rpm packages from the /var/cache/path to the repository?
M
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
First of all, I would like to say that while I'm not a Red Hat zealot, I'm am a Red Hat sympathizer. I've been a Red Hat user since RHL 4.2, and will continue to use their products when possible. I'm not the happiest with what has happened in the recent months, but I see that this will overall be best for the company.
:)
I manage about 40 machines, most of which are currently running RHL 7.2 and 7.3. We are in the process of transitioning to a gentoo-based distro. A custom stage 3 tarball has been created that can be plopped onto a server and already contains the extra utilities needed as a base level for our servers (ntpd, screen, etc). I've frozen the portage tree, and are side-porting updated software that has been released as the result of a GLSA. This prevents the server set from being too "bleeding edge", while still being secure.
That being said, it'll take a good deal of time to convert 40 servers over from RHL to gentoo. The Progency announcement is great for us, it gives us a bit of insurance against a flaw coming out that we can't immediately solve. Personally, I'd like nothing more than running RHEL on our servers. RHEL focuses more on stability than new whiz-bang features, and the 5-year support life is a plus. But RHEL costs money, money we can't really justify right now. And unfortunately, our business size (small to medium) is no longer the target customer size for Red Hat's business. They're going after the 1000ish-server and 10000ish-workstation market. Again, annoyed, but at least understandable.
I see Red Hat's biggest mistake being announcing the Fedora project AFTER announcing the EOLs on RHL. If they would have announced Fedora and released Fedora Core 1, say 6 months before even announcing the EOL of RHL products, it would have eased the fears of many people. I have Fedora Core 1 running on a workstation, and it works pretty damn well IMHO. But I would not run it in a production environment yet because it's new and unproven and scary.
Secondly, the argument about RHL 9 being out less than a year before being EOLed: Red Hat DID announce that they would only be supporting RHL 9 for a short time, but they probably should have said it louder than they did. Alternatively, if they would have gotten off the ground with the Fedora project earlier like I mentioned above, RHL 9 should have become Fedora Core 1, and would have played into the above strategy.
So that's my take on this. Red Hat could have done things much differently to avoid annoying the smaller linux sysadmin, but that's all in the past now. Like it or not, Red Hat is moving in a new direction, and I wish them the best of luck. I just wish that my position didn't prevent me from moving along with them. Also, kudos to Progency for stepping up to the plate and providing transition support for these products.
By the way, it's "Red Hat". Not "RedHat". Just because the two words in their company name are short doesn't allow you to merge them together. Pretty soon you'll have people going to Slash Dot to read about AlanCox speaking out against Micro Soft