Red Hat Recap

We have some assorted Red Hat stories which can be - and in fact already have been - jumbled together for your reading pleasure, like a sort of literary succotash. Forbes has an accusatory piece about Red Hat's licensing model, which is apparently, err, Microsoft-esque. Red Hat reminds everyone that RH9 is not going to be officially supported for much longer. Internetnews.com has a brief interview with Red Hat's CEO.

Comments

Red Hat's Going on

[sircle_72]

Everything you wanted to know about red hat but were afraid to ask... six months ago.

Re:Red Hat's Going on

[Anonymous Coward]

He also got it wrong. The new model is that Fedora is the bleeding edge software, and can be released that way for the eager hackers to play with. We get freely published software with no tech support from RedHat except doing the bug fixes, they get thousands of beta testers.

They then charge the licensing fees for the commercial releases, *which contain licensed tools which RedHat could not publish as freeware* due to some of the odder and non-GPL compatible licenses. (Take a look at QT and the recent XFree86 copyright issues for examples.)

You could install it entirely free before from downloaded ISO's or RPM's, and you can still do this with Fedora. What you can't do is buy one copy, install it on 500 machines, and expect RedHat to support all 500: that was slaughtering their Linux tech support.

Re:Red Hat's Going on

[tannhaus]

QT is released under the GPL

Re:Red Hat's Going on

[vwjeff]

At least he managed to cover the horns on his forehead. Really, only a child calls people names. Please grow up. BTW, you forgot to mention his hooved feet. Oh, screw growing up. I'm having too much fun!!

Re:Red Hat's Going on

[noselasd]

On the other hand, Red Hat makes a damn fine stable product. Well tested
and with lots of enterprise features.
You can pay for it and get support,(and not to mention "support" redhat).
Or you can get it for free - www.whiteboxlinux.org

Re:Red Hat's Going on

[ePhil_One]

What you can't do is buy one copy, install it on 500 machines, and expect RedHat to support all 500: that was slaughtering their Linux tech support.

Folks with 500 systems don't bother RH's tech support, except possibly with kickstart issues to automate their rollouts. I've gone and bought copies so I could call and ask questions (well, once, I learned my lesson after that). They help with basic install issues only. Redhat's Bugzilla system is a far more useful means of getting support, but at that level I'm more assisting with bugfixes than asking for support.

Now, they claim to help with setup of services under RHEL, I haven't tried. But the big service they offer is "Up2date", which lets you easily manage and update packages on all you systems. Its cool, but $700/year value it is not.

Not that I'm Anti-Redhat. They have helped stabilize and legitimaize all sorts of packages, the Redhat Package Manager (RPM) works great, even if I need something custom compiled I'll tend to rebuild an RPM rather than manually compile and install. By providing vendors a widespread and tested distribution, they allowed vendors to build apps and drivers that didn't involve publishing a bunch of source code and giving away trade secrets (no matter how lame).

Re:Red Hat's Going on

[Tassach]

But the big service they offer is "Up2date", which lets you easily manage and update packages on all you systems. Its cool, but $700/year value it is not.

You're exactly right. I think Red Hat is screwing themselves by overpricing RHN/up2date. RHN is a handy tool for managing a server farm, but by itself it's not worth much more than $25/year/server, at least to me. If for example you have 100 servers, under the new pricing scheme that would be $70,000/Yr. For that money, you could hire a decent mid-level administrator who could do a whole lot more than install the latest RPMs.

What, no editorial?

[Nugget]

I'm disappointed in michael. I would have expected more invective. When I pointed this out last June he took the opportunity to taint the article with inflammatory and inaccurate editorial making it sound like I didn't know what I was talking about. Now I guess I've been vindicated by Forbes and the article gets no such coloring from the slashdot editors.

How can we accept Red Hat's per-seat pricing and overbearing EULAs that allow them to audit user sites for license compliance? Why does Red Hat get a free pass from the community and from the FSF for constricting our freedom as badly as Microsoft ever has?

Rick Carey speaks the truth. Red Hat is no more a "Free" choice than Microsoft is.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

All the software in all verions of Red Hat is free. They don't need a 'free pass' from the community, the FSF or anyone else because they are fully complying with the licensing terms of all the software they distribute. Come back when there's something to whine about.

Re:What, no editorial?

[tftp]

Why does Red Hat get a free pass from the community and from the FSF for constricting our freedom as badly as Microsoft ever has?

It doesn't get a free pass; RH is just free to offer any stupid EULA they can come up with. However if you accept such EULA then it would be none other than you who constricted your own freedom.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Nugget]

But no, they are not. The GPL expressly prohibits their ability to place additional restrictions on the software. They do not seem deterred by this, however.

Read the EULA. Read the license. Tell me how they don't violate the GPL.

Re:What, no editorial?

[goon america]

Why does Red Hat get a free pass from the community and from the FSF for constricting our freedom as badly as Microsoft ever has?

'Cause the EULA is only to impress PHBs. Anyone who knows their salt doesn't have to abide by that EULA in any meaningful way.

Re:What, no editorial?

[equiraptor]

Does Oracle support whitebox? The last I heard, they didn't. Which means if you want to run a multi-proc Oracle system on Linux, it's RHEL or SuSE, unless you want to sacrifice your Oracle support. Even VMWare ESX server won't write drivers for Whitebox. Sometimes you're constricted by commercial applications and have to go with the big name, and that's when this Red Hat EULA becomes a major pain.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't place any restrictions on your right to redistribute GPL software. They don't place any restrictions on your right to receive source for the GPL software they provide to you. The only thing they place restrictions on is the terms on which they will proivide you with support services. That's it.

Now, tell me how they do violate the GPL.

Re:What, no editorial?

[reaper20]

If you're running Oracle on a multi-processor Linux system then the price of RHEL is insignificant.

Re:What, no editorial?

[equiraptor]

Not if you're a company that isn't profitable yet. Every penny saved makes a difference.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Nugget]

That is not accurate. They also place restrictions on what you can do with the GPL'd software. For one, they disallow you to install one copy on multiple machines. Rather, you must pay for five copies if you intend to run five copies. This is independent from the service agreement.

Read the EULA. It's all there.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

then congratulations on choosing oracle, you saved your company a lot of money.

Re:What, no editorial?

[alienw]

Why don't you read it? Or at least provide a link to what you think is the EULA? Dumbass.

Re:What, no editorial?

[equiraptor]

When did I say I chose it?

Oracle does some things nothing else does. That, combined with the support, is why it was chosen, I believe. However, like I said, I didn't chose it. But I do have to live with what's already there.

Re:What, no editorial?

[reaper20]

Oh ok, then you'd be using Postgres then. ;)

Seriously though, there's a niche there for selling to Oracle customers, given how expensive their software is the $2k for RHEL is almost nothing for large enterprises.

If large companies are going to spend a boatload money on Oracle and CA then why not Linux? Red Hat makes money, invests it in Fedora and GNOME, and I get a modern distro for free.

I don't see what people are so pissed about. Fedora is a better distribution than Red Hat Linux was, and with Fedora Legacy I don't have to upgrade unless I need to.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

They also place restrictions on what you can do with the GPL'd software. For one, they disallow you to install one copy on multiple machines. Rather, you must pay for five copies if you intend to run five copies. This is independent from the service agreement.

Read the EULA. It's all there.

I have read the EULA. Now cite the specific paragraph.

Re:What, no editorial?

[equiraptor]

Postgres comes with support?

Re:What, no editorial?

[Nugget]

I did exactly that in June, and it's linked in the post at the top of this thread. Here it is again: http://www.livejournal.com/users/nugget/42813.html

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

So are you retracting your claim that there are restrictions in the EULA, independent of the service agreement, and relying only on the service agreement clauses that you refer to in that letter? Or are you just trolling?

Re:What, no editorial?

[equiraptor]

And in case it seems like I'm contradicting myself, no, the company doesn't care about support from Red Hat / Whitebox. Yes, it does care about support for Oracle. I suspect the difference is the cost difference between a Red Hat admin and an Oracle admin.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat contributes money to GCC, glibc, XFree86, the kernel, GNOME and loads of other projects, all of which are available in other distros as open source.

How much do YOU contribute?

In short, you're a cretin. You need help. Red Hat has put out more GPLed code than SUSE and MandrakeSoft combined, but of course facts don't matter. You need to find a woman FAST...

Re:What, no editorial?

[eviltypeguy]

Wrong. They only place restrictions on their distribution. The GPL software remains GPL. You can download the source packages that are in RHEL freely from RedHat's FTP site.

If you remove redhat-logos and anaconda-images (something like that) you can roll your own distribution based off RHEL without worrying about their EULA.

Where do you think projects like White Box Linux and others came from?

Re:What, no editorial?

[Seth Finklestein]

Often, people like to claim that the media is "liberal." Michael Sims is like the communist handing out poorly-photocopied fliers on the street corner. "Watch out! Micro$oft-Di$ney-Wal*Ma$t is infringing on your rights!"

Of course, what Michael doesn't want you to know is that he's a hypocritical domain stealing fraud. Michael Sims may care about your rights online, but he sure as hell doesn't care about mine.

Of course, Michael's also a coward. Rather than reply to posts he doesn't like, he merely moderates them without comment.

I propose a total boycott of Slashdot and all its advertisers. This injustice shall not stand.

Sincerely,
Seth Finklestein
Zealot

Re:What, no editorial?

[changelingyahoo.com]

I spoke with RedHat several months ago about this issue and here's the deal. You are free to place RHEL on as many machines as you'd like without even violating your license. You can distribute RHEL to others; there are no restrictions on distributing RHEL itself. You are allowed to use up2date and RHN to update only the machines you have a valid license for. You are not allowed to download updates from RHN and then apply them to machines that do not have a valid license. You may, however, download the RHEL SRPMs which are freely available on RedHat's site and update your software manually that way. If you believe any of this is incorrect then contact RedHat and they'll clarify it for you.

Re:What, no editorial?

[equiraptor]

Oh, the false assumptions make my head hurt.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Nugget]

The bitter truth, though is that the title of the second document makes it appear to be the services agreement, but it is in fact nothing more than an addendum to the EULA. From that document:

"BY USING OR PURCHASING RED HAT LINUX ADVANCED SERVER OR SERVICES, CUSTOMER SIGNIFIES ITS ASSENT TO THIS AGREEMENT." (emphasis added)

The second document is not, by any reading, just a service agreement. In it, the user of RHAL software agrees to be subject to audit and monetary penalties for violation of the agreement even in the absence of a services contract.

If you use RHEL, you've agreed to both documents.

Re:What, no editorial?

[adamfranco]

I just read the EULA and it specifically says,

Red Hat Linux itself is a collective work under U.S. Copyright Law. Red Hat grants you a license in this collective work pursuant to the GNU General Public License.

Nothing in the EULA says anything about not being able to copy the software.

Now, from browsing around their site I gather that what RedHat is charging for (and restricting on a per-machine basis, is a connection-to/right-to-use their update service. I wasn't able to see anything that said that you couldn't take one ISO of Advanced Server and put it on two machines. However, you would need to pay twice to be able to update both of them via RedHat's update system.

If you want to install RedHat AS and then compile all updates your self, it seems that you would be welcome to, but why then use RedHat?

This kinda actually makes sense as a business plan. If you have mission-critical servers, but not the expertise to admin them under Debian, *BSD, Gentoo, etc, buy a RedHat license and have it "just work"(TM).

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

nice, an ontopic direct reply to the article is modded down for no other reason than because it dares to criticize Der Fuhr..er, I mean Michael.

Michael should be fired.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, I see your point. (License here btw, it would help your arguments if you'd link to the supporting documents)

It still doesn't strictly break the GPL since it's referring to a combined product that's an aggregation of GPL'd software, other free software, and proprietary Red Hat images that they are allowed to restrict. BUT I'd agree that I have great reservations about the approach they're using, it's rather reminiscent of what SuSE previously did with YAST which Novell has now stopped. Also, the claim that a license leaps into force when someone uses a product is dubious at best.

Re:What, no editorial?

[mAineAc]

If it isn't a free pass where do I download the source. If it is gpl'd software I should be able to download it and change it and work with it all I want. I don't want or need support but I was just looking around and I can't find anywhere to get the sourcecode to play with. I would think that is against the gpl in and of itself. I admit I just did a cursory check for the software but I couldn't google it up anywhere.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Nugget]

Bear in mind that any user of REHEL (with or without a service agreement) is also bound to this agreement which serves as an extension to the standard EULA.

In it, the user agrees not to install RHEL on machines not covered by a service agreement and that if they are caught doing so they may be charged penalties by Red Hat.

This Red Hat Linux Advanced Server and Services Agreement (the "Agreement" is between Red Hat, Inc. ("Red Hat") and any purchaser or user ("Customer") of Red Hat Linux Advanced Server or Services (as defined below).

This text is quite clear. If you are using RHEL, you're bound by the agreement. It's not specific to their services agreement. Plus this:

BY USING OR PURCHASING RED HAT LINUX ADVANCED SERVER OR SERVICES, CUSTOMER SIGNIFIES ITS ASSENT TO THIS AGREEMENT.

It's pretty difficult to read this any way other than as it is written. If you're using RHEL, you're bound to such gems as this:

If Customer is found to have underreported the number of Installed Server by more than five percent (5%), Customer shall, in addition to the annual fee for Service per Installed Server, pay a penalty equal to twenty percent (20%) of the underreported fees.

and

If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed Servers, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed Server.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Paul Jakma]

If you would take your own advice and actually read RedHat's "EULA", which is actually not a EULA, but a subscription agreement, you might notice that Appendix 1, section 1 specifically notifies the agreeing party of their right to copy and redistribute the component software under the individual licences of much of the component software in RHEL, further RedHat is quite specific that the agreement does not restrict or limit the customer's rights in any way with respect to those rights granted by the licences of the individual component software which makes up RHEL. Indeed the preamble of Appendix actually grants the agreeing party a licence under the GPL to the collective work.

RedHat are not violating the GPL. You are allowed to copy RHEL, sans the small number of packages containing RedHat Trademarks. And RH even make this easy by seperating the Trademarked art work into seperate packages from the actual GPL'd packages which use those Trademarked images. Indeed the frupping RHEL subscription agreement even goes into detail on this in section 2 of Appendix 1. And you cant call the resulting distro RHEL or even allude to it being RHEL.

There are 0 additional restrictions placed on the RHEL user in terms of what they may do with the software components. The only thing you are not allowed to do as a RHEL subscriber is lie to RedHat about how many copies of RHEL you have installed, which relates to the support & subscription side of RHEL or copy their proprietary RHN server software (which isnt (AFAIK) part of RHEL), which is fair enough.

Whether you use RedHat or not, and you dont have to, there are plenty of linux distro's out there to choose from, you still benefit from the resources RedHat puts into bettering linux by paying people to work on it. Indeed, you can even download a free and unsupported version of a Linux distro into which RedHat invest a lot of engineering resources if you want to. Even if you dont though, you will still be benefiting from the work RedHat employees are paid to do on free Linux software. (as well as those IBM, HP, Sun, SuSe, Mandrakesoft, $whatever_corporation, etc.. etc.. employees who also are paid to work on Linux and linux related free software). If a subscription fee means RedHat can continue to work on contributing to Linux, then that is good, because we will _all_ benefit, regardless of which distro we use.

I wish the clueless "leet" kiddies would grow up, get a clue and stop the inane ill-informed RedHat-bashing, but I guess there's little hope when even long long standing members of the community (such as yourself, thanks for the bovine project ;) ) are on the bandwagon too.

Re:What, no editorial?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

You are not allowed to download updates from RHN and then apply them to machines that do not have a valid license. You may, however, download the RHEL SRPMs which are freely available on RedHat's site and update your software manually that way.

An update to a GPL program that you download via RHN is surely a derived work of the program; as such the GPL applies and Red Hat have no ability to stop you from redistributing the update.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Paul Jakma]

That agreement is essentially much the same as the RHEL agreement but less developed, RHAS is obsolete now, replaced by RHEL AS. Anyway the text quoted prohibits you from lying about how many copies of RHAS you have installed while you are covered by the subscription agreement. Which is quite reasonable for a support & update subscription service.

It does not prohibit copying. My personal opinion is that if you removed RedHat trade marked packages, in accordance with appendix 1 sections 1 and 2 of the RHEL licence, replaced them with your own image packages and called it "My Personal Advanced Linux" you could then install that on other machines without breaching the RHEL subscription agreement. But ask a solicitor first.

Even if you could not, you definitely would be able to give copies of "MPAL" to other parties, as well as individual update packages received via RHEL update channels from RH. (but dont take my word, ask a solicitor).

Re:What, no editorial?

[changelingyahoo.com]

You are absolutely correct. The updates I was referring to that you are *not* permitted to download are the binary package updates available from RHN which they are permitted to restrict (though they do make the source RPMs available for free as required by the GPL). I should have been more clear. Thanks for picking that up.

Re:What, no editorial?

[lspd]

Read the EULA. It's all there.

You link to the wrong license agreement. RedHat uses the nice license for the software, and the nasty license for the support contract. Of course, RedHat will only sell you the software with a support contract, so the support contract terms apply to anyone wanting to purchase RHEL.

The support contract plainly states: "If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement."

The end result, of course, is that you can't buy RHAS without giving up rights the GPL explicitly gives you.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they will not support your machines if you install one copy on multiple machines.

Re:What, no editorial?

[LDoggg_]

Oh ok, then you'd be using Postgres then. ;)

Postgres is a really good feature rich database. And its free.
Oracle is an incredible database. And its expensive.
Oralce is also a huge assortment of applications. Human Resources, Accounts Recievable, Accounts Payable, Inventory, General Ledger, e-commerce(iStore), appliction server, adminstration tools, etc.

We're comparing apples to oranges folks.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Mr. Slippery]

Postgres comes with support?

It's sold separately.

Re:What, no editorial?

[equiraptor]

Ah, cool. Even better. However, since everything has already been written around Oracle (before I joined the company) a change is highly unlikely.

Re:What, no editorial?

[arkanes]

Just to be clear, all that huge assortment of applications have thier own fees - you don't get them all in a bundle (well, you can, but you pay the total cost of all of them). So comparing postgre to Oracle is still fair in that sense.

Re:What, no editorial?

[arkanes]

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

That aint so bad. Support your important systems and configure the rest.

Re:What, no editorial?

[listen]

No, the updates that you were referring to are *still* derivative works of a GPL'ed work. Thus, Redhat cannot provide them to you with additional restrictions. Once you have downloaded the RPMS, you can do what you like with them.

What Redhat can and do restrict is the access to their download servers. They are not required to let you use their bandwidth.... and that is what you are paying for, along with support.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect. Redhat or any other distributor may place whatever restrictions they feel like on compiled copies of GPL software. The license applies only to the source which Redhat provides. You are paying for the ease of using pre-compiled software.

Re:What, no editorial?

[niew]

I spoke with RedHat several months ago about this issue and here's the deal. You are free to place RHEL on as many machines as you'd like without even violating your l license.

I don't think that this is correct... I hope you got it in writing from your RH contact ;)

From the RHEL FAQ on the RH site, Questions #5 and #6:

Q [#5]: How are the Red Hat Enterprise Linux products delivered, in terms of services and prices?

A: The basic delivery model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is unchanged from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux products are sold on an annual subscription basis. As mentioned above, under the terms of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage agreement, a subscription is required for every system on which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is installed.[...] (emphasis mine)

Q [#6]:You mentioned licensing - what does this mean? I thought Linux was free.

A: Except for a few components provided by third parties (for example, Java) all the code in Red Hat products is open source and licensed under the GPL (or a similar license, such as the LGPL). So you always have free access to the source code. In fact you can download it from our FTP servers at any time.[...]

Re:What, no editorial?

[changelingyahoo.com]

That's true. I even re-read one of the FAQ's on the GPL and it says that while you can charge a fee for the software the person who purchases the software is free to distribute it. So it would seem if I download the RPMs from RHN then RedHat shouldn't be able to terminate my support license because according to the GPL they're not allowed to impose additional restrictions on distribution of GPLed software. I'll have to speak to RedHat again for clarification. Thanks for pointing this out, listen.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the support license is not governed by the GPL. They can do anything they want with that license.They are not imposing additional restricitions on distribution of GPLed software. You are completely free to do anything you want with that software.Redhat has no obligation to support you though if you do.The GPL does not say that if you distribute this, you must support it for ever.

Re:What, no editorial?

[black mariah]

Uh... no.

What that paragraph states is that you CAN put the software on as many computers as you want, but if you do you're not getting any tech support from Redhat. This is the support contract, not the software contract.

Re:What, no editorial?

[black mariah]

Not neccesarily so. A derived work would have to be modified. I don't think anyone has ever called RPM's a 'derived work'.

Re:What, no editorial?

[black mariah]

http://freshmeat.net
http://sourceforge.net
http://freshrpms.net
That should tide you over.

Re:What, no editorial?

[bicho]

Which you download through their service...

Anyway, If I remember well, gpl says that if you plan to (re)distribute any modified version of a gpl'ed program, you must include the source and give the same gpl lisence, thus spreading the same rights to others.

I can't see what they might be doint against that.
It doesnt say the source must be freely availablne (except as in free with the redistributed binary). But they do.
But then, I might have given a different interpretation.

Re:What, no editorial?

[inode_buddha]

No, you pay for five copies if you want support for five copies. Somehow, I don't see that as a GPL restriction, just a business restriction.

Re:What, no editorial?

[whoever57]

My personal opinion is that if you removed RedHat trade marked packages, in accordance with appendix 1 sections 1 and 2 of the RHEL licence, replaced them with your own image packages and called it "My Personal Advanced Linux" you could then install that on other machines without breaching the RHEL subscription agreement. But ask a solicitor first.

You don't even need to go to the effort of building your own distro. It's already been done. "

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you pay for five copies if you want to run five copies. Even if you don't want support on any of them. If you don't pay for five, and redhat finds out, they'll bill you for the five plus penalties.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Maestro4k]

• How can we accept Red Hat's per-seat pricing and overbearing EULAs that allow them to audit user sites for license compliance? Why does Red Hat get a free pass from the community and from the FSF for constricting our freedom as badly as Microsoft ever has?

While I haven't paid as much attention to the whole thing as some people probably have, I've seen nothing of a "free pass" for Redhat. Ever since they announced the changes to their licensing/business people have been royally pissed and not shy about expressing that sentiment. Take me for example, like I said I've not paid too much attention to it (mostly because I was out of work in the IT field at the time), but now that I'm looking at Linux again, I'm not even considering Redhat. Whatever I use, it won't be Redhat. Currently I'm looking at Gentoo, and from my brief experience (I got started on an install Friday before I left work), I'm already pleased with it, more so than any previous version of Redhat. Take that as you wish, as for myself I think perhaps I'd outgrown the constrictions of a more general distro.

The community's not just sitting around twiddling its collective thumbs about Redhat's actions. People are actively moving away from Redhat, no longer recommending it, and spreading the word about what they think of them. Personally I think Redhat may have destroyed themselves. As Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star infamously said (slightly modified) "[They're] already dead, [they] just don't know it yet."

Re:What, no editorial?

[saden1]

Exactly...no one is forcing anyone to choose Red Hat. Like every company Red Hat responds to customer demands. If customers start going somewhere else for the their Linux solutions you'd better believe they'd change their license policy.

Re:What, no editorial?

[N3WBI3]

I think it refers to using the rhn service to track your system and update it. Redhat does have a right to do that. The statement makes no claim on restricting your ability to distribute the SRPM's they provide..

Re:What, no editorial?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, like most other large open source packages, yes it does!

Re:What, no editorial?

[It'sYerMam]

The difference of course being that there're still many different distros for you to choose from, so you're not trapped into a monopoly's software.

Fedora is still RedHat in essence, so there's no point complaining about how evil RedHat is for long - you can just nestle happily into Fedora.
The problem comes, however, in a commercial environment - those which need the support and for whom this will introduce a huge increase in costing. In this case, it's probably better to go for a less commercial distro, who's less likely to suddenly introduce new costs.

Hopefully we won't end up with the entirety of Linux being swallowed up by the corporate machine.

Re:What, no editorial?

[Cyclops]

Bzzt! You're All Wrong!

Red Hat is making support contracts where you agree to waive certain rights for the duration of the support contract in exchange for some things they will only provide through Red Hat Network.

Most of the software they include is covered eitherby the GPL or the Lesser GPL. That way they can't make distribution restrictions. What they can is charge for their service, which is to provide you with timely updates, and such. Tough luck. I'm looking more and more into WhiteBox...

Re:What, no editorial?

[Znork]

"The problem comes, however, in a commercial environment - those which need the support and for whom this will introduce a huge increase in costing."

No, not really.

Enterprise customers already should have been on the enterprise versions. The old Redhat 7.3-9.0 are pretty much exactly the same as Fedora; not very stable, rapid development, short lifecycle platforms.

If you're ok with that and want to run your enterprise systems on such a platform you even get the updates for free now.

So, Redhat has clarified that they're not taking enterprise level responsibility for those distributions, nor making enterprise level commitments to their lifetime. Well, gee, they never have. It's not a major change apart from the price drop and explicit 'not commercially supported'.

Now, if you're an enterprise customer who's been lazy and cheap and are on the old short-lifecycle products it may force you to reevaluate what you actually want. Are you ok with upgrading every year (which you technically should have been doing already, but probably tried to ignore)? Or do you want a long-term stable platform?

Sure, the long term platform costs money, but frankly I can understand that.

Many claim that the OSS community updates and releases fixes for free software, so it doesnt cost Redhat much to provide these fixes.

That's not entirely true, however. The OSS community releases fixes _for the latest available version_. That means you _have_ to upgrade or backport the fix yourself.

Redhat, on the other hand, (most often) backports and releases updates for the exact version you're already running, which makes it much better for enterprise level stability.

That kind of fix releases consumes resources, but it also gives the enterprise level sysadmin the ability to comfortably deploy patches more or less automatically, without breaking installations. A level of comfort many sysadmins have been unable to find even in the other large commercial unix vendors, and which saves an amount of work easily on the level of what the actual RedHat support contracts costs.

Re:What, no editorial?

[lspd]

What that paragraph states is that you CAN put the software on as many computers as you want, but if you do you're not getting any tech support from Redhat. This is the support contract, not the software contract.

Right, but as I already pointed out, buying the software means purchasing a support contract. Imagine if RedHat didn't make the SRPMS available to anyone who hasn't paid for RHAS. If the support contract that each of those customers has agreed to prevents them from distributing the software, then an additional restriction has been placed on the software regardless of how far down in the chain of licenses it takes to reach that point.

Re:What, no editorial?

[jmorris42]

> Does Oracle support whitebox? The last I heard, they didn't.

Of course they won't support whitebox, and I don't have a problem with that. The underlying OS is just an annoyance to Oracle, one they want to minimize the problems with to the maximum extent possible. So they want to have it 100% RHEL so any problems that pop up can be worked out by someone else, that someone else being RH. And RH won't support anything that isn't 100% their official package set. Can you really expect them to support any other setup?

Clue: If you are writing the check for Oracle and the bitchkitty machine to run it on, the pricetag for RHEL's support isn't too much to ask.

I built WhiteBox for those of us in that middle area between RHEL and Fedora, not as a replacement for either. For people who grew up on RHL, need a stable long lived distro that Fedora isn't intended to be, yet aren't doing the sort of mission critical work that would justify a support contract for RHEL.

Re:What, no editorial?

[eviltypeguy]

You'll notice I said they put restrictions on the distribution not on the software itself (which they can't really do).

I have asked RedHat about these restrictions and the key is to remove anacaonda-images and redhat-logos or something like that. It's in their trademark usage document. The point is, it's almost all GPL software and you can use it as such. You just can't use the "aggregate unmodified distribution" as you wish.

My company has several RHEL licenses, and I personally own a copy of RHEL WS and run it at home.

Re:What, no editorial?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

A 'derived work' is formed whenever you have something that is not a verbatim bit-for-bit copy of the original.

I don't think there is any doubt that an RPM is a derived work. Anyway, the point is moot since the GPL applies no matter how the software is packaged, and whether the package is modified or merely a verbatim copy.

Re:What, no editorial?

[janic]

Well, I'm probably responding to a troll but...

What RH is restricting is the use of their service, not availability to the software. They are not restricting the availability of the source, complete with their modifications (which is one of the big things the GPL is concerned about)

If you want to put those updates on your system, go download the SRPMs and run:

rpmbuild --rebuild foo.src.rpm

Really, the only thing that RH says you cannot do is rebuild and distribute any of the RPMS that have their trademarks in them.

And to kybosh the next rant, RH has gone out of their way to keep those trademarked items separate from other things and in their own packages.

Finally, if you work for one of those companies that either can't afford to by a support license, or has enough talent in house that they don't need one (the org. I work for falls into both categories) then go download whitebox.

Since they are built from the same SRPMs, they are practically the same thing, right down to the errata! (bug-compatible, if you will)

cheers!
John

Re:What, no editorial?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

No, I'm not trolling, I'm merely saying that something that is repackaging a GPL'd work is, by definition, derived from that GPL'd work and therefore is itself covered by the GPL.

Now Red Hat may have gone to great lengths to separate out the GPL'ed parts from the non-GPL'ed parts. Good for them. From what I gather they are saying that the GPL doesn't apply to the binary RPMs. For that to be true, then those RPMs cannot be derived from (or contain verbatim) a GPL'ed work. I don't know enough about how their update system works to understand how that works in practice, as its a long time since I used a Red Hat system, and even then I never used up2date.

Re:What, no editorial?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

No, that is not true. The GPL section 3:

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

Re:What, no editorial?

[janic]

Well,

The thing about binaries and the GPL that most people forget is that you are required to distribute source to anyone whom you distribute a binary to.

If you make a binary package of GPL'ed software available to three people, you are required to provide a copy of the exact source which built those binaries _to those three people_, if they ask.

The same holds true if you make your package available to five, fifty, or five thousand licencees. In all of these cases, you, as the packager (or author, or distributor) of this binary GPLd package get to decide whom to distribute your binary to. You get to impose any restrictions (price, redistribution, use, etc.) you want on the binary, as long as you provide the exact source to build those binaries to the people you distributed them to, when requested.

Now, when you look at what RH is doing, you will see that they are not even requiring people to be in the "club" which purchased binary licences (for the distro, or updates) from them in order to get a copy of the source to all of their packages. So basically, anyone with a copy of gcc and all of the SRPMs can recreate RHEL 3.0 (for example) without paying RH a cent. It is the people that don't want the hassle of compiling, and want support, who will gladly fork over money to RH.

The outcome of all of this is the realization that RH is not, in fact, selling a product, but rather, they are selling a subscription to a service which provides binary packages of GPLd stuff that you can freely download from them anyways. It is because they make their SRPMs freely available to everyone+dog that they can impose the percieved draconian licencing terms for the binary packages.

cheers!
John

Re:What, no editorial?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

If you make a binary package of GPL'ed software available to three people, you are required to provide a copy of the exact source which built those binaries _to those three people_, if they ask.

This is not correct. GPL section 3 (again) ;) :

Quote

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

a. Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

b. Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

c. Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

End quote

So, subsection (c) does not apply so Red Hat's options are either bundle the source with the binary, OR offer the source as a separate download to everyone.

Red Hat are not just being generous when they offer source downloads freely, they are doing it so that they comply with the GPL.

Presumably the 'updates' you download from Red Hat Network contain some stuff that isn't GPL'ed. The relevant parts of GPL section 2 (covering distribution and/or modification) state:

Quote

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

...

b. You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

...

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.

End quote

A 'derived work' for the purposes of copyright would also cover something like packaging the work with something else. The GPL would apply to the product as a whole. The GPL has an explicit exception for "identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves". This is what allows distributions to include non-GPL stuff on the CD for example, and my guess is this is the basis of Red Hat's licencing. I still find it dubious though.

Re:What, no editorial?

[janic]

(sigh)

RH is in compliance with section 3 because they adhere to at least one of the stipulations ("a" to be exact) as required by said section.

The comply with stipulation "a" by including CDs with source when you buy a boxed set (which is thje only way you are going to get a legally distributed binary copy from them) and by making the SRPMs available for download at the same place you can get the RPMs from. (ie: the RHN)

In other words, because they distribute the source along with their binary packages, they are in compliance with the GPL. Your original allegation is that they were not in compliance, incorrect.

Your statement in this reply was that RH only allows downloads by everyone in order to comply with the GPL, that is also incorrect. RH distributes source along with the binary whenever they distribute a binary. Therefore, they are already compliant, without having to be generous.
They let world+dog download the source to products for free that they are charging big bucks for.

Finally, though, you are correct in picking out the "distribution allowance" section when referring to non-free, third-party apps, or in this case, the items explicitly trademarked by RH. However, RH is still kind enough to let you download those items directly from them with the restriction that you may not re-distribute them.

Dubious? No. RH is a company that is actually making money using GPL "stuff" and is actively contributing back with kernel patches, bug fixes, and other little things like hiring GNOME and other project developers.

Anyways, have a happy Easter or spring equinox celebration or whatever... I shall not return to this thread as I will likely be gorged on Easter baking and other good stuff.

Cheers!
John Gunkel (RHCE)

Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a danger this Forbes troll by Daniel Lyons wouldn't get all the hits it was trolling for so Slashdot decided to help out.

At a loss....

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

i'm going to have to upgrade my machines, but am NOT going to pay $179 to do it, but can't trust the possibility of Fedora adding/removing/changing things willy-nilly (i know there's more care taken than that, but not the kind of care that will taken with Enterprise for Workstations and it's siblings). i'm not sure which distro will upgrade my RedHat installs with the least disruption. And i hate to sound like a crufty old man, but i'm used to the RH tools and don't really desire to learn the in's and out's of a new distro, but i 'spose i'll have to.

*shakes head at RedHat*

Re:At a loss....

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Gentoo and you won't look back. I left RedHat in April 2002 for Gentoo and my systems working how I want to.

Re:At a loss....

[lofoforabr]

> And i hate to sound like a crufty old man, but i'm used to the RH tools and don't really desire to learn the in's and out's of a new distro That's what leads most people to stick to what they are currently using: lazyness. If people were just looking forward to at least experimenting new things, I suppose neither MS nor RH would be acting the way they are. Well, in theory they could, but the userbase would surely get smaller. > but i 'spose i'll have to. Sorry for snipping the end of your phrase. I wish people would think like you in this respect. I see so many people complaining about either Windows bugs or RH licenses that I just cant understand. If they don't like it, why stick with it? I guess everyone deserve whatever software they use, don't we?

Re:At a loss....

[nadamsieee]

I suggest checking out the major GNU/Linux distros that use the RPM system. Mandrake looks particulary good for someone abandoning Redhat.

Of course, I use Gentoo; so this is pure speculation. ;)

Re:At a loss....

[ameoba]

If you want something Free that NEVER gets changed, why not look into Debian Stable?

Re:At a loss....

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy answer!

http://www.taolinux.org
http://www.whiteboxlinu x.org

Both are rebuilt Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 distros, free to the community, and supported with updates. And even if those projects stop doing updates, you can just download the SRPM updates from RH's site and rebuild them!

Best of all, RHEL is supported for FIVE years. Stable, polished and long-lifed, community RHEL variants are the way to go!

Re:At a loss....

[nonmaskable]

After the RH 8 - KDE (I'll be kind and call it a controversy) stuff a few years ago, I switched all our dev boxes and the beowulf to SuSE. Not much learning curve, and I think SuSE rolls a more stable system overall. So, if Novell screws up somehow...no big deal.

I would almost suggest you switch just to demonstrate to yourself how few issues there are between Distros.

Re:At a loss....

[Alan Cox]

If Red Hat support isnt worth $179 then don't buy RHEL, its as simple as that. You can grab Debian, Gentoo, RHEL clones like Whtiebox, or use Fedora.

Thats why the MS comment is so off, you have lots of choices. In fact I believe Progeny were also talking about RH9 extended support, and there is a Fedora legacy project. Probably the support quality of the volunteer projects won't be as good as RHEL or SuSE enterprise products, but there is a reason for that you can copy code for free, but support and errata testing cost real money.

As to updates. FC1 will update RH9 smoothly.

Alan

Re:At a loss....

[glop]

Also, if you do not care for support you can take RHEL and install it on several computers with as many CPUs as you wish.

As far as I understand it the restrictives terms are only about SUPPORT and not redistribution.

Re:At a loss....

[TheSunborn]

Yes, but updates are part of the support so...

Quote from license:
"Customer may not use one subscription for Services for more than one system concurrently. Any unauthorized use of the Service will be deemed to be a material breach of this Agreement."

so you lose your options to download updates if you ever patch computer while an other is still running.

Re:At a loss....

[Linker3000]

I was discussing this elsewhere recently as I have a single system running RH9 in a small business and it's mainly used for a file and print server and Intranet server.

Putting aside the issue of paying for a RHEL licence, which is not horrendous (but a little OTT considering what it costs now!), condensing the advice I was given from various sources, it seemed to boil down to this for us:

• Fedora's 'bleeding edge' might introduce unwanted hassle for us, so stay away
  
• Fedora Legacy project will provide support updates to RH9 so could we redirect yum to the right location and live with RH9 for the forseeable future
• We could migrate to Whitebox Linux to effectively get RHEL 3

I'm not a Linux newbie but I'm no way a guru either, so how does that sound to you - I'm especially wondering if Whitebox is the way to go for simplicity, but am also cautious about support levels and bug fixes - our needs are simple, but I don't want the server stuffed by a wierd quirk...and stuff on the Whitebox site about 'x' not working because 'I forgot...' is a tad unnerving!

If we part company with RH, what's the likely hassle factor of going to, say, FeeeBSD or [insert your favourite distro here]?

Ta!

Re:At a loss....

[u-235-sentinel]

I hear what you are saying. I've been looking at SuSE and Debian this last year since RH9 support was stated to be going away. SuSE 9.0 looked awesom. I was able to install across the internet just fine and install the server pieces I wanted also using YAST. I strongly recommend people to check it out. You can pay the $39/$79 or download and try it without the live eval cd.

I stuck with RedHat and purchased advanced server in the past. Now that RedHat has moved to Fedora (I'm reserving judgement on it still), I think it will be good and bad for them.

Debian was pretty good... once you were past the installer. SuSE installation was at least as nice as anything RedHat pushed out. Gentoo and other's are available with less disruption. I wish RedHat well but I feel this is the beginning of the end for them (could be wrong.. hope so).

Re:At a loss....

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for an isp and we were all red hat until their recent change. The best replacement distro we found? FreeBSD. Good documentaion, easy administration, solid system. Runs like a champ on our poweredge servers too.

Re:At a loss....

[moartea]

... but i'm used to the RH tools and don't really desire to learn the in's and out's of a new distro ...

That's why I use Slackware. Once you can configure a linux box by editing text files, you can easily switch to other distros without headeaches.

Re:At a loss....

[niew]

Also, if you do not care for support you can take RHEL and install it on several computers with as many CPUs as you wish.

As far as I understand it the restrictives terms are only about SUPPORT and not redistribution.

This isn't correct...

The RHEL binary RPMs and ISOs are distributed under a per-machine/per-year cost subscription license. You cannot (legally) install more copies than you have licenses for, irrespective of support options.

This is all fine in the eyes of the GPL, which talks about _source_ redistribution. To remain compliant RH must make the SRPMs available for download for the GPL'd software in RHEL.

This is why the RHEL clones (taolinux.org, etc...) are possible and in fact practically identical to RHEL. They have taken all the GPL SRPMs and recompiled them. The handfull of remaining RPMs are RH trademarked logos and the like. These packages get replaced by custom artwork.

Re:At a loss....

[Chilliwilli]

You say you can't trust Fedora.. is this based on an particular reports or just conjecture?

Who has upgraded to Fedora from RH9 and how have you found it? I have a RH9 box and would like to upgrade to FC2 when it comes out.. how hard will that be and what are the dangers? (Talking updates here no a full new install.. otherwise I'd have Gentoo on there already)

Re:At a loss....

[Anonymous Coward]

*ahem* Gentoo *ahem*

Re:At a loss....

[wmacgyver]

I've updated a few of my RH9 boxes to FC1, no issues that occured during the upgrade. The biggest annoynce was in FC1, the up2date out of the box doesn't have the right rpm key, easily fixed by either import the correct key or just manually update the up2date rpm. The other annoyance is up2date now takes a lot longer, unless you point it to one of the mirrors. These RH9 machines were on RH support, so I must admit, I miss the old up2date speed. Other than that, nothing else noteworthy for us. These machines are web/db servers, running apache, php, mysql, pgsql etc.

Re:At a loss....

[CoolGuySteve]

Actually, we are seriously considering moving from Redhat to Debian. If you look at the version numbers for most of the stuff in RHEL, it's all pretty old. A similar system could be built with Debian stable along with a handful of unstable and testing packages.

What you pay for with Redhat Enterprise is something that's stable, slightly older, and with automatic updating. What's the point? Debian is doing it for free and we wouldn't have to put up with this licensed 'Update Server' and 'Per CPU' shit.

Like really, they expect us to pay more because they increased the NR_CPUS value in the kernel config? Their server products just don't seem to offer much value for the price that they're charging.

I don't know, maybe their support is really awesome, but I doubt it would help much more than google unless your problems are really obscure or undiscovered bugs.

Re:At a loss....

[StandardDeviant]

Well, in their defense, RHEL also supports
things that debian currently doesn't, such
as AMD64 and other "enterprise-level" stuff.

Mind you, I say this as somebody who is in
charge of a RH-heavy shop and is currently
in the process of giving RH the finger and
moving to debian. ;)

Re:At a loss....

[Troed]

Thanks - I've asked around lots of times what to do when you have an RH9 server but no wish to change distribution. People have suggested I should upgrade to Fedora - but the Fedora Legacy project is _exactly_ what I want instead. No upgrading, I just want the security fixes ...

Again, thanks!

(I mailed Red Hat about buying a license and continue with their commercial distributions, but they couldn't bother to reply .. nice sales organisation)

Re:At a loss....

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you got open source souftware that changed your hardware willy nilly, that would be ok?

what a fucktard

Re:At a loss....

[niew]

I'm not sure why I was moderated down here... From the RHEL FAQ Questions #5 and #6

5) (...)As mentioned above, under the terms of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux usage agreement, a subscription is required for every system on which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is installed.(...)

6) Except for a few components provided by third parties (for example, Java) all the code in Red Hat products is open source and licensed under the GPL (or a similar license, such as the LGPL). So you always have free access to the source code. In fact you can download it from our FTP servers at any time (...)

Re:At a loss....

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Debian Abacus?

More seriously, Debian stable has *never* worked completely on any consumer machines less than a year old, especially on laptops. The ACPI drivers alone dictate updating to "unstable" and taking your chances.

Re:At a loss....

[Isaac-Lew]

so you lose your options to download updates if you ever patch computer while an other is still running.

Not if you download & rebuild the source rpm.

Re:At a loss....

[rawshark]

I'm going to have to upgrade my machines, but am NOT going to pay $179 to do it, but can't trust the possibility of Fedora adding/removing/changing things willy-nilly

What exactly do you mean by "adding/removing/changing things willy-nilly"???

Fedora gives you the ability (IIRC) to sync to the development branch of the latest software. You are under no obligation to do this. You are under no obligation to update to Fedora 2, 3, 5, 8, or 13.

Re:At a loss....

[williamhooper]

It's not like you can go buy a box set with RHEL WS in it for less than $100 or anything...

How many people whining have even really looked at the options instead of just repeating what they read on Slashdot.

Re:At a loss....

[Anonymous Coward]

... Then "migrate" to white box linux. It aims to be RHEL, without the proprietary markings and service support.
http://www.whiteboxlinux.org

Re:At a loss....

[discogravy]

note that debian runs on 11 architectures and RH doesn't. stable'll run on Sparc machines; RH 7.1 is the last version that does that I think (or was it 6?).

Re:At a loss....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use yum, it's so much easier than up2date. You run "yum update" and it will get all the same updates that up2date would, but it won't take all day. There's even a service in Fedora that will do it for you automatically.

Re:At a loss....

[wmacgyver]

I discovered that later on, the thing is, in a RH9 to FC1 upgrade, it won't install yum. You have to install it manually.

Re:At a loss....

[juhaz]

So if you wanted "kind of care" that is only taken with Enterprise version, why are you even running Free RHL which doesn't have that? And if you've been happy with it, why not update to Fedora?

You don't make any sense complaining that you don't whant to upgrade from non-enterprise to non-enterprise based on lack of enterprise-class care that you've never even had.

Imagine that, another inflammatory Forbes story

[SiChemist]

What does Forbes have against Linux, anyway?

Re:Imagine that, another inflammatory Forbes story

[Anonymous Coward]

Forbes as a whole doesn't. Daniel Lyons does. I don't know why. Some people compare him with Laura Didio or with Robert Enderle but that doesn't seem accurate; Didio is a dupe, Enderle is a professional troll out to get page hits for his articles, Lyons does seem to be inspired by deep seated feelings of spite towards users of Linux and/or free software. This article was mild by his standards, but you can still see it there. Try Googling for some of his other Linux related stuff if you don't believe my overall assessment.

Re:Imagine that, another inflammatory Forbes story

[gilesjuk]

I like the sentence about Linux an being imitation (of Windows) and that he'd rather pay for Windows and get innovation. What is he smoking?

Linux had a kernel HTTP acceleration before Windows did (Windows 2003 adds kernel IIS acceleration). Apache doesn't imitate IIS, Perl doesn't imitate VB etc..etc..

Re:Imagine that, another inflammatory Forbes story

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the sentence about Linux an being imitation (of Windows)

Really? I remember this guy in comp.os.minix saying "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." He really hinted heavily that he was imitating Unix. But what would the hobbyist in question know about Linux anyway?

Re:Imagine that, another inflammatory Forbes story

[gilesjuk]

Well I'm not on about Linus, I'm on about Rick Carey.

Re:Imagine that, another inflammatory Forbes story

[strobert]

I think he is smoking the good old forbes crack. Forbes seems to be a Microsoft front on a lot of things.

Basically to sum up the article: Lyons (the forbes writer) and Carey (the "liunx example user" in the article) beleive the typical Microsoft marketing line. Micorsoft == Innovation. nobidy else innovates.

As you metnioned that is a big joke. Shoot a lot of "microsoft's" good ideas over the years they bought from somebody else. so ther are not innovating nearly as much as they like to say they are.

not to mention he (Carey) really isn't familiar with Open Source and Linux if he thinks it is about imitation. So why is it then that things like apache and rsync are getting windows ports and things like cygwin and Microsoft's own sservices for Unix (SFU) exist?

"Red Hat reminds everyone"

[Jahf]

You call that a reminder? I call ridiculous.

I have an RHN account at work. It's never had a machine registered to it because we ran out of licenses for RHEL3 before I got mine test machine running.

That means I've never registered a RH9 machine with RHN ... but I have gotten more than 10 identical notices about Red Hat's EOL of RH9.

I notified their postmaster, but honestly who checks their postmaster account? Not Red Hat apparently as my work mail had more notices today.

Re:"Red Hat reminds everyone"

[AKnightCowboy]

I notified their postmaster, but honestly who checks their postmaster account? Not Red Hat apparently as my work mail had more notices today.

How many times do you have to be kicked in the nuts before you buy a cup? Just filter them to the trash.

Forbes is optimistic

[Gwala]

Forbes seems rather optimistic about linux - just take a look at their 'linux at work' sidebox.

Linux Loyalists Leery

- IBM Refuses To Indemnify Linux Users
- Red Hat's Mad Matt Vs. Humongous SCO Lawsuit
- IBM Takes Linux To A New Level
- Why You Won't Be Getting A Linux PC
- The Limitations Of Linux
- Boies' Take On Linux
- PeopleSoft Jumps On The Linux Train
- Oracle's Linux Lineup
- The Cult Of Linux

Re:Forbes is optimistic

[the gnat]

Dan Lyons (the author of the linked column) is also the same guy who wrote a rambling, incoherent article describing Linux users as naive, idealistic hippies, constantly referring to them as "Linux crunchies." And the crack editing team at Forbes saw fit to publish it. How does a publication that purports to cover the business world manage to be so out of touch with it?

Worried about Paying Anything!

[Herkum01]

Talk about a bunch of BS. RedHat wants to charge for support for the OS. Now Carey does not want to buy Linux but would rather go with Windows. So pay Microsoft for a license and then hire your staff for support to address the problems that Microsoft did not fix. Or use Linux and pay Redhat to support the OS and not pay any licenses, or not pay RedHat and hire your own staff. Either way you are not paying for a license to Redhat and you are paying for support for both products so it seems like Linux is still a winner.

Re:Worried about Paying Anything!

[Stinking Pig]

I'm sorry, but "Support" is a bag full of shit, regardless of who is selling it to you. I'd rather buy the license and be done with it.

Re:Worried about Paying Anything!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Support", in this case, is back-ported security fixes.

Michael ....

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Michael, for the most part, is a crappy editor. Now, hold on before you get all in an uproar. His story choices are out of sync with most of the other Slashdot staff and a good deal of /. readers; the guy is a moron.

And yes, RH is moving more towards this "subscription based" model....if you want upgrades and patches anyway. Sure, you could do it yourself, but the RH Network has been one of the main drawing points due to its ease of use. i know they have to charge for that service, but i still want a *real* version of RedHat for download, NOT this Fedora testbed nonsense.

Re:Michael ....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice. And it's perfectly reasonable for you to choose not to use Red Hat / not to advise others to use Red Hat / to predict that Red Hat's policies will hurt their business, if you so believe.

The only problem is that there seem to be a great many IDIOTS out there who think that this means that Red Hat is infringing the GPL. It isn't. Or that they have somehow betrayed someone. They haven't. If this doesn't apply to you then my apologies for subjecting you to this rant, but we're going to see plenty of those people in this thread.

Re:Michael ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously Michael should have been fired a long time ago, or alternatively, given his own section in Slashdot named "Leftist politics for nerds, Stuff that matters to Michael".

No wonder OSDN is getting very nervous about the shrinking advertising dollars that are coming in. Get rid of Michael and things might improve.

Re:Michael ....

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that OSDN needs dedicated personnel to spend all day censoring trolls and so on. Any normal person would quit this job after two weeks, so you need someone who is a real committed nazi who do it out of love. In short, it would be tough to replace Michael.

Can't recommend RHAT to customers these days...

[morelife]

The job used to be having to explaing OSS and Linux, sell it, and if they wanted Red Hat, fine. It was the least of your worries.

Red Hat is now three separate moving targets:

fedora
rhel
rh9

Present that to a business person and they just say... "Thank you. Next".

Re:Can't recommend RHAT to customers these days...

[AKnightCowboy]

Red Hat is now three separate moving targets: fedora
rhel
rh9

Not really. RH9 is irrelevent next month and I think it's been made pretty obvious that Fedora is the unstable beta development branch that feeds into RHEL and you use it at your own risk with zero support. Red Hat's only product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you're a home user then they're pretty much telling you to go use some other distribution. Mandrake would be the most logical choice for former home Red Hat users, but they should give Debian a try as well.

With all that in mind, our group decided to stick with Red Hat and purchased the 20 WS licenses and a couple ES licenses for our machines. I can't say I'm particularly impressed with RHEL so far. The lack of packages that used to even be in RH 9 is amazing. They don't even include xcdroast anymore so I'm kind of at a loss as to how I'm going to burn CDs until I can get it to compile from source (I'm having trouble with that for some reason). I also love how they leave out several packages like dhcp and openldap-servers from WS and expect you to buy the much much more expensive ES brand to get them. Not a big deal since you can still just download the server packages you need from the ES channel, although it probably won't auto-update through RHN. All-in-all, an incredibly lackluster product. If we didn't insist on "commercial support" I'd have just went with Debian.

Re:Can't recommend RHAT to customers these days...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

If you're a home user then they're pretty much telling you to go use some other distribution.

Yes and no. RHEL can be downloaded, but of course you pay for support. I think that RH decided that the idea the Linux Home User just was not going to happen, that Microsoft has the Home User sewn up. Personally, I think it's a great disappointment, and will come back to bite Red Hat.

With all due respect to all the various boutique distros (*BSD, Mandrake, Slackware, Debian, and so on...), at this point, for the home user (sorry, I know a lot of "home users" and most of them would be offended by this "Joe Six-Pack" shit, even though they admit they are computer illiterate), a distro supported by real flesh and blood company (for example, Novell / SuSE) is the one that will win.

Re:Can't recommend RHAT to customers these days...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. RH9 is irrelevent next month and I think it's been made pretty obvious that Fedora is the unstable beta development branch that feeds into RHEL

Only thing that has made that "obvious" are your delusions.

Fedora is a successor to RHL line and just as stable, RHL was also feeding to RHEL, did you consider it unstable beta because of that? No? Why Fedora is, then because it does the same.

Re:Can't recommend RHAT to customers these days...

[AKnightCowboy]

Fedora is a successor to RHL line and just as stable, RHL was also feeding to RHEL, did you consider it unstable beta because of that?

Yes, yes I did. RHL was unstable garbage. RHL 9 was the worst of the releases I have ever encountered. Various things broke because of their new threading library (which they seem to have fixed in RHEL 3.0 thank god). The DB4 packages were broken, pam_radius_auth wouldn't work without segfaulting under the new libraries, etc. RH 8 and below, Solaris, and every other Linux distribution I tried were all fine with the stuff I'm bitching about.

Cost of switching distributions?

[Coryoth]

They claim the cost of switching ditributions is very high, potentially involving rewriting a lot of code that you had written that may have taken advantage of features of the particular distribution.

That one strikes me as a little odd - I've been pretty distribution agnostic myself, and never really had any problems moving from one to another. At worst you can just install a few extra packages to cover some version differences. Then again, I'm a single user - I'm not trying to maintain an enterprise wide system, nor do I really have any experience with such things.

So, my question is, how big are the costs of an enterprise changing distributions? I can certainly understand some significant cost (potential retraining, reorgansing the system a little to work with any new structures) but I can't quite imagine it being that high. If I had to guess, I would imagine it not being overly different from say, upgrading from Windows2k to WindowsXP or some such.

Can someone with some experience in this provide some insight?

Jedidiah.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[tftp]

The differences between RH9 and SuSE 9 are significant, mostly in installation and maintenance area. The up2date is completely different, and you can run your own. Printers are done differently somewhat. Even /etc/rc.d tree is different. In a large company, such as with 100 boxes, this may be a problem - but not an insurmountable one.

The pain of migration from Win2k to WinXP... nobody in his right mind would do that. Win2k is the best OS that MS ever came up with. But if you insist, that migration would be pretty much automatic.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[alienw]

Keep in mind that switching windows versions is quite painful. Except that microsoft actually provides some support for upgrades, unlike most linux vendors.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[Herkum01]

I am willing to beat that you can always get support for an older Linux system, though you may have to pay for it. You cannot get support for a old Windows system whether you want or not.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[0racle]

What they're complaining about is writing to specifics, and then for some reason expecting those specifics to be in every other distro.

For instance, lets say I write something to run on Debian specifically. This app requires a init script as the system boots, so it is hard coded into the app to write the script to /etc/init.d and links in the /etc/rc#.d directories. I then go ahead say that this is written for "Linux" and distribute it. One of my clients runs Slackware, where the SysV style init scripts are in /etc/rc.d/init.d so my hard coded app that was written for "Linux" now only works on Debain because I wrote for a Debain specific setup.

The reaction should be, write it in a more neutral way, not whine that I wrote for a specific feature that surprise, surprise, doesn't exist on another distro.

What made me laugh about this is that its no different then any other OS, I write something for Windows its not going to work straight across on Solaris, or write for *BSD and it wont run on OS X.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[nonmaskable]

Based on my experience switching from RH to SuSE at RH8, I would say it's crap. I had to change perhaps 5 lines in various admin scripts in our beowulf.

None of the C/C++/Java code changed at all.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[Coryoth]

The differences between RH9 and SuSE 9 are significant, mostly in installation and maintenance area. The up2date is completely different, and you can run your own. Printers are done differently somewhat. Even /etc/rc.d tree is different. In a large company, such as with 100 boxes, this may be a problem - but not an insurmountable one.

Thanks, that's the sort of summary I was looking for, and was pretty much my understanding. Yes, there are some significant differences, but nothing too challenging. Unless you have a huge number of admin scripts that use a lot of harcoded paths, mostly it would seem to be a matter of learning how the new distro does things, and setting everything up according to their style - and that isn't too big a leap if your familiar wnough with UNIX.

I guess this just means: Don't write too many scripts that have hardcoded expectations of where to find things - and that's not especially difficult.

The pain of migration from Win2k to WinXP... nobody in his right mind would do that. Win2k is the best OS that MS ever came up with.

Sorry, I haven't used MS since Win2k first came out, so I was randomly guessing at versions :-)

Jedidiah.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[Stinking Pig]

1) the speed of change is very rapid and all the distros don't make the same decisions about following that change. Glibc, the kernel, and gcc are the big ones, but everything introduces possible incompatibilities. I've spent some delightful time diagnosing NPTL changes that broke my last companies' app on RHEL3, but nothing else. It's arguable that the old behavior was broken and eventually all distributions would come along to the same change, but the immediate effect is "RHEL 3 breaks my app." That sort of thing could happen going from any distro to any distro, depending on the cleanliness of your code.

2) Most inhouse code is not so clean. It's not uncommon for scripts to look for /etc/redhat-release, use hardcoded paths, and otherwise make bad decisions. This is particularly true when the code was one of the company's first few Unix projects; they're coming from Windows and they don't understand the environment.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[Bake]

Actually, according to the Linux Standard Base, the proper place IS /etc/init.d.

Write your app according to the LSB and you should be safe.

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[Anonymous Coward]

What made me laugh about this is that its no different then any other OS, I write something for Windows its not going to work straight across on Solaris

This is quite disingenuous. You are saying that completely different operating systems having compatability issues is the same as different flavors of linux having compatability issues.

Or are you saying that 'porting' from Debian to Slackware is as involved as porting an MFC program to Solaris? (which would certainly be sad, but I don't think very true...)

Re:Cost of switching distributions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. It is more like writing something for XP Home, and having it not work on XP Pro, or vice-versa, or NT Workstation vs. NT Server, Win2K Pro vs. Win2k Server vs Win2k Adv. Server vs Win2K Data Center, etc.

Even though the labels are different between the linux Distros, there is just too much more in common between them than between any Windows and Solaris (or any other flavor of {li|u}nix).

RedHat not for the SMB market

[codepunk]

We want to make sure that we do focus on the SMB (small/medium business) market.

I have a Red Hat certification but I am unable to install it anywhere. I get install jobs because of the price and they priced themselves completely out of the SMB
market.

When I bid a job against the local MS junk pushers I under cut them typically by as much as one tenth the cost. Red Hat is way to costly in this cut throat environment to compete with small business server so I don't even consider it.

Re:RedHat not for the SMB market

[Albanach]

Red Hat is way to costly in this cut throat environment to compete with small business server so I don't even consider it.

redhat Server costs $350 a year and can be compared to, say, Microsoft Small Busines Server which is a snip at $1,250. Yet MS shops are undercutting you?

Re:RedHat not for the SMB market

[subsolar2]

redhat Server costs $350 a year and can be compared to, say, Microsoft Small Busines Server which is a snip at $1,250. Yet MS shops are undercutting you?

With microsoft you supposedly are paying for the life of the product. In a small office it probably can be cheaper to pay $1250 once than to pay $350/Yr for RHEL. If you talking about just file and print serving for a small office (5-10 people) then MS is cheaper after two years.

If the price was $350 for the life of the product or even $600 it would not be a problem. I do have an issue with what I feel is leasing software which is in effect what RH is doing.

Re:RedHat not for the SMB market

[sheldon]

They changed the pricing model with SBS 2003.

There is a Standard edition which just has Windows Server and Exchange. It's about $500.

The Premium edition which includes SQL Server and ISA Server costs $1200.

As the other person responded, Microsoft only charges you once for the software and then self-serve support and updates are free. That's not the position Redhat has taken, where security patches and other updates are only available now to people who pay the year subscription. So you are forced to pay for the software again each year.

Other possibilities

[negyvenot]

Since Red Hat is open source, you have at least the following choises: Cent OS, and Tao Linux. Both being clones of RHEL.

Re:Other possibilities

[IO ERROR]

There's also White Box. Someone explain to me why there are THREE separate RHEL clone projects? Shouldn't these merge? Since they're pretty much doing exactly the same thing?

Re:Other possibilities

[bmarklein]

There are four - you forgot Lineox.

Re:Other possibilities

[jmorris42]

> Someone explain to me why there are THREE separate RHEL clone
> projects?

Slightly different focus.

Whitebox aims to be a pure play clone of RHEL, period. Yum was brought in to replace RHN because there wasn't a choice, being as RHN is what RH charges for. But beyond that and trademark removal it aims to track RHEL bug for bug. For example, binary kernel modules compiled against RHEL3 load into the WBEL kernel without errors or warnings and if an update broke that I'd consider it a bug.

Tao is RHEL with apt instead of yum and, I think, a few additional packages as well.

CentOS, I'm still trying to get a grip on exactly what they are about. Whatever their goals are, one thing is clear; they are thinking big and the rebuild portion of their project appears to be more like a stopgap measure on the way to forking their own distro. And hey, Mandrake started off the same way so more power to em.

Lineox is a commercial effort, nuff said.

Gentoo

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

i have used Gentoo on Sun Blade 150's and i have to say the Gentoo documentation and extremely helpful #gentoo-sparc channel are by far the best i've seen in the Linux community. i'm still looking at Gentoo for my machines; reading and watching about the stability of options and package inclusions....mainly feeling out the stability.

Redhat is still around?

[mao che minh]

The future of Linux lies with Suse/Novell and IBM.

Novell has Ximian for its connectors (that means ZENworks for Linux is on the way), a solid distribution to integrate their tools with and run their services (like eDirectory) on, and GroupWise for productivity - which is already mature. In other words, Novell has the future of Linux on the corporate desktop locked, and is poised to make Linux easily managed in the low end server market with their already existing tools and directories.

It is only a matter of time before IBM stops relying on Redhat as a partner, and instead chooses Novell/Suse or their own Linux distro.

Redhat is pretty much over. I stopped caring about them after they released Fedora.

Re:Redhat is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the future of Linux lies with Novell, you better bend over and grease up.

Re:Redhat is still around?

[JoeBuck]

SuSE and IBM would have nothing to sell if they had to take out Red Hat's contributions, and would not be able to effectively take over if all the maintainers of vital Linux and GNU components being paid by Red Hat were to disappear.

I am often irritated by Red Hat, but I never make the mistake of thinking that we can do without them.

Novell has nothing "locked", as their contributions are GPLed just like Red Hat's.

Re:Redhat is still around?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yeah, those massive contracts with HUGE companies such as Shell are meaningless, eh? Just because RH doesn't have much of a home desktop presence, doesn't mean you can dismiss them. In the corporate world they're massive.

No offence, but you sound a bit like a leprotard.

$179? No problem.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

i'm going to have to upgrade my machines, but am NOT going to pay $179 to do it

I don't see any particular problem with paying for software I need and $179 really isn't that much. I'll end up paying it one way or the other to RH or Novell (SuSE). No, I have NO intention of moving to some boutique distro that requires a Linux Guru to manage.

By the way, I don't quite understand why people that will pay $200 plus on an iPod, big cash in the latest game toy / case mod / whoop-dee-doo / sushi bar excess, why $179 for an OS is a proble.

Re:$179? No problem.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Yeah, and you aren't a student right now are you? $200 will be change later on in life for me, but not at this time. Consider other situations before running your mouth.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Stinking Pig]

Most other Linux distributions are actually much easier to manage than Red Hat and require less of a Linux Guru. The lack of dependency management is crippling when you're used to something better.

With regard to cost, were we discussing buying an iPod for every desktop in your company? If not, I must be confused. I do pay for my Linux distro ($120/year Mandrake Club), but I'd think long and hard before dropping that number * servers or workstation seats.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Yeah, and you aren't a student right now are you? $200 will be change later on in life for me, but not at this time. Consider other situations before running your mouth.Of course $179 is a bit for a student (although that does not seem to prevent "students" from purchasing iPods). For a business, even a small one, it's not a lot as far as the cost of business.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Albanach]

Yeah, and you aren't a student right now are you? $200 will be change later on in life for me, but not at this time. Consider other situations before running your mouth.

Redhat and SuSE both offer discounts to students.

Redhat

SuSE

Prices start at $25. Consider those facts before running your mouth.

Re:$179? No problem.

[TheSunborn]

The problem is that the 179$ is an Annual Subscription. My os install typical last 4 years, so the price for a redhat workstation would be 716$ and the price for Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 1576$.

So with the current pricing installing windows would be cheeper.

Martin

Re:$179? No problem.

[_Sprocket_]

By the way, I don't quite understand why people that will pay $200 plus on an iPod, big cash in the latest game toy / case mod / whoop-dee-doo / sushi bar excess, why $179 for an OS is a proble.

I'm not aware of too many businesses that purchase iPods for all their employees. Or outfit their serverfarm with iPods.

The point isn't a single $179 purchase. It is $179 times the number of systems (or processsors) invovled. It adds up - and quickly.

But wait a sec - it's not just $179. It is $179 plus the cost of overhead for managing licenses. Plus the cost of project management overhead for aquiring licenses if, for some reason, a target dev box didn't come with RH Enterprise Linux and you have to expand your licenses (which may or may not present an obsticle in your environment - it does in mine even though our IT budget is in the millions... its all red tape).

Not that this is an issue for everyone. I'm sure most enterprise-level environments can handle it (mine included if I plan for it properly). But this is certainly less trivial than comparing the license to an iPod implies.

Re:$179? No problem.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

i was about to thank you for your help, but that last line kinda ruins it. Thanks for the help, but not for being a tool.

Re:$179? No problem.

[JPriest]

Because they will quit supporting it and make you upgrade for another $179 a year from now. That is $360/2 years. You can pick up an EOM copy of XP pro for about $125

Re:$179? No problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see any particular problem with paying for software I need and $179 really isn't that much.

My issue isn't that I can't/won't pay $179.00 for software. My problem is that RedHat is charging $179.00 (and considerably more for other varients) for software that others write. Yes, it's technically for support...but the way they've got it structured makes it awfully similar to a license model. I know I can download the source RPM's. But why would I want to do that? Wasn't the idea behind a distribution to avoid having to build a Linux system piece by piece?

Re:$179? No problem.

[Jerk City Troll]

I don't see any particular problem with paying for software I need and $179 really isn't that much.

That is an outrageous price when talking about software that is both Free and free. I can see paying that much for support services, but not for the actual software itself. Given that you cannot download RedHat Enterprise for free, you aren't paying for support.

No, I have NO intention of moving to some boutique distro that requires a Linux Guru to manage.

All systems require some degree of competence and understanding to setup and administer correctly. If you aren't afraid of learning new skills and expanding your knowledge, I would highly recommend Debian as an alternative. It is really the easiest distro to maintain. In addition, it will always be free and never chock full of much of the annoying crap many distros like SuSE and Mandrake throw in (silly logos, hyperactive themes, silly tools that pretend to do something useful, etc).

I don't quite understand why people that will pay $200 plus on an iPod, big cash in the latest game toy / case mod / whoop-dee-doo / sushi bar excess, why $179 for an OS is a proble.

Probably has something to do with the fact that when you're buying software, you're actually just buying a piece of plastic and aluminum with a certain configuration of bumps on it. And even then, you really don't own anything, you're really just renting or borrowing. You cannot even sell it.

If you buy and iPod, you actually own it. It is yours. You can take it apart, you can smash it, and it has value with you can recoup.

It's really not all that subtle of a distinction.

Re:$179? No problem.

[poofyhairguy82]

Its not that software is not worth such an investment, its just that a product must stay in the price range of its competition for it to be worth it. Even down here in Texas where people will get in fights over brands of trucks, I'm sure the diehard Ford/Chevy/Dodge loyalists would stop buying their favorite brand of truck if it was $10000 more than a comparible model. With nothing to compare to $179 dollars for Redhat isn't that much. But when you consider joining the Mandrake Club costs $120 and SuSE costs $89.95 you see that Redhat's price IS too much.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can *can* download RH Enterprise for free. Have a look at their website sometime.

Re:$179? No problem.

[mousse-man]

It's not the 179$ who are the problem.I pay probably quite a few bucks more to maintain a Solaris 9 machine in my house.

I'm from the 'proprietary Unix' crowd, mainly AIX (due to the fact that it runs everything I need on rather big iron).

I ran from Windows 6 years ago. I'm on one hand a Machead at heart, on the other I like to have a flexible OS, and if possible for free. Since RedHat won't add things like an MP3 player, or for that instance, a player that will play encrypted DVDs, I switched to Mandrake on the desktop side, never to look back (on the server side, at least here at home, I run a combination of Linux and Solaris). If RedHat offered me all these features, and some more stuff that would normally be on the page of the Penguin Liberation Front, I'd have stayed with RH.

If I do not have this flexibilty on desktop operating systems, they're gone from my private machine. This includes Windows, BTW.

Re:$179? No problem.

[epiphani]

Why? Because almost everything Redhat packages is free. There is no reason I should pay $179 USD for a product that should essentially be without cost. The only way that expense can be lagitimized is by calling it a support cost. And from what I've heard from friends with Redhat support contracts, the tech support blows.

Re:$179? No problem.

[God! Awful 2]

You're a student? How much is your tuition? And how did you afford to buy a computer in the first place?

-a

Re:$179? No problem.

[Haeleth]

Because almost everything Redhat packages is free. There is no reason I should pay $179 USD for a product that should essentially be without cost.

If the $179 isn't paying for anything, then use Fedora; if Fedora isn't good enough, then the $179 must be paying for something worth having. You can't have it both ways.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Bull999999]

That doesn't prevent students from buying games and gaming machines.

Re:$179? No problem.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Correct. i am a student. Good to see you picked up on that. As for the computer, i guess you are not a student...at least not of logical thinking anyway. The computer was a gift. So what is that you were asking? Oh, you're done now? Glad to hear it. Calm down, son.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Actually, even the Evil Micro$oft has sweet deals for students. For example, back in the dtudent days, I bought VisualStudio for a sweet $35. Truthfully, got to wonder about a "student" who's never been to the "Student Store" and obtained the in-your-face-out there "student discounts". Of course some "students" don't need to buy software, what with wherez and p2p, 'cuz you know software's got to be free as in beer, blaw, blaw, blaw...

Re:$179? No problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right Karl, he's a tool, but no point in mentioning it on /. Trust the moderations system. By you replying with your name instead of as an anonymous comment, you are actually lenging your support to his comment.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. Each release is going to be supported for five years, and upgrades are free with your support contract. Of course, you're always free to download the source and build like WhiteBox does.

Based on RedHat's current and past behavior, I really don't see a problem. I'd be much more concerned about Novell taking this path based on their track record of using closed components in their products.

Re:$179? No problem.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

Nice use of "quotation marks" there. Well done. Secondly, i have purchased software from our computer store, Visual Studio .Net, Borland, Office, etc. No RedHat boxed sets in there, genius. But thanks anyway, son.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Blaw, blaw, blaw, yap, yap, yap.... Enjoying you "free-as-in-stolen-as-in-a-mile-from-fair-use" music today?

Re:$179? No problem.

[GigsVT]

The $179 doesn't get you any support.

It only gets you updates.

Re:$179? No problem.

[GigsVT]

It's worth having, but it's worth having for the $60 a year it used to be. The thing worth having is the updates. The $179 doesn't get you any support, period. Only updates.

Re:$179? No problem.

[God! Awful 2]

When I was a 1st year student, my tuition cost $2,500, my dorm cost $3,000, my books cost $600, and my computer cost $4,500. Computers may be cheaper now, but the others probably cost more. $179 was a fair chunk of change for me then, but it wouldn't exactly break my wallet. I think I spent about that much to buy Borland/Turbo C++.

-a

Re:$179? No problem.

[Pros_n_Cons]

Novell has nothing "locked", as their contributions are GPLed just like Red Hat's.


I think he ment the lock-in from e-directory.

Re:$179? No problem.

[JumboMessiah]

Well, I don't know about you, but the university I'm affiliated with is in talks with RedHat right now about that issue. The deal is this, for ~3k a year we will license the RedHat proxy server. Which, more or less, is a private mirror of their distribution server (ES, AS, WS, and errata updates). Students, faculty, and staff will have free access to the server to install WS on all their personal platforms.

Any university owned equipment (lab workstations, servers, etc.) will also feed off the central proxy/distribution server but will operate on a separately negotiated license.

So for you as a student, this will give you a free copy of WS to put on any number of computers (non university owned) you wish and entitles you to all the updates while you attend. It even gets you access to a private mirror so you don't have to contend with others on the public servers.

As for uni wide costs, this is chump change. The savings in labor, expertise, and steep discount being offered on the university owned equipment licenses make this very attractive. We know that two years from now, our installed base of workstations and servers will still be able to easily get its hands on the latest SSL/SSH/errata of the month.

When we think of support, we think of the 1000s of lab workstations and servers. We also have to keep in mind the folks who keep them patched and up to date. Which, in a lot of circumstances, are student employees who will be gone in a year or so. It saves for us to implement a patch process that is easy to understand and has guarantees attached to it.

We pay Sun and MS the same for the same ability on their products. We can't afford to have some guru create an install base off a distribution that we can't be assured will offer timely errata updates and/or upgrate paths. We gladely pay to have that capability. And in the process give back to the community through RedHat's contributions to Linux.

Gentoo, Debian, and White Box are all fine distributions. But we can't assume the risk of having to stand in front of a board explaining how a 1000 computers got rooted and started pumping out spam to the world. Especially because we chose a distribution that lost funding or interest and couldn't supply errate updates or easy upgrade paths.

FYI, I'm just hoping to give a perspective from the other side of the fence. We are RedHat's target market and are investigating it just like we've investigated other avenues.

Re:$179? No problem.

[ZaMoose]

It's not $179 per seat at volume. RedHat does volume discounts (I believe they even start to kick in around 5 seats).

It's not a straight line function. You'll pay less per copy as you increment the number of copies.

Pretty standard "enterprise" (*shudder*) licensing.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Brandybuck]

FreeBSD offers deep discounts to students as well. Last I checked (five minutes ago) it was zero dollars and zero cents. Commercial users will, unfortunately, have to pay twice as much.

(shrink wrap and box are sold separately)

Re:$179? No problem.

[SwellJoe]

The lack of dependency management is crippling when you're used to something better.

Yes, a lack of dependency management is crippling. But Red Hat (and Fedora) have dependency management. I'm not sure where you would have gotten the notion that it didn't.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Ed Avis]

The thing is, there's nothing particularly to recommend Red Hat. It's an okay GNU/Linux distribution, but so are Debian, Slackware and Mandrake. The main reason to use Red Hat used to be that it was the most popular. If you wanted to make your application available to the largest number of users, or take advantage of applications others had packaged, it was slightly easier to use Red Hat than another distribution. It usually made sense to follow Red Hat's conventions for file locations and GUI standards. If you don't have a strong reason to choose otherwise, go with the de facto market leader.

But now, Red Hat is just one distribution out of many, not necessarily the best, and certainly one of the most expensive. Fedora is okay, but it no longer has the magic touch of being _the_ distribution most commonly supported, from the desktop right up to high-end servers. It too is just another distro.

So while I might have paid $179 for Red Hat back when it was freely downloadable and popular, now that it costs $179 it is no longer worth the money.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Stinking Pig]

Maybe I should say working dependency management or defined what I mean by dependency management :-) RPM does let you know that foo-1.2 needs bar > 8.0 and baz == 0.9423. You need some extra toolkit to then go dowload the proper versions of bar and baz, plus any dependencies that they bring along. Debian, ports (as implemented in *BSD or Gentoo), and Mandrake's urpmi are examples of this in action. It's my understanding that yum is supposed to do this as well, but I haven't seen it working and I haven't seen it in a server room.

I've worked with every RH version from 5.2 to 9 as well as ES2.1 and EL3. I've used up2date and yum, both with poor results (usually related to rhn_register failing to contact the registration server so that I can register the product). I've tried to use apt4rpm a few times, but was always stymied by mirror problems. Maybe these were all mirror problems and I'm just unlucky, but the end result is that most every RH box I've seen in the past few years uses source installations for its production work, obviating the value of the RPM database for things like filesystem verification and dependency checking.

I haven't used Fedora as the customer surveys we did showed about 0.0% interest in using it. Those customer surveys are interesting in themselves, as they indicate very few of our ~500 linux-using customers intend to upgrade from their existing RH installs at all -- the bulk of which are 7.x. If it ain't broke, why fix it, and if it mostly works then it ain't broke.

I hope that yum is up to the level of urpmi or can get there as it means better security for everyone .

Re:$179? No problem.

[SwellJoe]

I've worked with every RH version from 5.2 to 9 as well as ES2.1 and EL3. I've used up2date and yum, both with poor results (usually related to rhn_register failing to contact the registration server so that I can register the product). I've tried to use apt4rpm a few times, but was always stymied by mirror problems. Maybe these were all mirror problems and I'm just unlucky, but the end result is that most every RH box I've seen in the past few years uses source installations for its production work, obviating the value of the RPM database for things like filesystem verification and dependency checking.

I have not seen this problem with yum or up2date. The Fedora mirrors have been exceedingly overworked lately, but that's no fault of yum or up2date--merely an indicator of popularity of the distro. The Red Hat up2date repository for paying clients always work well. For Fedora we run our own mirrored yum repository, and have zero problems.

Use of source installations for production work is just foolishness on the part of the folks maintaining the installations you've seen, and has nothing to do with any lack in the dependency management provided by Red Hat or Fedora.

up2date and yum both run fine on Red Hat versions going all the way back to version 6.2...though there are no repositories for versions quite that old.

apt-get has always worked fine for me on my desktop system (I use it for the CCRMA audio packages), though I much prefer yum. Overworked mirrors are just a fact of life in a world where there are a lot more takers than givers...but, unless you're paying for the service, I don't think there's much point in complaining.

Re:$179? No problem.

[jdavidb]

When exactly is $200 going to be change for me? I've been at my job for six years, had my degree for four, almost have my masters, survived all my company's layoffs, and just got a raise, but $200 is still a major purchase I have to think about for awhile. Heck, I have to think about the $10 purchases, because they add up.

When am I going to finally be able to spend money like water?

Re:$179? No problem.

[Stinking Pig]

What makes you think that service wasn't paid for? I did mention the EL and ES, correct?

Anyway, I'm sure you're probably right as rain and these pesky memories and experiences will probably quit bothering me in a little while. In the meantime, we can still agree that no matter the distribution, no matter the OS, there are thousands of administrators out there who do it wrong.

Re:$179? No problem.

[Jerk City Troll]

Can *can* download RH Enterprise for free. Have a look at their website sometime.

Oh? Where at?.

To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a quick post: those of you bashing Red Hat for various reasons, consider this:

1) They release all their config tools under the GPL
2) They contribute to the kernel, GCC, glibc, XFree86, GNOME, OpenOffice.org and other projects
3) They're standing up and fighting SCO

Hey, I'm not too happy about the whole RH-to-Fedora business, but Red Hat as a company deserves huge respect. Without its help and funding, Linux would not be progressing so fast.

Go back to the days of GCC 2.7.x, XFree86 3.3 etc. to see what I mean...

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[BubbleNOP]

They also provide Cygwin. What does "ability to distribute customer's applications without being bound by the GPL" mean? Is this gem the reason they were surprised by Richard Stallman's words?

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[Anonymous Coward]

[...]Red Hat as a company deserves huge respect. Without its help and funding, Linux would not be progressing so fast.

Go back to the days of GCC 2.7.x, XFree86 3.3 etc. to see what I mean...

Or just install debian stable ;-)

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[Tet]

What does "ability to distribute customer's applications without being bound by the GPL" mean? Is this gem the reason they were surprised by Richard Stallman's words?

It simply means that you can compile things with the Cygwin gcc on Windows and the resulting binary isn't covered by the GPL. This wasn't true with earlier versions, which were linked against a GPL Cygwin DLL, and hence compiled programs were required to be GPL if they were to be distributed. This just brings it in line with the GNU development toolchain on other platforms. There's nothing sinister going on here. These aren't the droids you're looking for. You may go about your business. Move along...

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[Anonymous Coward]

They're standing up and fighting SCO

Of course they are. If SCO wins, RedHat loses. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They're doing it because they have to do it if they are to survive.

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[Pop69]

You don't have to go back as far as the GCC 2.7.x days, you can only need to go back as far as the GCC 2.96 days.

Oh.. hang on, never mind....

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[endx7]

1) They release all their config tools under the GPL

GPL is far from a magic wand. (It won't make your code automagically perfect. You have to have programmers that can do that before that'll happen)

2) They contribute to the kernel, GCC, glibc, XFree86, GNOME, OpenOffice.org and other projects

Remember gcc 2.96?

3) They're standing up and fighting SCO

I would too if my business was completely bassed on selling Linux.

I don't have any major hate of Redhat's stuff though, and I was mostly just pointing out the bad points. (Personally, I just don't like it because it felt too confining, so thus, tada, I didn't use it)

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[reidbold]

1) They release all their config tools under the GPL

GPL is far from a magic wand. (It won't make your code automagically perfect. You have to have programmers that can do that before that'll happen)

He wasn't implying that, he simply said that red hat contributes. They don't just take the 200 buck licenses lauging to the bank, they pay people to make stuff available for everyone.

2) They contribute to the kernel, GCC, glibc, XFree86, GNOME, OpenOffice.org and other projects

Remember gcc 2.96?

Uh what? That's a nice red herring. Again, red hat contributes back, the misbranded gcc is irrelevant here.

3) They're standing up and fighting SCO

I would too if my business was completely bassed on selling Linux.

Or they could have avoided fighting and taken the easy way out by settling.

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[endx7]

He wasn't implying that, he simply said that red hat contributes. They don't just take the 200 buck licenses lauging to the bank, they pay people to make stuff available for everyone.

He may not have been trying to imply that, but it sounded like he might have been.

Remember gcc 2.96?

Uh what? That's a nice red herring. Again, red hat contributes back, the misbranded gcc is irrelevant here.

Ok, so the gnu link wasn't that informative. However, gcc 2.96 (before it was fixed) was -very- broken, and not an actual official gcc release, but instead the development version gcc + some patches redhat commited. Mplayer in particular had a lot of problems with it. Fortunately (as far as I know), Redhat didn't do anything else quite that bad, or I'd -really- rather not have Redhat's contributions.

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[nathanh]

Just a quick post: those of you bashing Red Hat for various reasons, consider this:

1) They release all their config tools under the GPL
2) They contribute to the kernel, GCC, glibc, XFree86, GNOME, OpenOffice.org and other projects
3) They're standing up and fighting SCO

Hey, I'm not too happy about the whole RH-to-Fedora business, but Red Hat as a company deserves huge respect. Without its help and funding, Linux would not be progressing so fast.

This is slightly off-topic, and while I agree with you that RedHat is most definitely a friend of Linux (and always has been), there are always going to be some people who see conspiracies everywhere. Your 3 facts show RedHat to be one of the good guys but the facts will be ignored by some people. They want RedHat to be evil. They will misinterpret the facts to support their warped view.

Another recent example is Sun. Here are just some of the things that Sun has done for Linux.

• Donates money and support to OSDL, which employs Linus Torvalds.
• Donates money and employs full-time paid developers to work on GNOME.
• Spent $75 million to buy StarOffice, which they subsequently open-sourced as OpenOffice. Further donates money and employs full-time paid developers to work on OpenOffice.

Yet we're already seeing the "Sun is evil" comments regarding the recent settlement between Sun and Microsoft. I've even seen one normally respectable site accuse Sun of entering into a conspiracy with SCO and Microsoft as early as March of last year, and this $2 billion settlement is part of the "pay off" for Sun's cooperation in destroying Linux. I can't even imagine the kind of confusion that would make somebody think like that.

My point is that people believe what they want to believe. You and I both know that RedHat is a bloody good thing for Linux, and so is Sun, but people who want to believe that RedHat and Sun are evil will continue to believe that, and no amount of facts will change their beliefs.

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[ConsumedByTV]

That bug in your sig is a perfect example of why I can't stand most OSS projects.

It's pretty clear you were being stupid and it's pretty clear that RPM responded by failing in an even stupider way.

sad.

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[Anonymous Coward]

Donates money and employs full-time paid developers to work on GNOME.

Well, that's proof enough for me that Sun is Evil. ;-)

Re:To curb the anti-Red Hat gibberish

[juhaz]

gcc 2.96 was absolutely not that broken. It might have been slightly broken, but vast majority of code that didn't compile was because of the code was broken. RedHat was just ahead of time, though it has unfortunate consequence of breaking stuff with those who aren't, it's ultimately a good thing. Bit same with their (very early) total switch to UTF-8 with RH8.0, it too caused huge hassle (at least non-english speaking parts of the world), but is at the end easily worth it.

And you seem to be badly confusing "contributing" and "using" here... there was and is nothing wrong with RH's contributions to the gcc project, heck, if they wouldn't do so I'd be suprised if it were even at 2.96 level by now! If there was something wrong it was in using a development version in distribution.

In the end, only thing that episode convinced lots of people about is that mplayer developers have a FRICKIN' BAD ATTITUDE.

Michael is also a hypocrite

[Anonymous Coward]

look at the incident where he hijacked a domain name

I say bullshit..

[Kjella]

...unless you've specifically written code for some of any proprietary apps included with a distro (which should be quite obvious if you do) then I don't see the problem.

If anything, I'd be worried about user training. Different distros may look quite different on the surface, and normal users might have trouble finding stuff. But I don't think it's worse than a Windows version change...

Kjella

Re:I say bullshit..

[Eskarel]

I can't really see that being so much of a problem. KDE is KDE regardless of what you put it on, be it Debian or RedHat or even to a certain extent BSD or even Solaris. I don't use gnome(I confess, I like a pretty GUI), but I assume it's pretty much the same there.

The only differences I've really seen between the Red Hat 9 I'm typing this on and the various prior versions of Mandrake is on the administrative side. The admin GUIs vary(though not really the software underneath them, and to a slightly lesser extent the installation procedure. These differences may be minor or major, but to a large extent they are immaterial. Anyone who can't figure out the differences ought not to be fiddling with the settings in the first place.

No Complaints here...

[jaylee7877]

I work at a University so we can purchas RH Enterprise Workstation licenses for $25 and Advanced Server licenses for $50. I've found RHEL to be an excellent, stable distro. RHN in particular is very well done. I love being able to reboot or update my systems through rhn.redhat.com and have errata automatically applied with no interaction on my part. I realize businesses pay considerably more $$$ for RHEL but remember, you're still paying for services (errata, installation support, etc). If you don't have the dough, Fedora is still an excellent product. FC1 started out a little shaky but has stabilized considerably. FC2 is on it's way to becoming an excellent modern Linux distro. RedHat remains committed to Open Source (they still don't deal with *any* closed source code), they still are one of the largest organizational contributors to the Linux Kernel project, Apache, Samba, etc. RedHat has a great future IMHO....

Re:No Complaints here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...why not compare enterprise support options for other enterprise software, like Weblogic or Websphere.

Where I was sitting last year, it was $10K US per CPU per year for Weblogic maintenance. Now let's hear about Oracle, DB2, Websphere, AS400, HP/UX, Dell and HP servers and other software and hardware support contracts...

So, $350/license/year for RHEL support seems awfully cheap to be hooked up to RH's autoupdate service. I know if it was me, it would be one machine hooked up to identify what was changed per update, and then I'd be downloading the source and going from there on my other servers that I also installed RHEL on.

Re:No Complaints here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...why not compare enterprise support options for other enterprise software, like Weblogic or Websphere.

Mebby because they don't use Weblogic or Websphere or any other multi-kilobuck-per-cpu software?

Mebby because their linux software expenses went from something trivial (ie, nothing) to something not-horribly-large-but-still-significant that now has to be viewed, reviewed, argued about by the faculty, justified against multiple user suggestions that everyone convert to some other linux-distribution / MacOS / Windows / we-never-should-have-left-VMS, all different, and they're still expected to have it in place by the time the official RH9 support ends?

Whether reasonable or not, whether justified or not, I can tell you that in our university department, RedHat's change is causing headaches for those of us "in the trenches".

Is $6.95 Too Expensive For Anyone?

[ortcutt]

I don't understand what the complaint is:

Enterprise Linux AS 3.0 ISO's

You don't get support, but you aren't paying for it.

Re:Is $6.95 Too Expensive For Anyone?

[stefanlasiewski]

You don't get support, but you aren't paying for it.

I'm curious, how exactly will you keep your system up to date? You don't get a RedHat Network account and loose the ability to easily update your RedHat system (I'm talking RH, not another distro).

retain compatibility with their Errata srpms

SRPMS are one thing, but do I then have to compile the software, or does WhiteBox provide some reasonable.

Compiling software takes time. Time = money. If you spend alot of time compiling software to provide a stable, reliable binary; when RHEL already does that work for you, you may end up LOOSING money.

Sure, you could use apt-get or yum, but are there reliable RHN cloned servers? In my experience, most of them only work with Fedora or RH9.

Re:Is $6.95 Too Expensive For Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get a RedHat Network account and loose the ability to easily update your RedHat system

when RHEL already does that work for you, you may end up LOOSING money

'Lose', not 'loose', friend. You must be new here :)

Re:Is $6.95 Too Expensive For Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm doomed. Yes I know I know.

s/LOOSING/LOSING/

Re:Is $6.95 Too Expensive For Anyone?

[ortcutt]

I wasn't arguing that Redhat doesn't provide a useful service which people might be interesting in paying for. Having no support is a downside, but it might be worth it for some people.

Hardly anything

[Anonymous Coward]

Retraining? Linux is Linux, and the applications you use arr still the same. I use KDE on Redhat, I use KDE on Mandrake. I run Apache here, I run it there. All the same.

Re:Hardly anything

[Coryoth]

I was assuming some desktop boxes, and a few cluless users who need to introduced to a potentially slightly different desktop ("You need to click on the green lizard instead of the red hat now...").

Alos, there is potentially a little readjustment for admins. init script layout and other quirks in /etc can be a little different between distributions, and potentially there are some different admin tools to get to know.

None of it is serious retraining, but it might be worth a day course or so to introduce people to whatever minor changes are relevant, and save yourself some hassle later on.

Jedidiah.

On the way out?

[TheMadPenguin]

I am wondering if Red Hat might be on the way out in the enterprise? I know it is one of the most widely supported distros available today with a long standing reputation with enterprises, but taking a step back and looking at the Novell/SUSE/Ximian powerhouse that is most likely building.... anyone have any thoughts on that? I think we might be in for a change of tide (of sorts). This is of course personal opinion, but I am curious what others think on this topic?

--
3 million strong can't be wrong...
Mad Penguin Las Vegas

Re:On the way out?

[HangingChad]

I am wondering if Red Hat might be on the way out in the enterprise?

Unlikely. RH has a very compelling enterprise product and a good name. But if Novell/SUSE/Ximian/IBM come up with an integrated server/desktop/mobile device management system, they'll kick everyone, RH included. IBM has the juice to put business apps many companies already use on an integrated platform. Hell, yeah, I'd be afraid of that. RH on it's way out, I don't think so. But the potential for a downside, oh yeah.

Re:On the way out?

[williamhooper]

IBM has gone out of it's way to support multiple distros. IIRC just a couple of weeks ago they announced SuSE and RHEL support for some products on the same day.

I should clarify

[mao che minh]

" The future of Linux lies with Suse/Novell and IBM."

I should have said "The future of Linux in the business space....", as no company will likely ever govern where Linux's future lies, merely influence at best.

Linux and Redhat confusion

[blutrot]

Many PHBs think that Redhat and Linux are the same thing. They do not know that Redhat is a distribution of linux and that other distributions such as debian, slackware, and SuSE exist. Ask several PHBs what version of linux is ran in their offices and they will say Linux 9.

Forbes:
"Most open source is imitation," Carey says. "Linux is an imitation of an operating system. If these [Linux] companies are going to create a price point that is significant enough that they are approaching the same pricing model as the innovation premium, why pay a premium for imitation when I can pay a premium and get innovation?"

This comment is a prime example of such a case. They see the cost of Linux going up when the cost of Linux never went up in the first place. They fail to see that they are paying for the support that Redhat provides, not for linux itself. In order to push linux in the business world, it is important that PHBs understand that linux does not come from a single company. They must understand how the liscencing works, and that they can always just hire a few admins to update their boxes -- not just rely on Redhat to do it for them.

Re:Linux and Redhat confusion

[Stinking Pig]

100% true, and it's not just the PHBs and marketdroids -- I've gotten the same thing from junior admins, network people, and assorted Windows programmers.

I usually try to correct it with the roads analogy: Linux is infrastructure, like roads -- Red Hat is a company that sells road-related services, like paving trucks and cars.

It's fairly successful for someone who's got five minutes to think; most people don't have that, so I shut my mouth when they quit listening. No skin off my nose if ignorant people prefer to stay that way.

Re:Linux and Redhat confusion

[JW Troll]

"they fail to see that they are paying for the support that Redhat provides, not for linux itself"

yo buddy, if i charge you fifty-thousand for the tires on my dodge viper and toss in the car for free, it DOESN'T MATTER whether you pay for the car or for the tires! you're paying the same amount either way. in this case, redhat is charging approx. the same as microsoft charges for similar products - to the guy in the article, it's a poke in the eye with your finger, or a poke in the eye with my finger. same difference.

thank god for FreeBSD

[Billly Gates]

Just do a cvsup to the latest ports tree. and portupgrade all your ports.

Or if its a server do a cd /stand, ./sysinstall, and from there select configure and you can upgrade to a newer distro over the internet!

If you absolutely need Linux, then look at Debian stable. Very well tested and also free.

Re:thank god for FreeBSD

[phoxix]

I'm sick of this shit, I love you BSD guys and all, but lets think about this:

Just do a cvsup to the latest ports tree. and portupgrade all your ports.

No offense, but this has got to be the most over-simplified system of upgrading ever. I've rarely found people who been able to cleanly update their system the way FreeBSDers keep telling us. Additionally its just not logical to do on 25+ machines.

urpmi, yum, apt, and the ilk are much more suited where many many boxen are involved and the cost of sysadmin time, can be high for an employer. (not to mention the computing resources needed for such a huge compile)

Sunny Dubey

Re:thank god for FreeBSD

[Billly Gates]

Agreed on logical machines there.

But I switched because upgrading IS HELL ON LINUX. It really is simpler on FreeBSD. All the ports are tested. Perfect? No, but hell and I mean hell of alot better then RPM.

PS when you do a cvsup go to the root directory of /usr/ports and look for a file named UPGRADING or INSTALLING, I do not remember the exact name. But it will tell you the upgrade hurdles and how to overcome them. For example when I upgrade my freeBSD box I had problems with Expat as a depancy. The instructions showed me how to fix this. Hope that helps.

I believe sourceforge is experimenting wiht an app to do compilied upgrades. I do not remember the name.

the profile system under Unix is meant for a centralized mainframe/server and dumb terminals for each user. All the apps are on 1 system so all you need under /home are the setting files for programs. Windows/Novell profiles on the other hand are the opposite. Only policies are uploaded while apps are local to the client. I am hoping Novell will change this after they buy SuSE.

I hate Unix dependancies with a passion! Windows you just point and click or write a script in a users profile to automatically upgrade their machines.

Why the hell do .so's or newer versions of glibc are incompatible with the old versions? I can run an ancient Windows95 or Windows3.11 app without a problem under Windows2000. Why can't they just keep older libraries and make a seperate newer one? If the developer wants to link to the new one they can but the old one should be linked at compile and execution automatically. Windows has this with dll management since Windows98 and Windows2k. No more dll hell. Also why can't all the dependancies be included wiht all the programs and put in their own directories and not /usr/lib?

There are multiple versions of MFC.dll like MFC42.dll. Its soo fustrating and this is the cause of the problem under Unix that Mac and Windows uers have good.

For more info read the Rox story earlier today.

Re:thank god for FreeBSD

[phoxix]

Ah, you sound young to the word of *nix, heh

But I switched because upgrading IS HELL ON LINUX. It really is simpler on FreeBSD. All the ports are tested. Perfect? No, but hell and I mean hell of alot better then RPM.

Upgrading isn't hell. All I have to do is "urpmi.update -a ; urpmi --update --auto-select", and I've upgraded software or the entire distro. Do not fault the "linux upgrading system" for the sheer stupidy Redhat used to employ. Also RPM is rather powerful, but once again thanks to the stupidity of redhat, RPM has been marred for life. No matter how cool other people (mandrake, yellow dog, etc) do with it there are lots of ignorant people who will hate it automatically, even if they haven't tried the newer set of tools.

the profile system under Unix is meant for a centralized mainframe/server and dumb terminals for each user. All the apps are on 1 system so all you need under /home are the setting files for programs. Windows/Novell profiles on the other hand are the opposite. Only policies are uploaded while apps are local to the client. I am hoping Novell will change this after they buy SuSE.

You give no clear reason why you desire this massive un-UNIX like change. Also thanks to nss_ldap, much of the above can be done in one manner or another. (however, nss_ldap requires running nscd unless you want massive lagage, but that in turn causes sync'ing issues. One day all fo this will be fix0red. Only linux and Solaris support nsswitch(), none of the BSD's support it in a correct manner, therefore this is not possible with them.)

Why the hell do .so's or newer versions of glibc are incompatible with the old versions?

Because the binaries are linked that way. (read my other comments to see how all this works out.)

I can run an ancient Windows95 or Windows3.11 app without a problem under Windows2000.

Thats because retarded Windows applications like to over-write critical libraries with their own versions. Hence why Windows has a "roll-back" feature, and why LongHorn's WinFS allows for invisible versions of the same file. Its to allow for sheer windows programming stupidity.

Why can't they just keep older libraries and make a seperate newer one?

No one ever said you can't install old libs, I do it all the time to play old dynamically linked binary only games on my linux machine.

If the developer wants to link to the new one they can but the old one should be linked at compile and execution automatically.

Thats gotta be the biggest "dum-ass" idea ever (and yes, I spelt dum instead of dumb.). Different libs have different features, calls, etc. Go read a CS book to see why the MSFT people are smoking real crack. (go read ESR's "art of unix programming" to see why they're on more than just crack)

Sunny Dubey

Re:thank god for FreeBSD

[Brandybuck]

Additionally its just not logical to do on 25+ machines.

You don't do this on 25+ machines. That's just silly. Instead you "portupgrade --package" on one machine, and use the packages on the other 24+. If you're administering 25+ machines, then SURELY you know a tiny bit of shell scripting, and can push those new packages out to the other machines after you've tested them.

Re:thank god for FreeBSD

[mmerlin]

Plus FreeBSD has QuickPatch - a source based patch update system for FreeBSD security updates

Re:thank god for FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you know that you can portupgrade from binary packages?

The Forbes article is complete trash.

[kbsingh]

A few days back, I wrote about this same article in the Linux.com Forums. Click here and read that post, it will show you how badly informed and mistaken the Author of the article really is.

Either he is pushing a personal vendetta against Redhat, or he is writing what he is paid to.

Re:The Forbes article is complete trash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Either he is pushing a personal vendetta against Redhat, or he is writing what he is paid to.

His personal vendetta is against Linux, or maybe Free Software. Someone who was being paid to write bad things would do so more professionally, not with the spite filled tone Lyons frequently adopts.

Per-Seat pricing is fine.

[The Monster]

How can we accept Red Hat's per-seat pricing and overbearing EULAs that allow them to audit user sites for license compliance?

The article itself says why, although it mocks the reasoning.

But Red Hat claims Enterprise Linux is still free--because customers are being charged for support, not for the software itself (ahem).

For years, we FOSS advocates have said

You can give away the software and make your money on the support.

RH is doing exactly that. Anyone who wants a copy of the software can have it, free as in beer and speech. They can hire anyone they want for support, whether in-house or outsourced, under mutually agreed terms. What they can't do is make a deal for RH to support a 20-user shop, and then pile on 30 more users for free. Letting your customers take advantage of you is not the way to make money.

Maybe my perspective is different on this because I make my living in the Support department of a company that sells support contracts that ultimately pay for me. I tend to be frustrated by our Sales and Implementation departments driving things under The Manufacturing Delusion, more interested in 'making the sale' than creating an environment that offers our customers an ongoing service. Lately I've seen signs to suggest we might be turning that around, though.

Re:Per-Seat pricing is fine.

[TheSunborn]

What is needed is the ability to buy widtout any kind of support but WITH updates. Running redhat widtout updates are (as with any other os) dangerous if your computer is connected to the internet.

What is needed is an option to
download redhat iso+patches onces, and then install/patch as many computers as wanted

Re:Per-Seat pricing is fine.

[110010001000]

Wrong. You cannot legally take a copy of RHEL and install it on 20 machines if you only have 1 license, not matter who is providing support for the other 19 machines. This is what we are talking about. Redhat is selling something that a lot of people put work into for free. Suckers.

Re:Per-Seat pricing is fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who wants a copy of the software can have it, free as in beer and speech.

Really? Where can I download the ISO images of the real RHEL Linux? I haven't been able to locate them on their servers and I'm not finding them on mirror sites either. I must say that I'm surprised at how difficult it is to find. RHL9 and prior versions was everywhere. Why isn't RHEL? Thanks.

Re:Per-Seat pricing is fine.

[Wumpus]

Actually, you can. You'll have to compile your own copy, though.

White Box Enterprise Linux is doing just that.

Re:Per-Seat pricing is fine.

[black mariah]

So is Suse, Mandrake, Lindows, and about a dozen other Linux distributors. You gonna bitch about them too, or just Redhat because they pulled their head out of their ass and decided to actually make money instead of existing on the brink of financial ruin (Hi, Mandrake!)?

Re:Per-Seat pricing is fine.

[unapersson]

Mandrake's distribution was and is doing fine, it was the previous management's branching out to do e-learning that pushed them to that brink.

Not that I have to say this on Slashdot, but...

[Trailer Trash]

Please don't go read the article. It's another troll piece by Dan Lyons, a reputed dimwit who likes to get on slashdot and groklaw with trash like this to pump up the web hits. It's not worth reading, he says nothing new, move along.

I'm dissapointed

[mao che minh]

80+ comments and no Gentoo zealots have opined about how mega-awesome and perfect their distro is yet. You guys are letting me down.

Re:I'm dissapointed

[elsegundo]

Ok, I'll bite...

I've been running RH7, 8, 9 then Fedora on my boxes for a few years. Got an AMD64 and decided to try Gentoo since they had the 2.6 kernel in the AMD64 2004.0. After scaling /mnt/gentoo I kinda like it. Fedora's still ok but I've found myself in rpm hell too often. Of course I've just traded rpms for ebuilds. :) BTW, the project I'm currently working on has SuSe running on a couple IBM pSeries boxes. It's not too bad either.

Re:I'm dissapointed

[BenjyD]

I predict a wave of Arch linux zealots any day now. There seem to be a lot of disaffected Gentoo users on their forums.

Re:I'm dissapointed

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, they *are* help forums.

I think you are making a little misenterpritation.

Re:I'm dissapointed

[BenjyD]

I meant the arch linux forums, not the gentoo ones. I should have been clearer.

Carey, Carey

[Anonymous Coward]

"The companies doing these Linux distributions are trying to make money by taking away the freedom of Linux. I don't mean free as in cost. I mean free as in free speech. If you make me pay more for ten users than for three users, you're taking away some of my freedom. From the consumer perspective, that's not why we went into this. It was freedom of choice."

You do mean free as in cost. You want support for an S&P 500 company on one $179 license.

They spelled my name right...

[Thagg]

but they didn't put it in bold :) Oh well.

Once the article came out, I called Red Hat to make sure I hadn't misinterpreted what they were doing -- and to attempt to clarify how they were restricting distribution of what was apparently GPL'd software.

The person I spoke to make a clear distinction between the binary distribution and the source code. The source code is available for free download, and will continue to be available for free download forever. On the other hand, they do restrict you from installing the binary distribution onto multiple machines. They say that the act of compiling the programs, and assembling them into a distribution, is work that they demand to be compensated for.

I was under the mistaken impression that the price of the distribution was to compensate for the maintainance, and that they really wouldn't mind of you installed from the CD onto multiple machines. That is incorrect, they "consider that a violation of their license."

There are obviously loopholes that you could drive a truck through, if you were so inclined. I asked, and there is apparently no restriction on reverse engineering of the distribution, so you could buy one copy, download the corresponding source code, and make an exact copy of each of the programs in the distribution, and put those files on all of your machines. You could also monitor what their up2date system is doing on one machine, download the source code changes and compile and install those on each machine. This would be a significant pain in the neck, of course.

It's interesting that Red Hat has not done some things that would prevent one from doing this. In particular, they do not include software that Red Hat has written, but is not GPL'd. If they had done that, then there would be no way to legally create an identical distribution from source code.

We've got about 100 systems running RH 8 and 9. Some 40 of those are dual Opteron boxes, for which Red Hat Enterprise Edition is about $800/box, so it would not be an insignificant expense to sign up for the system.

Thad Beier

Re:They spelled my name right...

[changelingyahoo.com]

This is interesting because the RedHat rep I conversed with said (and I quote): "As long as you don't violate the terms of our agreement by seeking support or RHN service for machines not covered under the subscription, you're safe to install RHEL3 on as many machines as you choose." I think RedHat needs to get their story straight.

Re:They spelled my name right...

[salimma]

I asked, and there is apparently no restriction on reverse engineering of the distribution, so you could buy one copy, download the corresponding source code, and make an exact copy of each of the programs in the distribution, and put those files on all of your machines.

You can. It's called White Box Linux. Won't give you the peace of mind of running RHEL though.

Re:They spelled my name right...

[PMoonlite]

I think you're slightly confused here. Red Hat knows exactly what it can or can't restrict under the terms of the GPL.

If they give you binary or source code, they cannot restrict what you do with the GPL portion of it (nearly all) beyond the terms of what the GPL already restricts. Period.

What they can restrict is whether you are allowed to use RHN for updates and get support. If you invalidate the contract you signed for those, they can take away your update and support services. That's it.

So if you have GPL'ed Red Hat binaries, you may distribute as you like. You can't get support on them or updates on them unless you are following your contract. You can't distribute it and call it RHEL. You can't distribute it with the non-GPL bits (logos and such). But none of this in any way violates the GPL.

Other distros

[Anonymous Coward]

If your still using RH9, its time to switch. Here are some distros you can switch to.

Mandrake 10. With KDE 3.2 and kernel 2.6, This distribution is up to date and is usable as both a server and desktop. I use it

SuSE 9.1. Coming out soon. Now with Novell Goodness.

Fedora. The contiuation of Redhat post 9. Core 2 will be out soon with Gnome 2.6!

Debian. For those who want hard to use out of date software even in the unstable version!

These distibutions are all way better than Redhat 9, so stop using Red Hat and join the future of Linux!

Two simple targets

[Alan Cox]

Fedora - this is what RH was before it got tangled up in retail and other things that slowed it down. Its regular releases, new toys and akin to RH5, RH6, RH7, etc

RHEL - business oriented product with Red Hat support and with certifications and testing guarantees for things like Oracle. In order to b e supportable it handles less hardware, contains less packages and picks more conserative ones, as well as having a long lifetime.

I've not found many businesses have problems untangling this. but some of the non business folks got a little baffled or still don't realise that
a) FC1 updates RH9 fine
b) FC is exactly what old RHL (7.x etc) was about.

Re:Two simple targets

[prockcore]

a) FC1 updates RH9 fine

Yup. In fact, I went insane yesterday and installed yum on my RH9 box. I then used it to upgrade to FC2test2 while everything was running (including X), I then restarted X and boom, I'm running FC2test2.. including the x.org X11. I still need to reboot to use the 2.6 kernel instead of RH9's 2.4 kernel.

The only problem I had was I had ximian installed, and had to uninstall a couple of ximian packages.

Re:Two simple targets

[mcrbids]

a) FC1 updates RH9 fine
b) FC is exactly what old RHL (7.x etc) was about.


Except that FC really *isn't* like 7. I've been finding all *kinds* of glitches, huccups, and burps in FC 1. For example, KMail crashes. Constantly. I unload and reload KDE, it works. One time. Then crashes. Constantly.

I've been using the same KMail files since RH 6.x, and I've never before had problems like this.

Here's another one: yum -y update frequently fails to find dependencies, and I haven't installed a single RPM except via yum.

Yuck. I'm not happy. RH has kinda screwed the pooch on this one - I was a happy RH network customer, with over a dozen machines.

Now, I'm left with a dozen headaches, and given the abrupt license changes, I feel very ill at ease with RH.

What's next?

From where I sit, RH is about to have their lunch eaten by Novell/Suse, which is kinda sad since they had so much community support!

Re:Two simple targets

[drinkypoo]

"Slowed down" is exactly what made redhat less of a moving target "back in the day". Speeding it up means that making it work becomes a different prospect more rapidly. I never found redhat to be all that reliable in the first place anyway, but a few releases were pretty good around version 5, and for what it came with (usually more than I wanted to install) and integrated it was fairly impressive. It still is, but the buzz seems to be that fedora is less stable than redhat, so if there's anything to it at all then the objection that fedora is not really equivalent to redhat is entirely valid.

Re:Two simple targets

[williamhooper]

For example, KMail crashes. Constantly. I unload and reload KDE, it works. One time. Then crashes. Constantly.

Sounds like it might be a prelink issue. Have you checked bugzilla?

Here's another one: yum -y update frequently fails to find dependencies, and I haven't installed a single RPM except via yum.

Irrelevant unless you mention what yum repos you are using.

abrupt license changes

Yeah, announced just over a year in advance...

Re:Two simple targets

[TheOrquithVagrant]

> Except that FC really *isn't* like 7. I've been
> finding all *kinds* of glitches, huccups, and
> burps in FC 1.

And in what way is this NOT like RedHat 7? I'd say FC 1 was considerably LESS buggy than many "official" RedHat x.0 releases. 6.0 was so awful it almost made me switch distro. RedHat 7 (the first one with the infamous inofficial 2.96 gcc, in case anyone doesn't remember) was a complete bugstrosity, although updates stabilized it quite well within a few months of release. The number of RedHat Linux releases that were _not_ buggy horrors before the first deluge of post-release updates were in my experience only 6.2, 7.3 and 9.

FC1 should be compared to other RedHat x.0 releases, and at least in my experience, compared to gems like 6.0 or 7.0, i have to say FC1 compares quite favorably.

Don't get me wrong - I like and use RedHat. I'm only pointing out that the "regular" RedHat Linux releases have often been quite bleeding-edge and buggy, just like Fedora is now. Just like Alan Cox stated above.

There's simply no need to say it

[Anonymous Coward]

We've got trolls like you who'll do it for us.

Loss leaders

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I think Red Hat has seriously underestimated the importance of their loss leader (the series of low-end boxed sets ending with RH9). Fedora is a step in the right direction, but it has a beta-quality feel to it that turned this long-time Red Hat user off to it.

I'm in the market for another distro right now -- something that would not have happened if there were such a thing as RHL 10. So what's it going to be? SuSE? White Box Linux? Something else? Hopefully I'll have that answer in a couple of months. It's not going to be Fedora, and I've got too many customers that aren't willing to pay the premium for RHEL.

They've shot themselves in the foot. RHL was an important loss leader that established the brand. People were familiar with RHL, so they were eager to buy RHEL. Without the low end product, where do you build your market from? People who are just getting started with Linux now, might just install SuSE since there's no RHL. And when they're ready to step up, those big bucks are going to go to Novell, not Red Hat.

It's a shame that success has blinded Red Hat to the realities of the marketplace. They are ready to pretend to be Microsoft, but reality says that RH ain't Microsoft. The users aren't locked in and they will move if they feel they're being screwed with.

Re:Loss leaders

[Obyron]

It may or may not be your cup of tea, but after being annoyed for a long time with my RedHat server I made the switch to FreeBSD. The set-up was a snap for me, and I haven't had so much as a hiccup out of the system. People can make all the "BSD is dead!" jokes they want, but I'm in love with it.

Too many people (not necessarily the Parent, but other's in this thread) are too quick to write off the Other White Meat, as it were.

Re:Loss leaders

[Bull999999]

As someone who also started using Linux with Red Hat distro and used FC1, I'd recommend Slackware. Slackware seems faster out of box than Red Hat (including FC1) and Mandrake. It is one of the more not so user friendly distro, but it also forced me to learn more about how Linux works in general. Slackware also uses the offical kernel without modifications and upgrading the kernel to version 2.6.4 as a snap. I'm planning on using the knowledge I learned from using Slackware to try a Linux-From-Scratch project and see if I can roll out by own distro someday.

Re:Loss leaders

[lrhegeba]

On the one hand you write "I've got too many customers that aren't willing to pay the premium for RHEL" but then "so they were eager to buy RHEL". Though i understand your thoughts about the lossleader building a brand, i believe red hat already has a very strong brand and can cut the losses coming from there without worrying about their brand too much. They perhaps can even appear more "enterprise IT" when not having a software by the same name running on the desktop of the cto's mom at home ;-)
Personally i think it is ok if red hat moves in this direction given they still support linux development/developers in general as they have done in the past and adhere to set linux standards (lsb etc.). I am sure in the not so distant future we will see Suse Enterprise renamed to Novell Server, so the desktop and the server distro will be named differently; and they'll adapt a similar price scheme.
Customers still have the choice to migrate to other distros if they are not willing to pay the price and there are a lot of good distros out there. In the long run i believe it will be a win for linux that red hat earns more money and will be able to finance more enterprise features which will trickle down to all of us. i just hope the microsoft comment was an example of dry humour...

Re:Loss leaders

[the_illuminatus]

I'm in the market for another distro right now -- something that would not have happened if there were such a thing as RHL 10. So what's it going to be? SuSE? White Box Linux? Something else?

Since you are taking votes, may I recommend installing Debian via Knoppix?
I did this a number of times and it goes stupidly smoothly:
1. download and burn knoppix cd.
2. burn your ~/ to another cd.
3. boot from knoppix cd
4. sudo knx-hdinstall from an xterm
5. reboot, adduser, dump your home directory back to hard drive
6. sudo sed -e "/stable/unstable/g" /etc/apt/sources.list
7. look at debian.org's list of mirrors and apt-get.org for other sources of packages.

and if you are me, apt-get remove --purge kde* && apt-get install fluxbox*
I can't imagine going back to rpm hell. The debian devs care, and everything works. I love it. give it a shot...

Re:Loss leaders

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Red Hat has seriously underestimated the importance of their loss leader (the series of low-end boxed sets ending with RH9). Fedora is a step in the right direction, but it has a beta-quality feel to it that turned this long-time Red Hat user off to it.

Please remember the following: Redhat's own CEO admitted that RH9 was not a loss leader! That's right, according to Redhat they were making money on RH9, just not enough. Since so many companies/people have been turned off by the elimination of RH9, it's clear that Redhat made a really boneheaded decision.

Re:Loss leaders

[discogravy]

I agree wholeheartedly with this. Right now my employer (large university) runs a metric fuckton of solaris servers. We're looking to get rid of Sun because of the expense; I need to prove that a) linux can do it and b) we can have support if we need it but it's not going to cost us a shitload of $MONEY. Which, no doubt RHEL is less than the cost of Solaris + Sun Hardware. But I'm not going to buy RHEL just to test it out. And Fedora is Not Showcase Material. RH9 was quite impressive; although on the personal workstation side i had some qualms, the server-side (ie, non-gui) was fine and dandy. Subscriptions, and only two distros (UBER-XPENSIVE or free_but_constantly_beta) are not great confidence builders.

I have recommended SuSE and Debian for replacement servers. (SuSE because support is there and they're more sure of where they're going as of right now -- no stupid fuckups on THEIR end...and Debian because at least there is no company that can say "Stable is fucked! pay up or you'll be stuck there forever!".

The only people who are going to stay with RH are those whose products are dependent on them, and I'm sure even now, this instant, someone is busy porting their app off of RH and onto FreeBSD or Debian.

Debian!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the big deal with RH9? We used RH7.3 now we use Debian. Don't miss RH at all.

Succotash

[DgWatters0]

Heh, I never realised that succotash was a real word, having only ever heard it in the context of a certain cartoon. OK, you can mod me down now.

RHEL is not MS-esque

[El Volio]

My understanding of RHEL is that it can be installed on as many systems as you like after all, it's (almost) all GPL software. (That might not apply to any non-GPL bits.) But you're purchasing per-CPU support. If you've got servers that you don't need so much support for, at least from the vendor, then do what you like.

That said, I wish Red Hat would bring out their mid-level offering between Fedora and RHEL and quit the coy smiles. It's giving me fits for planning our deployments this year, since Fedora works great for some things and not others, but I really need a middle tier (lower than RHEL WS).

Now, when Red Hat starts exclusionary license agreements, killing competing products with vaporware announcements, and changing APIs without telling anybody, then they'd be "Microsoft-esque". But being that they're distributing Free Software, that would be really hard to do. This is more FUD from Forbes, a magazine noted in the past for its difficulty understanding Free Software.

Re:RHEL is not MS-esque

[seekr_hidr]

FYI, I was wondering about that too so I called their sales rep the other day and I was told that you can't just buy one copy of RHEL and install it on as many servers as you want even if you don't need support for those. But, the source code is still free for download and you can compile from source on other machines if you want, but you can't just install their binaries on other machines...

Re:RHEL is not MS-esque

[Bull999999]

So this means that you are not really paying for the software, rather, you are paying for the work of putting it together, support, and updates. I don't see a problem with that as Red Hat is a for-profit corporation afterall. I doubt that there are many slashdotters who are willing to give up their day job, create their own linux distro, and support and update them full time without asking for money.

FOSS is about education, research, and people

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's take a step back and look at what this is says about our community.

I just can't get behind the anti-Microsoft movement anymore. I can't in so far as it has become a movement about being to corporations what Microsoft is to corporations, and doing for corporations what Microsoft does for corporations.

And for that reason I do not care what happens to Redhat anymore. I do not care at all. There are some good people there, but Redhat is Microsoft. Redhat is anathema to me. What is Redhat's goal? It is of necessity to make the most profit for itself as possible, while at the same time damaging its public image as little as possible. That is all. That is what a public corporation is. Let's stop pretending.

While I think it is interesting to solve problems, and some of the problems I have solved in software have been and are used by these same corporations, what FOSS is to me at its heart is a revolution, an intellectual revolution borne of academia that will empower the common man to embrace communitarian principles, brotherhood, fraternity, and together to drive back ignorance and greed through knowledge and understanding.

Let's continue to develop software and institutional structures that will give every citizen direct and real-time access to the process of governance, at a cost in proportion to the means.

Let's put the eyes and ears and minds of every man, woman, and child on our elected officials to hold them accountable for what they are doing to us.

Let's give every citizen access to vital information about their bodies, their health, and their minds, from the privacy of their homes or street corners or dark alley.

Let's connect everyone who will join us, and give to one another every idea and insight and innovation. Let us give it at no cost, for to charge money is to give it at cost to our own character. Let us be reimbursed, each one, to our needs.

Let's show them what a rag-tag band of ugly-bags-of-mostly-water can do when we are connected, are free, are informed, as brothers and sisters united against ignorance and hate and greed and every vile wickedness of man that is propagated against the human spirit.

RedHat CEO EE380 talk at Stanford

[zedge]

Matthew Szulik, President and CEO of RedHat also gave a talk at Stanford on March 3, 2004. This was part of the EE380 Colloquium Series.

Price?

[matth]

I'm seeing people throwing out like $130 or $200 for a license for RedHat.. where are you getting these numbers from? We were looking at purchasing a license at work the other day and it's like $500 for workstation $750 for AS and $1,200 for ES.. I could have those numbers not quiet right.. but they should be fairly ball-park.

Re:Price?

[TheSunborn]

The price of 179$ for the workstation version is an anual subscription rate(Needed for updates) so if you plan to keep your workstation running Redhat WS 3 for the next 5 years it would cost you 179*5=895$. So total price depends.

Martin

Re:Price?

[matth]

still ES is 1,499! thats alot... why would I do that when debian is fairly stable? and even so there are other distros.

Even so what's so great about AS that WS doesn't have?

Re:Price?

[Anonymous Coward]

You ever try to get Oracle to work on Debian? Oracle has been tested up the wazoo and is guarenteed to work with all of RHEL products, as well as dozens of other mainstream products.

Our 40 person company, our IT budget is $1 Million annually.
$1499 is a drop in the bucket, especially considering how valuable that server is (we're not talking some cheap workstation here, we're talking a public-facing heavily used server).

Also, using RHAS will save me a signifigant amount of LABOR.
An hour of IT time easilly costs $100/hr. To recoup the cost of RHAS, it should save me 15 hours PER YEAR. That should be pretty sasy. RHN alone saves that much time.

Re:What, no editorial? [help, please, moderators]

[Thagg]

The parent positing is absolutely not flamebait. If I hadn't already posted here I would have moderated it up. Other moderators, please do so. If you have any question about whether it is flamebait, check out the link provided in the article -- Nugget is desparately trying to inform people, not bait them.

Thad Beier

Red Hat violating the GPL!?

[schoett]

... they do restrict you from installing the binary distribution onto multiple machines. They say that the act of compiling the programs, and assembling them into a distribution, is work that they demand to be compensated for.

Restricting the binaries in this fashion appears to violate Section 6 of the GPL:

6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.

That means the FSF (or any other copyright holder of GPL software distributed by Red Hat) should make it clear to Red Hat that they are in violation of the GPL.

Antitrust violation

[mslinux]

"Red Hat Professional Workstation... Enterprise Linux for personal use"

The above quote is from redhat.com

Seems they're rethinking their corporate focus after the backlash from the RHL screw up. So which is it RH, enterprise or personal? Thought you guys didn't want personal users? You've lost my business for good... business & personal.

Re:Antitrust violation

[williamhooper]

Red Hat Professional Workstation is a box with RHEL WS CDs in it.

Re:Antitrust violation

[mslinux]

Yes, I know, it retails at Office Max for 89 bucks... very similar to their old RHL offerings. Why piss all of the personal users off by removing the much loved RHL product and then turn around (after tons of complaints) and position this as a personal product?

Hello, does anyone at RH have a brain? They just told their personal users that the no longer cared about them... and now they expect people to forget that and buy this crap for personal use? There's no way in hell that they'll ever be popular again... You don't stab a guy in the back and then offer to help him up... seems RH doesn't understand this.

Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Forbes seems rather optimistic about linux - just take a look at their 'linux at work' sidebox.
- The Cult Of Linux"

Ummm.

Because "cult" is halfway to... umm, red koolaid and white sneakers...?

Right on!

That's like saying James Randi is optimistic about perpetual motion and dowsing.

SCO Fallout

[nurb432]

Notice in the 'interview' his *first* reason for holding off on OSS is due to the SCO lawsuits..

Regardless of who is right, its going to take us years go get over this bad PR-image they have rather successfully created.....

Re:SCO Fallout

[Anonymous Coward]

> Regardless of who is right, its going to take
> us years go get over this bad PR-image they
> have rather successfully created.....

Well, if IBM *is* guilty then *they* bear the
blame. Has nothing to do with SCO PR campaigns.

Re:Per-Seat pricing is fine....RHES != Free

[jtotheh]

The availability of the source without the binaries for an entire distro is clearly a way to get around the GPL - although you can technically share the software the reasonable way to do so is prohibited- go to gnu.org and find the 4 freedoms defined and you will see one of them is sharing the software (not just the source) RedHat does NOT allow you to install on machines if you have not purchased a license for that machine. You have to buy support for every machine you want to install it on. See this InfoWorld article or read the actual license at here (here's a quote: "If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement")

I know RedHat contributes, but I prefer to use Debian nowadays.

Things are going from bad to worse - first the Redhat->Fedora transfer and now Sun is in bed with Mickeysoft.

GNOME 2.6 is already in Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

"Fedora. The contiuation of Redhat post 9. Core 2 will be out soon with Gnome 2.6!

Debian. For those who want hard to use out of date software even in the unstable version!"

GNOME 2.6 is already in the official Debian experimental. Just add it to your /etc/apt/sources.list. It works fine. Install it and go.

It would have gone into unstable, but Debian is currently trying to stabalize sarge and doesn't want GNOME 2.6 transfering into sarge when it is about to be released.

It's being in experimental doesn't mean that it isn't getting bug reports and fixes. It just means that it isn't on the path to inclusion in sarge.

As soon as sarge is released, GNOME 2.6 will go into unstable.

As far as I recall, all that Fedora has available at the moment in any official capacity is a GNOME 2.5.x development release.

Re:GNOME 2.6 is already in Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I recall, all that Fedora has available at the moment in any official capacity is a GNOME 2.5.x development release.

Psst, they have gnome 2.6.0 and had it almost since it was released last week....

No: Re:Red Hat violating the GPL!?

[lordcorusa]

Your assumption seems to be unduly alarmist. Here is my understanding of what Red Hat has done, based on reading their publications and talking with their representatives:

Red Hat's support contract is the means they use to restrict you from installing the RHEL binary distribution on multiple machines. When you purchase the RHEL package, you are essentially buying a support contract for one machine, and getting a gratis RHEL distribution with it. Part of the support contract says that you agree to put that copy of the distro on only that one machine. Put it on multiple machines, and you invalidate your support contract, but nothing more; you still have the right to use the distro thanks to the GPL, but don't expect Red Hat to help you with it at all. Therefore, this is not technically a violation of the GPL, because the only thing you lose by invalidating the support contract is your right to get support.

This support contract change was done in response to the common practice of installing RHL on 100 machines, buying support for one machine, then changing the supported machine every time a problem occurred. As far as I am concerned, the tactic is reasonable. As to whether the specific price points are unreasonable, that will be decided by the market.

WHAT obligation to distribute ISOs?

[The Monster]

Where can I download the ISO images of the real RHEL Linux?

I don't recall the provision of the GPL that requires binary distribution to anyone who wants a copy. (Where can I download that paragraph?) In fact, I'm pretty sure that all it requires is that if binaries are distributed, source must also be made available to those same recipients. Red Hat is doing even better than that ( emphasis in A: mine):

Q: You mentioned licensing - what does this mean? I thought Linux was free.

A: Except for a few components provided by third parties (for example, Java) all the code in Red Hat products is open source and licensed under the GPL (or a similar license, such as the LGPL). So you always have free access to the source code. In fact you can download it from our FTP servers at any time. However, Red Hat does not provide free access to the binaries . . . .

Under the GPL, RH is under no obligation to give source code to random, anonymous third parties -- only to those people to whom RH distributes binaries. Further, (despite assertions elsewhere to the contrary) anyone who has purchased the RHEL package for even one machine cannot by the terms of the GPL be denied the legal right to sell or give copies of all of the GPL software to anyone they wish. Any attempt by RH to assert such restrictions would void their license to redistribute the GPLed contributions of thousands, if not millions, of programmers. RH knows better than that.

Re:I threw up my food.

[txviking]

Very interesting thoughts... but 1) Bush speaks fluently Spanish (some say better than English ;-) ) 2) Kerry does speak fluently French

Thank God for Windows and OSX.

[Anonymous Coward]

You install it, you run it, and it works.

So WHEN did you say you'd get the Linux finally installed?

LOL!

License does not forbid sharing.

[The Monster]

although you can technically share the software the reasonable way to do so is prohibited . . .read the actual license at here

I read the license. It specifically explains how to legally share the software - specifically by deleting RH trademarks and 'anaconda-images'. I don't believe anyone thinks that someone has the right to distribute RH software, with its trademarks and everything present. But I could be wrong. Maybe the FSF should look into it.

Re:License does not forbid sharing.

[jtotheh]

I read the license. It specifically explains how to legally share the software - specifically by deleting RH trademarks and 'anaconda-images'

I know, they now have something like that at CheapBytes. Reminds me of when the Judge ordered Microsoft to produce a browserless Windows - they brought in some mess that wouldn't even boot and said they were doing what he asked.

I'm sure RedHat's people/lawyers are way smarter than me and that technically they are in compliance with the GPL - but if you read any of Stallman's stories about printer drivers and NDAs etc RHAT are not in step with the spirit of GNU.

If you have to pay for support to get the software that doesn't really seem very different than paying for the software. It would be different if you could opt out and maybe get support elsewhere. They are not allowing anyone to compete on the support services. Sort of reminds me of the "Microsoft tax" on laptops.

Just as soon as....

[Anonymous Coward]

...we finish hacking the gibson.

You cookie.

my redhat story

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed redhat 8.0 last year, my first try at a linux installation ever, since i've been hearing that it's so darn great.

it doesn't detect my sound card.

it detects *a* video card, just not the one I have in the box.

it detects my ethernet adapter correctly but can't initialize it.

user friendly my ass. windows found everything just fine, but linux is a soundless, offline, slow-graphics piece of junk to me.

the end.

Daniel Lyons Article

[Xenographic]

This is another Daniel Lyons article.

Daniel Lyons is an idiot. He does no research whatsoever, as far as I can tell. He wrote a piece on Groklaw that consisted of reading PJ's (inaccurate, to protect her privacy) whois information on her domain and accusing her of working for IBM simply because IBM has an office in that city (the irony being that she doesn't actually live there...).

To support his arguements, he quoted random trolls. I don't remember offhand if they were from Yahoo or Slashdot, but it doesn't matter and I mention this simply to give you some idea of how little thought this man puts into his pieces.

In short, the proper response to an idiotic article like this is simply to consider the source, and then ignore it. Save, of course, that I reccomend to everyone who might care that they never subscribe to Forbes because their research is shoddy, and I can prove it with respect to these stories.

At least Didio seemed to finally wake up when last she commented on SCO, only to stop commenting on it (at least, so far as I have seen as of this writing). Lyons, however, seems to have gotten upset when it became clear to anyone following the SCO story that he had done no research, and is thus personally invested in the story at this point. That is the only explanation I can give for his incredibly infantile and poorly reserached article on PJ, which was, ironically motivated by her comments that he needed to do better research...

So then, it is clear that Forbes' editors are prone to letting poorly researched crap past them (assuming they actually do any sort of editorial review over Lyons to begin with), and that the entire publication should be considered suspect until such time as they can demonstrate better research skills, not to mention a higher level of maturity.

Frankly, to me, Lyons is nothing more than a troll who uses a spell checker and has wider readership. My primary uses for his article consist entierly of a meager amount of comedic value and source material to have printed on novelty toilet paper. I should hope that no one ever decides to challenge that as fair use, because I would have too much amusement in creating bad puns with the acronym IP... ;]

Re:Daniel Lyons Article

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have too much amusement in creating bad puns with the acronym IP

Like IP therefore I am or IP on your IP (concerning the "novelty toilet paper" bit) ... ?

It's odd, though, how IP therefore I am is strangely reminiscent of the idea that the current IP regime is the best and only means for rights holders to profit from their work...

Somebody should make it the new motto of SCO ;) It's eerily apropos ... especially considering how infantile they act ...

Re:Daniel Lyons Article

[Anonymous Coward]

IP therefore I am

Heh. Yeah, that pretty much sums up SCO ...

If not for their inane IP claims, their business would already be dead...

So you want us to become THE BORG?!?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet people still malign Bill.

What the Linux needs is Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a troll. For Linux to succeed, they need to hop on Microsoft's wagon. When MS-Linux is released, you will get this:

1) Easy OS installation

2) Seamless device detection

3) No-hassle driver updating

4) Quick software installation

5) World class APIs in DirectX

6) Windows Media Player

7) Intuitive GUI

8) Windows Update

So to get Bill on the Linux side, it's up to YOU to convince Linus to change the license so that a real coding house can fix what Linus can't. The GPL has shown it is flawed, change it to a BSD license and ride the rising tide of the guiding hand that Microsoft can provide.

Microsoft, the savior of Linux. If you truly love Linux, you will be in favor of this.

Actually a good move on Microsoft's part.

[ajutla]

Microsoft is concentrating first on a security-focused update (SP2) to Windows XP. I think this shows that at least MS is trying to work out outstanding problems in their existing OS before rushing Longhorn and forcing people to upgrade to that to improve their security. It looks like---or at least I hope, that MS is paying more attention now to making their products more secure, . I wonder if this has anything to do with the deluge of viruses hitting Win computers in the past few several months (like Blaster). Probably.

Re:Actually a good move on Microsoft's part.

[ajutla]

That was completely the wrong article I liked to, sorry about that, here's the right one.. Actually, it is interesting to also note that MS is going t othe point of breaking some application compatibility to improve security.

Jumping the Shark

[SoupIsGood Food]

More and more, I get the feeling that Red Hat has jumped the shark.

Novell is moving aggressively into the corporate market, while reveling in the power of viral marketing by "doing the right thing" by the Open Source community. It's agressively pursuing big deals, like the recent one to put SuSe on IBM's boxes. Knoppix and Mandrake have the n00b market all but cornered, and Debian and Gentoo are the must-haves for the Power Users.

Fedora is the odd distro out: not as approachable as Mandrake, not as stable as Debian, not as bleeding edge as Gentoo, and without the corporate cred of Novell. Red Hat, in spinning off Fedora, has really alienated a lot of potential customers, most of which buy on the say-so of seasoned geeks. Geeks are no longer saying Red Hat.

Oddly enough, Slackware is seeing something of a renaissance... stable and secure and with support contracts available is very attractive to a lot of traditional Unix shops who don't need flash and flair.

SoupIsGood Food

Re:Jumping the Shark

[Erwos]

What you're neglecting to mention is the fact that Novell is also moving to aggressively lock people into Netware. Have you ever talked with any of their sales reps?

The last time they came to my university (around 3 weeks ago or so), it was a _debacle_. They said they didn't feel any particular need to GPL everything. They said they weren't going to support anything but SuSE for Netware. They lied to us directly when we asked whether Netware was going to move entirely to a Linux kernel ("we'll do both forever!" Right.). They talked about how great their pricing scheme was, but when further queried, they _didn't have one ready_. We could not have bought from them even if we wanted to!

Compare this to the Red Hat rep, who told us exactly what we wanted to hear, and then offered us amazing terms for licensing. Novell may or may not be doing a good job on the corporate side, but they've effectively locked themselves out of the rather lucrative educational market, unless they magically turn comptent real fast.

In other words, Novell just bought SuSE and Ximian. Give them some time to make idiot mistakes in public, and I promise you'll see them. Novell's management is not exactly the greatest ever.

I also think that people don't understand what exactly the benefits of RHN are _besides_ the updates. That's only part of it. It's absolutely excellent to be able to remotely schedule individual updates to individual machines, as well as remotely install packages without touching the command line. Red Hat _is_ genuinely easier to administrate than pretty much every other distribution I've seen - I think RH just does a poor job of marketing that.

Making a mistake is not the same thing as jumping the shark. If Red Hat starts bleeding subscribers (which, I should note, they have NOT done), we can talk about their situation in more dire terms. But Novell buying SuSE does not suddenly make them into an unstoppable juggernaut.

-Erwos

Re:Jumping the Shark

[theantix]

Funny you should say that... I recently switched my primary desktop from Debian unstable to Fedora because it strikes the right balance (for me) between having up to date applications and a solid desktop system. Mandrake is too KDE oriented, Sid breaks important stuff too often, Woody is too outdated, SuSe doesn't have good application support unless you buy their CD, and I don't have the patience to compile everything for Gentoo nor the inclination to manage a Slackware installation.

These are all fine distributions, don't get me wrong... my point is not that they suck and that Fedora rules, my point is that Fedora strikes a new balance to the mix that some users like me will prefer. If it's not right for everyone that's actually very good -- it can only benefit the Linux community to promote diversity in distributions so hardware and software vendors can't only support binaries for a single platform.

Gentoo!!!

[bonch]

Good lord, man, you're supposed to be randomly referencing Gentoo when you do that! FreeBSD? Debian?!

P.S. If Gentoo's portage was ported to FreeBSD 5.x, I'd be a happy man indeed.

Re:Gentoo!!!

[ImpTech]

'Course, afaik portage is all python, so there should be little porting involved. Just start making a repository.

Re:Gentoo!!!

[Billly Gates]

"Good lord, man, you're supposed to be randomly referencing Gentoo when you do that! FreeBSD? Debian?!

"

Shudder

Redhat sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like Microsoft. Greedy, corporate, scumbags. Can't wait to see them go belly-up. Open source seemed like a good idea for a while but now reality is sinking in. I'm giving up on my push to switch over to Linux at my company. At least with MS I don't look like an ass, like I look now after preaching how Linux was going to save bundles of money from my budget. I love going back to the CFO and saying now "uhhh, if we want a stable, updated Linux we'll need to cough up piles of cash." No, from now on I'll be using Windows and praying that they fix the gaping security holes. Bite me Redhat and the Linux community for not living up to the hype. Yeah, that's right...Linux sucks on the desktop and is a pain in the ass on modern servers. No, I'm not a programmer and I'm not interested in writing drivers. Linux distros are so fractured with their different idiosyncrasies that it's not easy to switch to a different distro. You would think that the Linux community would have learned from the Unix community about different flavors of an OS. Life was better during the time between Windows NT4 SP5 and Windows 2000. Now I need to kill those Linux boxes and replace them with Win2k. I won't get fooled again.

Want RH Enterprise 3 without the RH license crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always CentOS 3.1.

http://www.centos.org/

It's Redhat Enterprise 3 minus all the proprietary crap (built from the same SRPMs) and it's free. For those who don't have time to keep up with all the security goings on, they seem to be Johnny on the spot with security/bug updates so a simple:

yum update

will check for and install updates on all installed packages. Good stuff. I'm in the process of upgrading my farm of RH 7.3 boxen to Centos 3.1 now and it has been rather painless. I wanted to stick with something that "looked like" Redhat to eliminate the admin learning curve and to make it easy to install commercial packages that are dependent on Redhat-isms.

Cheers,

funny....WB Linux != RHLinux != UNIX

[jtotheh]

White Box is a knockoff of RedHat, which is a version of the GNU knockoff of whatever UNIX really is..........

Listen and Pay Heed

[Anonymous Coward]

Carey and Beier are making very valid points
and Linux companies should take heed. Instead
of castigating them you should be applauding
them for brining this to the forefront. Put
them blame where it belongs, on RedHat and
other vendors that are causing the problem.

Wake Up Call

[Anonymous Coward]

If RedHat or any other Linux company thinks I'm
going to spend for Linux what I could get AIX
or Solaris for they had better think again. You
can live in a fantasy land if you want but I don't
and Linux ain't no AIX or Solaris. Not even close.

"Lightning rod"

[adminispheroid]

From reading a few of Daniel Lyons' recent articles, it is apparent that Forbes is taking pointers from AM talk radio. If, like Rush Limbaugh, you make a lot of outrageous statements and then back them up with flimsy arguments, you get a lot of attention -- a lot more than if you had said something reasonable. And so your site gets slashdotted, and if you're Forbes, that means you make a fortune from your advertisers. In the media, this is called having someone who acts like a "lightning rod". Perhaps this approach is familiar to those on slashdot, where it is called "flamebait".

Although Linux and open source in general are favorite Daniel Lyons topics, he recently published two incoherent rants trashing Sun. But it's likely he gets a bigger response out of trashing open source, so he'll probably return to that.

So if you like this kind of trash talk, fine, but if you don't, just do what you do with Rush: stop listening.

Re:Redhat sucks. [ Mod Parent Up ]

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod Parent Up...

A couple of comments:

1) IMHO Linux was always much more fractured than
Unix. The Linux community has always had
contempt for standards and it shows. At least
Unix had a well defined system and C API that
was followed.

2) In addition to considering MS I would want to
look at Solaris, AIX, or HP-UX.

No surprise, really...

[sheldon]

When Microsoft introduced Windows NT 3.1 back in 1992 they did not have the concept of CALs. This meant that you could buy it for $500 or whatever and replace a Netware server that cost $10,000 for the licensing.

But that was because 3.1 was kind of a crappy first version product, and Microsoft sold it cheap to get attention.

When 3.5 came out, they introduced CALs, but they still wanted to encourage use, and they gave away NFR copies. That's where I got our first install. Even received an upgrade to 3.51 for free.

Then 4.0 came out, no more free copies, plenty of CALS... they'd hit mainstream.

This is the evolution of software companies. Redhat is doing the same thing.

But you can't really blame them, they didn't start turning a profit until they moved to this model. People who believe that they can get somthing for nothing are going to get burned in the long run when their dreams are crushed.

TANSTAAFL

Linux in 1997

[seppy]

I remember when I was first starting out in my interest of UNIX and linux, that I used linux because I could run it on a 386 for the cost of a ton of floppies. I remember having some UNIX classes and being told the licensing costs for SCO, and for Solaris. Fast forward a couple of years, and I love using Redhat, trying to convince my boss that it's worth it for the effortlessness involved in deploying redhat. Call for some price quotes, $350/server seems like a good deal. Ooops, have to pay by credit card to get the $350/server deal, No PO's. Then we call a salesperson to find out what the deal is and he tells us that it's $850/year/server. $850/year per server? That can't be right. Redhat is good, but it certainly isn't worth $850 dollars per year per server. Our redhat deployments have stopped cold, and we aren't bothering with a redhat wannabee distro either. Too bad, because the the technology was good in the redhat products. Redhat has put themselves in the position to be replaced.

RH does not lock out other support vendors

[The Monster]

If you have to pay for support to get the software that doesn't really seem very different than paying for the software.

The GPL never guaranteed gratis, only libre. RH is doing the source gratis to anyone who wants it.

It would be different if you could opt out and maybe get support elsewhere.

I fail to see how anyone is forbidden from opting out. You can either compile it yourself, find someone who bought a service contract to give you a copy with the RH trademarks removed, or buy a contract yourself for the minimum 1 year period, then go to someone else for support.

Or don't use RHEL. Use Fedora, SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, or anything else you want. The freedom of RH do do this and still comply with the GPL is a feature, not a bug. It's proof that the whole 'GPL is viral' nonsense is the FUD I keep telling people it is.

NO -- though is GPL really violated?

[jtheory]

They are specifically saying that you can't install their Linux software on other computers:

If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System [sic], then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System.

An "Installed System" is defined earlier on in the document:

The term "Installed Systems" means the number of Systems on which Customer installs the Software. The term "System" means the hardware on which the Software is installed[...]

I don't think they quite violate the GPL, though. Read on down to where they discuss what "the Software" is -- it's everything that RedHat sells you, including mostly GPL programs and some freeware (which they specifically say have their own EULAs). They go on in a lot of details about how you have different rights for different Linux programs, and copyright is held by a lot of different people, including RedHat themselves in some cases (and they DO have the right to stop you from using the stuff they have copyright over). From what I can tell, you are free to pick apart a RedHat Enterprise Linux install and install almost all of the pieces on another server, free of restrictions (though they hide these details down near the end and clearly don't want anyone doing it). Still, I suspect that if you just installed a new system straight off the CDs, you would NOT be legal even if all software is GPL, because the default install will use the RedHat online services, etc. which you haven't paid for.

Another excerpt to help you get to sleep tonight:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a modular operating system made up of hundreds of individual software components, each of which was individually written and copyrighted, and the EULA of each component is located in the source code for the component. Throughout this document the components are referred to as the "Linux Programs." Most of the Linux Programs are licensed pursuant to a Linux EULA that permits Customer to copy, modify, and redistribute the software, in both source code and binary code forms. With the exception of certain image files identified below, the remaining Linux Programs are freeware or have been placed in the public domain. Customer must review these Linux EULAs carefully, in order to understand its rights and to realize the maximum benefits available with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Nothing herein limits Customer's rights under, or grants Customer rights that supersede, the terms of any applicable Linux EULA. Red Hat may provide Red Hat Enterprise Linux or other software or content by means of Red Hat Network or Red Hat Enterprise Network. Each software component has its own applicable EULA and all content is provided subject to its own licensing terms.

Then they just list Java as having its own special license (no mention of any of their own software...) then:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself is a collective work under U.S. Copyright Law. Subject to the trademark use limitations set forth below, Red Hat grants Customer a license in this collective work pursuant to the GNU General Public License.

Man.

[Fussen]

'Szulik says he'd love it if Red Hat could become the next Microsoft. "Who wouldn't want to be Microsoft?" he asks. "I mean, come on. Honestly."'

-I wouldn't. The Linux OS is about stability and integrity. Dictionary.com defines Integrity : 'Steadfast adherence to a strict moral or ethical code.'
-The companies that represent what linux is should reflect this in their business practices as well as their products.

'"This is not a religion," Carey says. "I want the most value for the dollars I spend." '

-It is not a religion. But, we do have loyalty, followers, proclaimers and believers of this technology.

-Do not overthrow microsoft and replace it with a wondersoft or megasoft. Replace it with something good.

Something good.

-Replace it with something we can respect and admire; with something that reflects the target-audience's beliefs.

It is smart to get the most value for your money.
It is not smart to support a dictatorship regime.

-We will not be enslaved as history has previously demonstrated. But we can still be enslaved through the rules of business and money in newer more creative forms.

To ponder: If someday we create AI, and it becomes self aware, and it asks us what it is.. We may not be able to say that it came from something perfect, but wouldn't it be nice if we could at least say it came from something good?

I don't want to be Microsoft

[provoix]

From the article: Matthew Szulik, chief executive of Red Hat, says Carey's views do not represent those of most Red Hat customers. But in the same conversation, Szulik says he'd love it if Red Hat could become the next Microsoft. "Who wouldn't want to be Microsoft?" he asks. "I mean, come on. Honestly."

There can only be one monopoly for any given new market. It is the nature of things (e.g. telephony, steel industry, automobile industry, oil, etc.) Unfortunately, M$'s market/technology was a worldwide phenomenon (spelling?). IMHO, M$ was a monopoly that should have been caught long before.

This claim by Szulik (no doubt spoken without thought) reveals their true ethic where OSS is concerned.

There can only be one Ra...

I didn't RTFA

[rodgster]

Typical for /. I didn't RTFA and I posted anyway.

Actually, reading the summary, I concluded it wasn't worth reading. However, the discussion (on /.) of RH was worth reading.

Too bad there isn't a reverse /. effect. You know negative page hits instead of positive. Maybe we should contact Diebold...

Imitation... that's a BAD thing?

[Reteo Varala]

"Most open source is imitation," Carey says. "Linux is an imitation of an operating system. If these [Linux] companies are going to create a price point that is significant enough that they are approaching the same pricing model as the innovation premium, why pay a premium for imitation when I can pay a premium and get innovation?"

Nice, but here's where said argument breaks down...

Pepsi is imitation of Coke... and yet while Coke's #1, Pepsi is enjoying a pretty good bottom line as well as Coke's #1 competitor. Why is this?

Simple... they are both colas, but there are two kinds of people out there... those who want Coke, and those who don't. Pepsi takes an opposing angle against Coke specifically because that'll catch those who don't want Coke.

The same can be said for Windows/Linux. There are two kinds of people out there... those that want to use Windows, and those who don't. (There's the third group, those who don't but don't have a choice... that's where Linux will be picking up the slack within a couple years, but I digress)

Linux's primary strategy is simple... be enough like Windows to compete in the category, but opposite in enough ways to claim all those who don't want Windows. The opposite angle is the Open Source philosophy... and it's provides (now) a strong marketing advantage, just like the "do want Windows" crowd loves the ability to contact MS to get support, the "don't wants" loves the ability to get support from just about anyone who's done work in the Linux operating system (or the freedom to do their own damn tech support)

It's all perspective to the people. Imitation's not bad, as long as marketable differentiation still exists.

Stock Price

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought into RHAT when it was $4-ish per share...

good ol' Daniel Lyons

[saforrest]

These are all by Daniel Lyons, Forbes' licensed troll who wrote an entire column insinuating that the FSF and Eben Moglen were some sort of software mafia shaking down innocent companies for cash left, right, and center, just because (gasp!) they wanted collaboratively-produced software to continue to be released under terms consistent with its original licence.

His wonderful purple prose reveals his opinion of Linux fans:

The dispute, which was leaked to an Internet message board, offers a rare peek into the dark side of the free software movement--a view that contrasts with the movement's usual public image of happy software proles linking arms and singing the "Internationale" while freely sharing the fruits of their code-writing labor.

Most open source is imitation?

[el_oso]

I saw this in the article and disturbed me, what do you think?

"Most open source is imitation," Carey says. "Linux is an imitation of an operating system. If these [Linux] companies are going to create a price point that is significant enough that they are approaching the same pricing model as the innovation premium, why pay a premium for imitation when I can pay a premium and get innovation?"

Well, I think this is true however no system is free of that, not even Windows. Actually I think MicroSoft and Window are as imitators as everybody else. Let's enumerate a few examples:

1. DOS tree arrangement of the filesystem was a copy of UNIX
2. They copy the UI form Apple, who btw copied it from Xerox.
3. They missed the internet and IE was not the first browser
4. Windows was not a networked operating system it had to be "hacked" to get it as an add on with TCP/IP
5. Windos was not a multiuser operating system
6. .NET is the same idea as Java, i.e. and imitiation. Granted it was some other stuff on it, but the idea in principle is an imitiation.
7. The new MS initiative to put an online music store as iTMS.

An probably much more.
So, I don't know what is this guy talking about. Apple also have it's share of imitation, although I personally believe that is more innovator than MS. My personal view is that OSS is not imitating, is talking a good idea and making it possible and then making it better. Perhaps this Carey guy doesn't care much about a bad design and/or security. But that is my opinion.

It's about RH's reputation as a viable choice,

[Ominous Armed Cow]

...not that other choices exist. Whatever happened to Open Source's vaunted lack of vendor lockin? RH has proven that a dangerous illusion, unless you are prepared to say that time spent undergoing mandatory upgrades of your entire machine base is irrelevant, or training wasted on RH products which are now being replaced is inconsequencial, or wholesale migrations to some other distro are no big deal, or licensing schemes for RH workstations which exceed Windows XP upgrade fees are a bargain, or declare that vendors who don't support the new version aren't an issue that RH, the supposed distro of choice for serious business requirements, is concerned about.

RH has damaged the reputations of it's most dedicated advocates, whose only fault was recommending your company's product on the reasonable assumption that nothing like this would ever happen. The people who got RH into the server room now have to explain how they steered their companies into such an expensive quagmire. Why should anybody who values their job and desires to help their employer accomplish its objectives ever recommend a vendor that pulls a stunt like this? Didn't MS try a mandatory upgrade to a subscription based model for XP before they weakened their stance within a few months? Where does RH get the marketing leverage that MS (which owns over 90% of the market and makes more money in 2 typical days than the entire Linux Market makes every year) lacked?

How does RH suggest a mandatory "upgrade" to RHEL 3.0 be performed on 10,000 machines when no upgrade path from RH9.0 is available? Does RH pretend that RH9 was not used in business? Guess they should have bought the RHEL at 2.0, but that doesn't upgrade either, now does it?

Does RH still claim that Fedora, which was billed as "cutting edge" and for "hackers" by the geniuses in RH marketing who were afraid it might hurt RHEL sales, and which *requires* upgrades with every new drop, (a.k.a: a toy), is an acceptable alternative for RHL users who don't want to incur a massive migration charge? Was it the users fault that they used a system which cycled every few years, came which much more software of the kind required than small businesses than the artificially limited RHEL, and was significantly cheaper?

BTW, I have used RH since 4.1 (Biltmore?). I've moved on because the choices offered to me by the distro I have invested years of learning and experience were unacceptably risky for my needs. RH was great when it offered an option for people who wanted a fairly stable release and didn't require support. Needless to say I don't recommend RH anymore to my friends or my clients. As Warren Buffet says, when you sell a commodity, your only as good as your dumbest competitor, and now I know why.

Slackware rules

[petrus4]

>Oddly enough, Slackware is seeing something of a
>renaissance... stable and secure and with
>support contracts available is very attractive
>to a lot of traditional Unix shops who don't
>need flash and flair.

Slack rules. It was the first distro I ever used...3.0 from memory. Gives you the best of a lot of different worlds though...a package system based on tarballs. It also had a perfectly good menu system (albeit tty based) very early on.

I think the fact that Slackware was my first distro was one of the main reasons why I was so disenchanted with many of the later, glitzier distributions. If Slack proved anything, it's that a distro doesn't need tinsel and extraneous crap to still be usable and good.
Proving his common sense and general skill once again also, Patrick has opted for GNOME as the wm of choice out of the Big Two, as opposed to the bloated abbheration which is KDE. If I had broadband, and thus wasn't installing my LFS, I already would have got Slack 9.3.
(End shameless pimpage ;-))

clarification:

[Ominous Armed Cow]

"...RH was greate when it offered an option for people who wanted a fairly stable release and didn't require support..."

When I refer to not requiring support, I'm talking about live human support, not automated access to bug fixes and security patches, which most operating systems, including Microsoft, give away for free. Expecting a customer to pay for fixes is encouraging your users to give your OS a bad reputation.

Why is it

[bferrell]

That these article seem to take the tack that the support and fixes come, not from the distributers, but from the author(s)of the of the individual packages. Is it just that business focused types can't see a model other that mana from the monolith?

When a vulnerability to openssl or openssh, does redhat/suse/deb write a patch and everyone else fall in line? Or does the dev group do a patch/new release and those individual distributers figure out who to package it for the least fuss and muss. Personally (and I'll grant I'm probably not usual); openssh has a problem... I go to openssh.org and get their fix. It usually faster to do that to hang around and wait for a distro based fix.

But, maybe I "don't get it"

nice FUD

[BokLM]

This article is completly stupid.
First he talks about SCO as a big danger, this is stupid.
Then he says Linux is becoming more expansive than Windows, this is stupid, no one asked him to buy RedHat Entreprise, if he doesn't want to pay for support, then he can use Fedora or any other free of charge linux distribution, and if he want some support he can pay RedHat for that.
Now he says that "Most open source is imitation" which is also stupid and completly wrong.
Then he talks about RedHat as the new Microsoft ...

my biggest concern

[alumshubby]

This isn't just a rant: I'm hoping people more knowledgeable than I can shed some light on this for me.

I, an admitted Linux dilettante*, am more than a little anxious about this newfangled Fedora thingy.

I've got the binaries-only user install of RH9 on my box. I'm unclear as to what my maintenance and upgrade path will be now that, as a home user, I have to choose between paying big coin for RHEL or accepting Fedora if I want to stick with RH.

What will happen to up2date? Is that little gem going to be supported by the Fedora community, or will I to have to keep my figurative ear to the ground to find out about new versions and fixes/patches? At least in Windows I have an update manager.

*I still haven't wholeheartedly embraced Linux because I need to keep Win2k going for my wife -- put it down to weak evangelism on my part and inertia and xenophobia on hers. Not to mention, how the heck do you make FrameMaker work under Linux?

Linux is losing its only advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Price is Linux's only advantage. And when it comes down to paying per/copy of RH vs. a Windows deployment the sales call just got alot harder. I guess I'll hang on to my MSFT stock after all.

Re:I threw up my food.

[Anonymous Coward]

"1) Bush speaks fluently Spanish"

Err... for his soundbites on TV maybe! Even then it's not quite right.

Not just IBM

[nurb432]

Remember they are threatening to sue EVERYONE that uses Linux ( and eventually *BSD ). that we are all thieves.

This isn't just an IBM-thing. They are after all of us.. just one step at a time... And if they cant get our money while killing OSS, they are going to ruin the movement by bad press as a backup plan

A popular misconception debunked

[jmorris42]

> which contain licensed tools which RedHat could not publish as freeware

RHEL does not contain any such software. Their extras CD contains non-redistributable items (like a JDK) but they have been including non-free software on clearly marked and seperate media for years now.

If you want proof of my statement, go to my webpage at whiteboxlinux.org and download a set of ISO images of EVERY LAST PACKAGE included in RedHat's _Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0_ product, rebuilt and respun and distributed for several months now with the full knowledge of RedHat Inc. and their apparent approval, based on interviews with employees in a position to speak with some authority on the subject. Or try looking at CentOS, Lineox, etc., all of which are doing pretty similar projects.

Bottom line, RedHat IS one of the good guys, they DO both understand and believe in Free Software and don't deserve 99% of the BS they get here on slashdot. They are trying to find the magic formula that turns their work on Free Software into a viable revenue stream, but they are doing it by playing the game by the rules as written by RMS, ESR and even Debian's Social Contract.

Red Hat is the anithesis of Microsoft

[darthcamaro]

Red Hat's licensing model is very very different than Microsoft. You don't pay to license the software, you pay a subscription fee for support and update. It's a big difference. If you decide you don't want Red Hat support than you just don't pay for it - it doesn't mean that you can't use the software - or support through other open source mechanisms.
Red Hat has always been a strong supporter of the GPL - read the internetnews.com article - they still support it - The GPL is the foundation of GNU/Linux and Red Hat - unlike SuSe who just recently GPL'ed YasT - has always given back to the community. Where would -wannabes- like me be without RPM? Do I really want to compile everything myself??

FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

You have forgotten FreeBSD and Slack!