Slashdot Mirror
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.
'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.
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.
Got Code?
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...
Easy answer!
u x.org
http://www.taolinux.org
http://www.whiteboxlin
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!
Redhat and SuSE both offer discounts to students.
Redhat
SuSE
Prices start at $25. Consider those facts before running your mouth.
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
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
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
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.
My Company
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).
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
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.
;) ) are on the bandwagon too.
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
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
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.
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).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
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.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
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.
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?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
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?
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,
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.
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.[...]