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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
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.
Just do a cvsup to the latest ports tree. and portupgrade all your ports.
/stand, ./sysinstall, and from there select configure and you can upgrade to a newer distro over the internet!
Or if its a server do a cd
If you absolutely need Linux, then look at Debian stable. Very well tested and also free.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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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.
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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.
/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.
2) Most inhouse code is not so clean. It's not uncommon for scripts to look for
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
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?
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.
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.
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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)
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.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Uh what? That's a nice red herring. Again, red hat contributes back, the misbranded gcc is irrelevant here.
Or they could have avoided fighting and taken the easy way out by settling.
-Reid
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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...