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Free Alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0?
looper_man writes "I'm a hardware design engineer, and our tools have been migrating to Linux over the last years. I've been running Red Hat Linux 9.0 on our compute servers for a while now without a problem. The latest release of one of our CAD tools requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, and will *not* run with RH9.0. I'm not very happy with the (yearly!) licensing fees that Red Hat wants for RHEL3.0, so I'm looking for alternatives. I plan on running one real RHEL3.0 server (for any OS/tool issues if I need to verify that the problem is real), and the rest of the machines running a RHEL3.0 clone. I've seen CentOS, TaoLinux, WhiteBox, and a few others. I don't have the time to spare to test these out, so I was looking for recommendations from the Slashdot masses. I need something that's stable, easy to install/maintain, and closely tracks RHEL3.0. Any words of wisdom?"
You're an engineer.
You're not the guy who decides that management doesn't want to fork out the cash for RHEL.
-r
I'm a hardware design engineer
...I don't have the time to spare
sorry, but isn't that the point, you pay some else, in this case RH, to do all the hardwork of testing and producing a stable OS and providing support, and this allow you to concentrate on what you do best hardware design engineering. I presume you don't want to 'waste time' on trouble shooting any OS that is less than stable.
So it's a nice question to ask, but I always make sure to ask vendors when they'll support other distros, and the answer, often as not, is "never."
Another one bites the dust
You're spending thousands of dollars on a CAD tool that's critical to your business, yet are balking at a lousy couple of hundred bucks?
Your CAD vendor wants RHEL because they need a consistent, supported baseline to develop their software for.
Personally, I wouldn't want to risk problems later to save a few thousand dollars. If you run into some problem down the road, your software vendor will point the finger at CENTOS or whatever instead of their crappy software.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Not to flame, but someone had to put in the time to create that stability. It is only fair that if they want to be compensated for their time, then you should either:
A) Pay them for their efforts
B) Don't use their product
NOT
C) Use a loop hole to take their work and use it as your own for free.
Remember that it is RedHat that is ultimately creating the updates for both its Enterprise Linux, AND CentOS, so if it goes backrupt, where will that leave you and your organization?
I want to have a kick ass stable OS that is supported by all of the software I need but I am too goddamn cheap to actually pay money for this. Can the Slashdot audience please do all of the testing and evaluation for me, let me know which is the best, and them spoon feed me the updates so it stays current?
Holy shit, I can understand bitching about paying Windows Server licensing fees (pay for the OS, each connection to the OS, each mail user on the OS...) but for RHEL you pay a ONE time support fee per year to use their automated updates system.
If you need more than one box and really want to be cheap (and violate your license agreement, but IANAL), buy one copy of RHEL, install it somewhere, update it, pull the RPM's from the cache and setup a LAN update server and install as many copies as you wish. We actually do this where I work except we do it for convenience. We actually have more RHEL licenses than we use.
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live." - Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"
"C) Use a loop hole to take their work and use it as your own for free."
It's not a loop hole, it is a requirement of the GPL that RH releases the code. It is the risky business model (charging for packaging and support of OSS software) that RH has chosen to undertake, that could cause them to go backrupt.
Yes , well I submitted a few bug reports to several diffrent linux programs. ;) ).
.. there is nothing forcing me to do this.
.
.
.If he really needs the support he will have to pay for it from redhat or another source.
So do hundreds of thousands of others(if not multiple millions , anyway a really really big number
So where is our cheque ?.
This is not why we do it atall though. We do it for the love of the systems and to see our OS improve.
Thats the GPL way . Freedom! in its various forms.
I pay for Debian (order CDs reqularly) and i donate to a few projects.Its my choise to do so
Not even a moral obligation , Contribution is part of the GPL was too.
dont forget how many bug reports that probably get passed back to RedHat proper from projects like Cent-Os too
So remember the part the community plays in all this
Anyway..
Redhats bussiness model is not based on OS sales anyway it is based primarly on Support
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Do your job. If you have authority to decide which of these distros to use, you have the responsibility to make the right decision.
And where are you posting to? Slashdot. What's Slashdot well-known for? Being visited, by and large, by a lot of young geeks with more ambition than they have knowledge. This is the place where people love to trash-talk technology without first bothering to learn what the technology is first (because, after all, all the cool kids know that technology's lame).
Yeah, there's the occasional gem in the comments, but there's a sea of bullshit you have to wade through in order to find it. By the time you're done wading, it would've been easier to just grab all three distros and evaluate them for yourself.
You have a job to do. I suggest you do it, and not substitute a horde of lemmings for your better judgment.
...thats like my car only costs me ONE PAYMENT every month, for 60 months.
The difference is that with your car, the payment requirements end after 60 months. However, with Red Hat, the payment requirement is perpetual. Using the car analogy, Red Hat is a lease where you pay on a scheduled basis forever but get a new one(car/Red Hat version) every three years.
I like owning my cars, not leasing them. I feel the same way about my software.
Remember RedHat 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9? I know with 7 8 and 9 there was a different release cycle, free download of ISOs of one of many mirrors, free off-peak access (paying customers got priority when demand was high), and no enterprise level support. That's what you bought RH AS2.1 for.
By using CentOS (to me it looks to be the most aggressively updated), or another clone, you get a configuration which Oracle and other enterprise partners support. The trade-off is a conscious decision that you won't get any enterprise level support if something goes wrong. To many people, and some organisations, this is simply not an issue. To my workplace, it is an issue, so we have licenses. Horses for courses folks.
Besides, you'll probably find there's a lot of insight returned from the users of EL clones - this might not happen nearly as much if the cash-strapped but expertise-rich hackers couldn't get into the product. RedHat must get something out of it in better and more useful feedback, if not money.
I think it's deeper than that.
First of all, RedHat themselves are the ones driving a huge amount of the bleeding-edge 'enterprise' features found in Linux, and generally integrating them first. So, RH is proactively designing/writing enterprise-friendly features, while distros like Debian are "downstream" and will only get them when Linus gets around to patching them into the mainline.
Second, RedHat is actually someone that vendors like Oracle can pick up the phone and call, which certainly helps while everyone's doing QA and loadtesting.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It isn't a license subscription, it's a support subscription.
Pay up for one system, like you say you plan to, and just install it anywhere else you need it from whatever media they give you. Just understand that you've only paid for support for one system.
Honestly, try reading the GPL before you ask stupid Linux licensing questions like this.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.