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Red Hat Readies RHEL 5 for March 14 Launch
Rob writes "The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have
liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial
Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March
14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will
better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as
Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms. RHEL 5 has been cooking for more than two years
and includes changes to the Linux kernel. In addition to the support for the Xen
hypervisor, RHEL 5 also has an integrated version of Red Hat Cluster Suite, the company's
high availability clustering software, as well as support for iSCSI disk arrays, InfiniBand
with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and the SystemTap kernel probing tool."
Ah here we go. Let's put it this way... If RedHat went out of business tomorrow, those same kernel developers would just go to another company, and in all likely hood will still be kernel developers. Looking at that list, IBM which doesn't even have a distro, is not that far behind. More telling is the "Unknown" which is twice RedHat.
Don't get me wrong, I applaud RedHat for all the work they are doing, but I have no illusions that they are the only company willing and able to do that work. Furthermore, they have designed their product line and pricing of it in a way that just doesn't work for a huge segment of the market. Why should I use a product that fails to meet my requirements of having "reasonably" fresh software, and pricing that offers reasonable discounts on large numbers of copies? CentOS, via their Plus repository gives me the best of both worlds. Stability and consistency where I need it, fresh software when I need it, at a price point that can't be beat. RH can learn from Centos.