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Red Hat Open-Sources RHN As "Spacewalk"
deadearth writes "At their annual summit, Red Hat announced they are open-sourcing the Red Hat Network Satellite product, calling it Spacewalk. This will be the new upstream for the Satellite system management solution. Here is the Wiki."
Automatic updates may be ok for the novice or the person who has no interest in knowing what is being updated until it is actually updated.
The problem you have in the enterprise is the IT mangers need to know what is being updated and talk to the appropriate application people so they can get approval to do the actual update. In the majority of cases you are going to find a vendor who is not willing to support a particular update so you end up with a political mess on your hands.
From the Redhat, Fedora or Centos side it is very easy to setup and maintain an in-house yum server so that you can "lock-in" a specific set of updates from which acceptance tests can be run and once accepted the same updates are then requested by each client. This may take a few months between testing, final acceptance and eventual update roll-out, in the meantime no new updates are are accepted. Then the cycle repeats.
Sounds silly but large corporations insist on this and the Redhat Satellite server was one of the best ways of doing this, however it was not a cheap solution. Since Redhat decided to use yum (RHEL5 on) the Satellite solution can now be replaced by a yum server although some companies with huge amounts of Linux machines could still benefit from the Satellite solution.
I am not quite sure if Redhat supports yum on RHEl4 but the packages can be got from Redhat and they do work. Using yum (not that much different to using apt-get or yast) is very easy and you can vet what you are going to update as well as preventing some applications from being updated such as "Java" and "MySQL" which can result in embarrassing moments if these are updated and the MySQL application does not support the later release.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Net booting is only one aspect of provisioning. What about tracking (servers, virtual machines, assets, images, configs, etc)? Or adding hosts to DNS and DHCP configs? Or keeping machines synced after the initial install? Or password and user management?
From reading https://fedorahosted.org/spacewalk/wiki/SpacewalkFaq it sounds like they have plans on making it not so oracle-centric.
Because they felt like it is a good answer.
The "political statement" part and the "didn't want to be a part of it" are however conspiracy theories - or more likely a reflection of your own views, given your username - that seem to forget that RedHat welcomed the GPLv3 and contributed to the process:
We want to congratulate the Free Software Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Center, and the many companies and individuals, who have all worked so diligently, for their efforts in developing version 3 of the GNU General Public License. Their work is to be commended. Red Hat believes our end user customers will benefit from several of the new provisions in GPLv3, including the patent license provisions. Red Hat will continue to contribute to projects that migrate from GPLv2 or other licenses to GPLv3, and we will look to include GPLv3-licensed projects in our future distributions. GPLv3 will also be added to the list of approved open source licenses under Red Hatâ(TM)s Patent Promise.
Which means that they'll use both and see no problem in either - just like the vast majority of projects and developers that like the GPL in the first place.