Red Hat Linux 8.x/9.x... is now considered by RH as a bleeding-edge operating system for consumer use, mainly targeted towards home users, small business and enthusiasts.
As a significant percentage of Red Hat's revenue is coming from Advanced Server (Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS), they are trying to push companies into buying this product. One way to achieve this is to turn the general releases of Red Hat Linux into a constantly changing test bed for Advanced Server. Features that have proven solid in the general releases will be eventually migrated into the Enterprise Linux products. As this will no doubt result in reduced stability in the general releases, anyone wanting stablity and reliability will need to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I had a number of servers running 6.2/7.2/7.3, but as 7.3 won't be supported after 31-Dec-03 I had to decide what version I was going to run. Like many people, I don't want phone/email support from Red Hat, just the errata packages for security and bug fixes. As the general releases won't be supported for more than 12 months (unlike RH6.2 - 3 years), I was not too keen to upgrade my reliable 7.2/7.3 servers with 8.0 or 9.0 at the end of the year. So I built my own version of Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 from the SRPMS and have a near automated process for building the errata RPMS from the SRPMS. I can install my custom built version of RHAS 2.1 on as many servers as I like (quite legally - GPL) without needing to pay Red Hat a huge amount of money in per server per year licenses. With this, I now get the benefit of 5+ years of errata for a stable Linux distribution. I don't mind paying money for errata packages, such as if Red Hat decided to support 7.3 for 2 more years, but I'm not going to pay $US1500 per server, per year. I do not need any of the advanced features in Red Hat Advanced Server, all I am looking for is a reasonably priced release that is stable and supported (errata) long term. However, I object strongly to paying per server licensing for software that is essentially GPL. You might ask, why not run another distribution, eg Debian, Slackware...? Well, may software vendors only support there products on Red Hat Linux and most are now moving to support only Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SLES. Server manufactuers are also moving to only supporting the Enterprise Linux products of the main 4 Linux vendors with their hardware management agents. Anyone running one of the 'consumer' versions of Red Hat will soon be out in the cold. > I disagree, I think there are several valid reasons to be annoyed by Red > Hat's latest move. Most of which have to do with running Red Hat in an > enterprise environment. > > Why should third parties develop for an ever changing platform? Already > it's hard enough to convince them that there is a large enough user > base, now try and explain to them that there will be a major version > change at seemingly random times. > > How on Earth does this look in the least bit professional? Was 8.0 the > beta for 9.0? Six months for a major version number? This comes off as a > poor management decision, it makes Red Hat appear unstable. Between > their release of a bunch of "enterprise" distributions, the recent cut > off of rhn and two major releases in six months, Red Hat looks desperate > for sources of income. Big corporations won't base their infrastructure > on a company that doesn't look like it's going to be around next year. > > Why would I want to support another distribution? I was only now > starting to place 8.0 in non critical systems, now you expect me to > support 7.X, 8.X, and 9.X. And don't give me the "they have AS for that" > argument, show me the company that will pay for AS for a nameserver and > I'll show you a company going out of business next week. Red Hat can > leverage administrators familiarity with their product to sell the AS > product line for mission critical systems such as Oracle Databases, but > if Red Hat decides to shoot itself in the foot like Caldera did, don't > think I won't switch distributions in a second. > -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
