On Tuesday 23 September 2003 13:10, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
I am not a Red Hat employee or a lawyer, but I think you would be in violation of Red Hat's contract for RHEL if you did that. (Whether or not Red Hat's contract violates the GPL *has* been brought up in other forums, but I think the fact that complete sources are available may be sufficient. In fact, the company even provides the sources to the non-GPL pieces that isn't required by most of the other licenses.)
I don't think it's RHEL's license in question, but what about RHN's? Isn't it RHN's license that states if you have one hooked up, you must have all, or is it RHEL's?
I don't think it's RHEL's license in question, but what about RHN's? Isn't it RHN's license that states if you have one hooked up, you must have all, or is it RHEL's?
As a support company, we don't need RHN. We need a solid OS (given the that RHN is not the only vector for keeping RHEL solid). We would gladly pay for a copy every year, or even a reasonable monthly fee for the rights to deploy to our customer sites. Otherwise, it's actually advantageous, in a business sense to support Microsoft. If you are paid to do support, always deploy the most defective product (assuming integrity isn't a big thing to you).
That being said, I recognize that RH needs to make money and we're happy to work with them in that area. However, if I went to my customer and told them that I had to tack on an extra $350/$800/$1500 to the install bill, they'd tell me to jump in a lake. That's a lot of jumping considering that we do hundreds of installs each year.
Is RedHat really telling me that I have to purchase support that I do not need in order to provide my customers with a stable platform (where stable == supported with updates and patches for >= 1.5 years)? As a business person, this is a clear signal that it is time to look for another distribution to deploy on. As a hacker, I don't care, I can support and update the darn thing myself. Time is not free, so the business personalilty wins out here.
-Chuck
P.S. I believe this is beginning to diverge from the topic. Where is a good place to take this discussion?
On Tuesday 23 September 2003 14:07, Chuck Wolber wrote:
As a support company, we don't need RHN. We need a solid OS (given the that RHN is not the only vector for keeping RHEL solid). We would gladly pay for a copy every year, or even a reasonable monthly fee for the rights to deploy to our customer sites. Otherwise, it's actually advantageous, in a business sense to support Microsoft. If you are paid to do support, always deploy the most defective product (assuming integrity isn't a big thing to you).
Exactly my situation.
That being said, I recognize that RH needs to make money and we're happy to work with them in that area. However, if I went to my customer and told them that I had to tack on an extra $350/$800/$1500 to the install bill, they'd tell me to jump in a lake. That's a lot of jumping considering that we do hundreds of installs each year.
Exactly what we're hearing, but make that hundreds of installs per month.
Is RedHat really telling me that I have to purchase support that I do not need in order to provide my customers with a stable platform (where stable == supported with updates and patches for >= 1.5 years)? As a business person, this is a clear signal that it is time to look for another distribution to deploy on. As a hacker, I don't care, I can support and update the darn thing myself. Time is not free, so the business personalilty wins out here.
With us it's a bit different. Red Hat is easy for us to support. It just works, and when it doesn't fixes are quick to come, or easy to pound out. The idea of going with another distro is very scary, especially because of all our infrastructure built around Red Hat. We've had to use SuSE in some places, and it's no fun to support. A lot of that could be that we aren't familiar/comfortable with it, but thats a lot of retraining to go through. But, unless RHEL becomes a viable solution, and affordable, then we'll _have_ to go elsewhere. *sigh*
On Sep 23, 2003, Jesse Keating hosting@j2solutions.net wrote:
But, unless RHEL becomes a viable solution, and affordable, then we'll _have_ to go elsewhere. *sigh*
And why wouldn't such elsewhere be the Fedora Project? If you want to support it yourself, you (and others in this business) may get together and keep issuing errata for releases deployed to your customers for as long as you like.
Then, if some customer really wants support from Red Hat, you can add RHEL to the package, since it's likely to integrate easily.
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 19:27, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
On Sep 23, 2003, Jesse Keating hosting@j2solutions.net wrote:
But, unless RHEL becomes a viable solution, and affordable, then we'll _have_ to go elsewhere. *sigh*
And why wouldn't such elsewhere be the Fedora Project? If you want to support it yourself, you (and others in this business) may get together and keep issuing errata for releases deployed to your customers for as long as you like.
My feeling is that these companies do not have the in-house people or infrastructure to do errata, but rely on upstream to do so for them.
Then, if some customer really wants support from Red Hat, you can add RHEL to the package, since it's likely to integrate easily.
My feeling is that these companies do not have the in-house people or infrastructure to do errata, but rely on upstream to do so for them.
Me too, but the load spread out over a lot of small companies, consultants, etc just might be able to pull it off.
-Chuck
And why wouldn't such elsewhere be the Fedora Project? If you want to support it yourself, you (and others in this business) may get together and keep issuing errata for releases deployed to your customers for as long as you like.
An industry consortium. Such a simple idea. I find myself slapping my forehead and asking why I didn't think of that... Ummm, probably because the devil is certaintly in the details. But what the heck, it's worth an attempt.
I've started a mailing list to continue on with this line of thinking. IMHO it's most likely to be geared to those companies, integrators and consultants who have a vested interest in a RHEL type OS lifetime for Fedora (or whatever RH OSs we want to support). Keep in mind, though we'd simply be doing this in an effort to pool our resources, there's no reason why we have to offer the fruits of our labors to the rest of the world for *FREE*. A nominal fee over thousands of users adds up quickly...
List address is http://www.quantumlinux.com/mailman/listinfo/rh-consortium
Then, if some customer really wants support from Red Hat, you can add RHEL to the package, since it's likely to integrate easily.
Indeed. Sounds like a great synergy... if it works...
-Chuck
Hi,
Not speaking for Red Hat.
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 17:07, Chuck Wolber wrote:
Is RedHat really telling me that I have to purchase support that I do not need in order to provide my customers with a stable platform (where stable == supported with updates and patches for >= 1.5 years)?
Keep in mind that the RHEL price is not only covering support incidents, it's funding the whole productization of the operating system. Feature development, integration work, QA, certifications, performance testing, keeping build environments around for 5 years to do errata, keeping people around for that, bandwidth to distribute the errata, documentation, roadmap, trademark defense, everything.
What you are asking for is to get the OS work from Red Hat, then provide the support yourself, without charging the customer for the support incidents twice, right? It's certainly a reasonable thing to bring up, but some way to allow that has to be found that is "win-win" - I'm not able to speak to the issues, as this is mostly a business problem, not an engineering one. I could not tell you for example how much of the RHEL price should be attributed to phone/email support and how much to the other aspects of OS development, so I have no idea how much a "no support" edition would cost.
P.S. I believe this is beginning to diverge from the topic. Where is a good place to take this discussion?
It's probably most on-topic on fedora-list (so I set reply-to), but honestly these lists are developer lists. The people you need to talk to aren't the engineers but the business side of the company, because the issues here are business issues.
Havoc
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 19:08, Havoc Pennington wrote:
What you are asking for is to get the OS work from Red Hat, then provide the support yourself, without charging the customer for the support incidents twice, right? It's certainly a reasonable thing to bring up,
I believe that this is actually the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Basic Edition, is it not?
"Basic Edition provides a one-year subscription to Red Hat Network. It is available via download only."
"Standard Edition provides a full year of Standard support (includes Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-9 p.m. phone support with four hour response (9 a.m.-5 p.m. outside North America) and a one-year subscription to Red Hat Network. Customers ordering Standard Edition will receive a full boxed product with CDs and printed documentation."
I am in a similar quandary with many of the people on the list who are dealing with either the cost of moving to RHEL or the short maintenance cycle of Fedora (a year of errata I was able to deal with but it sounds like Fedora will be much less then that). I have been using Red Hat Linux since 4.1 and I have never once needed installation hand-holding or any type of phone support so Basic might be the route I end up going on some machines. However, for at least half of the machines I manage even RHEL Basic Edition will be too expensive on a per-year basis so I know that I will have no choice but to be supporting at least Fedora. If I am already supporting Fedora for half of my machines I might just use it for all machines, instead of having to support two similar separate products and all the various versions of each.
I try to "support myself" via the community on mailing lists. When I do find bugs I have either lived with them or worked around them (roll my own RPM to fix the problem, for example) and I just file a Bugzilla report with as much info as I can (and a patch where I've been able to provide one) and move on and have left it to Red Hat to either fix or not fix the problem as they see fit. Perhaps if there are enough people in a similar situation and who are willing to contribute back to the project in some fashion, it will start to look like a safer option. I have few cases where I could ever foresee needing the hardware & ISV certifications of RHEL so it really all comes down to package maintenance and life cycles.
Sean
On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 11:42, Sean Millichamp wrote:
On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 19:08, Havoc Pennington wrote:
What you are asking for is to get the OS work from Red Hat, then provide the support yourself, without charging the customer for the support incidents twice, right? It's certainly a reasonable thing to bring up,
I believe that this is actually the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Basic Edition, is it not?
"Basic Edition provides a one-year subscription to Red Hat Network. It is available via download only."
Maybe so - shows why it's best to ask sales and marketing about these things rather than the developers. ;-)
Havoc
What you are asking for is to get the OS work from Red Hat, then provide the support yourself, without charging the customer for the support incidents twice, right? It's certainly a reasonable thing to bring up,
I believe that this is actually the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Basic Edition, is it not?
At $350.00 a pop? Certaintly not.
-Chuck
On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 09:15:56PM -0700, Chuck Wolber wrote:
What you are asking for is to get the OS work from Red Hat, then provide the support yourself, without charging the customer for the support incidents twice, right? It's certainly a reasonable thing to bring up,
I believe that this is actually the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Basic Edition, is it not?
At $350.00 a pop? Certaintly not.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS Basic Editionis $179.
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/ws/
Cheers, Brent
Still probably too expensive for some lots. Anything 29.99 gets some people nervous. However you cant do business at that...
On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 05:59, Brent Fox wrote:
On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 09:15:56PM -0700, Chuck Wolber wrote:
What you are asking for is to get the OS work from Red Hat, then provide the support yourself, without charging the customer for the support incidents twice, right? It's certainly a reasonable thing to bring up,
I believe that this is actually the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Basic Edition, is it not?
At $350.00 a pop? Certaintly not.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS Basic Editionis $179.
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/ws/
Cheers, Brent
-- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@redhat.com http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
Sean Millichamp wrote:
on some machines. However, for at least half of the machines I manage even RHEL Basic Edition will be too expensive on a per-year basis so I know that I will have no choice but to be supporting at least Fedora.
Red Hat could offer you a redistribution contract. You pay a fairly high fee for the right to redistribute the updates to you customers. It should be managed so that the per customer/system price you must charge is reasonable to the customer, say $50/year/system. You then setup you own RHN satellite server, that only your customers can access. I know Red Hat offers a satellite service of some sort, but I don't know the details.
I this model _YOU_ are Red Hat's customer, not your customers. Every system you install/maintain is in the support contract you pay for (So 100 systems/month is ~1200 systems this year). You pay the fee for 1000+ systems, which includes discounts I'm sure, and resell to your customers. Any customers that have a large enought installation (say 100 or 250 systems) would be requred to purchase direct from Red Hat, posibly contracting you for performing the maintaince.
-Thomas
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Alexandre Oliva -
Brent Fox -
Chuck Wolber -
Havoc Pennington -
Jesse Keating -
Sean E. Millichamp -
Stephen Smoogen -
Thomas Dodd