On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 03:02:29AM +0200, Martin Stricker wrote:
Kevin Waterson wrote:
But what of the little guy? The guy who decided to throw his lot in by developing applications for linux freely, in the hope that he will be able to freely have access to linux just as he has made his application freely available for redhat to bundle with its OS.
With the advent of enterprise level RedHat products, can we expect the community to still give freely of their time to fix and test RedHat products, or, does RedHat adopt the tried and tested MS model of testing its products on those who purchase it?
I understand what you mean. But the target of the GPL (the license under which most Linux software is published) is not to provide software free of charge. Instead you are getting the code for free, and you may change and distribute it freely! One example: You can download all the source RPMs of RHEL *for free*, compile them yourself, burn them onto CD and *sell* these CDs! Of course you cannot call them Red Hat (or any other trademark). When you look at other Linux companies you don't always get that freedom: Red Hat releases the source code for *all* their distributed software! When Red Hat bought Cygwin they put the proprietary Cygwin software under the GPL and published the source code! S.u.S.E on the other hand releases most of their self-developed software under a license which prohibits most of the use of it.
What some persons on this list (myself included) are complaining about is this: With RHL until 7.3 you got a very stable distro and updates for a long period of time for a very affordable price. This made RHL very attractive for small businesses and simple servers. With the discontinuation of RHL this part of the market is no longer supported by Red Hat, instead I would have to go either for Fedora Core (free of charge, but only 9 months of updates - I need at least the double time, better more - and the software may not be as stable and tested as I'm used to) which is fine for home users, or for RHEL which will provide the stability and long-term updates support I need, but is too expensive for my needs. Currently Red Hat's product portfolio is missing a mid-priced and mid-supported distro, which before was RHL. I need a very stable distro for my servers, and I cannot reinstall (and validate! a two-month procedure!) every half a year. So Fedora Core is not an option for me. RHEL would be nice, but is too expensive (and provides more support than I need). Either Red Hat gets out a mid-range product *soon*, or I need to switch my servers to another OS.
Best regards, Martin Stricker --
I think the analysis if Martin's above succinctly gets to the core of the real problem. We at Trinity run 100 or so machines for student and faculty use and the Fedora Core just won't do it for us. We have not the staff for the fast turn around nor the money to purchase that many RHEL copies. (I am not sure but I am assuming your would need a copy bought for each machine. Correct me if I am wrong.)
On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Aaron Konstam wrote:
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I think the analysis if Martin's above succinctly gets to the core of the real problem. We at Trinity run 100 or so machines for student and faculty use and the Fedora Core just won't do it for us. We have not the staff for the fast turn around nor the money to purchase that many RHEL copies. (I am not sure but I am assuming your would need a
I'm sorry, but you're being slightly pig-headed here. Its just a process of what IT managers have been doing for decades.
You choices are (and there may be more!):
A) make a case to management, and the user community ie. those staff who are telling you that they need Redhat (read Fedora) and won't use anything else. A case for more support staff and time to support Fedora.
B) go with RHEL, but again you need to make a case to the management for a budget.
C) go with another distro that suits your needs/pocketbook
Sorry if I'm sounding strident - I don't mean to.
As my grandmother used to say "A champagne thirst with a lemonade purse"
I apologise for the tone of my last reply, but I think what I said was valid.
Sys admins and people staffing IT departments are used to 'making do and mend', and I think often out of the best of intentions and the desire to help the company/enterprise/college. We're used to pitching low on the costs - and trying zero/low cost solutions.No problem there - that's whats brought us todays internet (based on free Bind amongst other things), Web (again, free Apache) and of course Linux.
But maybe sometimes when it comes to support the gremlins of money have to be brought in (I'm thinking of Dilbert visiting the accounts trolls at the moment :-)
So sorry if I was strident.
On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 01:22:24PM +0200, John Hearns wrote:
On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Aaron Konstam wrote:
--
I think the analysis if Martin's above succinctly gets to the core of the real problem. We at Trinity run 100 or so machines for student and faculty use and the Fedora Core just won't do it for us. We have not the staff for the fast turn around nor the money to purchase that many RHEL copies. (I am not sure but I am assuming your would need a
I'm sorry, but you're being slightly pig-headed here. Its just a process of what IT managers have been doing for decades.
You choices are (and there may be more!):
A) make a case to management, and the user community ie. those staff who are telling you that they need Redhat (read Fedora) and won't use anything else. A case for more support staff and time to support Fedora.
We have been asking for more support staff at the University for 10 years. They add staff for Network maintenance and MS Server Maintenance but not for Linux support (sorry Neil if you read this this is not an attack on you).
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akonstam＠trinity.edu -
John Hearns