[OT] Linux leaders offer education discount

Bret Hughes bhughes at elevating.com
Sun Nov 16 22:04:42 UTC 2003


On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 13:53, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Ed Hill wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 03:18, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >
> > >   if that's the case, how many students are going to be interested
> > > in the more stable but certainly older technology of RHEL on their
> > > desktop?  to which release of RH does RHEL currently correspond?
> 
> RHEL 3.0 is pretty close to RH9+.
> 
> >
> > Hi Rob,
> >
> > Probably quite a few grad students, post-docs, and professors will be
> > interested.  Theres a lot of researchers using Linux for data reduction
> > who really don't care about bleeding-edge stuff.  They just want a
> > stable, secure, and up-2-date platform for their desktops, servers, and
> > beowulf clusters.
> >
> > For instance, we have dozens of users matching that description in our
> > department.
> 
> Another reason to stick with the slower-moving product is support for
> commercial software.  I kind of doubt that we'll see products like Maple,
> Matlab, Mathematica, SPlus, CPLEX, etc. staying fully current with a
> fast-moving Fedora product.  They'll be supporting the OS that they can
> get support for themselves, namely RHEL.  And they will be very happy with
> the longer life cycle.
> 

TO continue this point, I have to believe there will be lots of software
out there willing to consider porting/suporting a linux version of their
software now that they can see a platform that does not change every
time a new kernel comes out.  They will now be able to say we support
RHEL WS  version 3 and know that they don't have to go through a
significant testing cycle every 3 months.

Bret





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