“The given deployment details are for my previous employer, who still consults me on a regular basis. I have advocated and deployed Linux there, first as adjunct file SAMBA servers in 1998, for a time on FreeBSD then Red Hat, to entirely displacing NT/Win2k in the server room in 2001, to porting HPUX hosted custom software to Linux as part of my Y2K work, to trialling Linux as desktop, first with Ximian on Red Hat Linux 6.2 to a successful trial with stock Red Hat 8.0 upgraded with the latest Mozilla and OpenOffice.org. Only by providing a proven better solution at the time was anything new adopted.” Read the open letter at NewsForge.
An Open Letter to Red Hat Inc
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
in captilism the prime motivation for do anything is money. if you aren’t going to make money off of it you are not going to do it. maybe if people had bought at least some sets of red hat linux instead of donwloaded them only them they would have made money off of the desktop and continued to develop for it. now if you are willing to cough up some dough to pay for development them i’m sure red hat would have no problem bringing it back but don’t expect them to take it out of their bottom line.
I completely agree with the above comment from Pinko. I mean how long can you take advantage of a company before they have to cut their losses and heal their wounds? Fedora is now being developed and I have no clue if the guy from the article or most people who’ll respond to this Post will. When Fedora is released very soon here, I am sure he can move his company over to it, I’m not sure what will happen with the RHN integration maybe the fedora project will take over that?
Red Hat did the community a huge favor by starting Fedora lets not rip their heads off for trying to stay alive.
It seems the author of this letter has never heard of this adage. The best example from the letter: “All PC are older Intel P2s to newer Durons, all outfitted with only 128k of memory (RH8 runs a little better than RH9 in 128k).”
Other than that, I agree with the previous to responders. Yes, the unpaid support may be going away for the general purpose Red Hat distributions but there are plenty of other alternatives. If he is truly worried about being able to update with some utility he may want to look in to creating a custom Debian distribution specific to the company.
The problem these people have with Fedora is that it’s going to be a constantly bleeding-edge distro with very short support terms.
It is not something you move your company to.
I’m interested to see what Novell and SuSE will do to fill the gap RedHat is leaving.
if we fork fedora project and take long release the
problem is solved
Red Hat is leaving a gap because they weren’t making any money there. It would be silly for Novell to jump right into the same hole.
Man, just think what an integrated SUSE/Ximian Gnome w/WordPerfect system could have done in the marketplace.
I agree with the previous to [sic] responders.
When complaining about a lack of proofreading, it is usually a good idea to make sure your post is perfect.
One unbackspaced ‘to’ in a post not meant to address a corporate entity is not nearly as bad as all the grammar mistakes in his letter. But, yeah, you are right, I made a small mistake.
So basically the letter says “We chose your software and solution because we’re cheap and didn’t want to pay. Similarly we didn’t sign up for a servicing contract since your software’s so stable and reliable. The few times we needed service, you guys were great, but not great enough for us to pay you”.
And now, after the fact (After all, Redhat announced this change months ago, which is when this guy should have sent his whiny letter), he’s complaining about Redhats move to stay in business and be profitable.
Hell, this guy didn’t even use his real name…
And I love how he points out “The high end server and workstation market alone does not offer enough potential for profitable living for myself as a consultant and contractor”.
Well perhaps if others had paid for the services and software of Redhat, they wouldn’t be making this decision, huh? Perhaps if people such as this guy had learned the software, and included the cost of the software with his bill, then he and his kind wouldn’t be in the situation they now find themselves in.
My impression of this guy is someone who knows some Linux, and thought he could make some easy money by saying “Pay me $XXX dollars, and I’ll replace your expensive Microsoft contracts with some great free softaware! If you need help with it that I can’t provide, don’t worry because that’s free also! Free! Free! Free!”
And now he’s in the predicament wherein his promised solutions (“was, is, and always shall be free!”) aren’t holding true, and he’s not capable enough to support these systems directly.
And the sad part is that there’s probably more doofuses out there who did similar things, and are now going to point their fingers at Redhat as being the bad guy, when the reality of it is that they were too cheap, or didn’t think a project through to completion when they tried to push Redhat Linux as a viable alternative to MS products.
It’s really sad because Redhat’s making a smart decision here (no more freeloaders!), and they’re still offering to help out the individual users, and Linux as a whole, via their Fedora project (Made by freeloaders for freeloaders!).
But if guys like this are pointing fingers now that they’ve convinced companys to switch, rather than offering alternatives, or saying “I was wrong: There really is no totally free solution”, then it could result in somewhat of a backlash, and in the long run, more people switching back from Linux to MS products.
I hope that’s not the case, but this guys letter is pathetic IMHO.
Don’t blame the company for your problems dude, blame yourself and the cheap bastards who thought they could get away with little to no IT budget! If you told them “Free, free, free”, and didn’t really understand the ramifications of your comments (ie, “How’s Redhat supposed to pay their employees and stay in business if I keep pushing them as a cost-free solution, and reccomending that people don’t sign up for support contracts”), then you’re getting what you deserve. Do Linux a favor and change to a career more suited to people like you, such as used car salesman or Walmart employee.
It feels like people expect RedHat to support 7.1 to 2010 with same-day security errata. That’s a pipe dream.
What RedHat is doing is freeing themselves of the need to support distributions which aren’t making them money. That seems sensible.
Move to SuSE? Let’s see how Novell changes their pricing structure first, shall we?
-Erwos
My biggest problem is that I work for a university. We teach Oracle on RH Linux. Or at least we did. We use Linux because it is more stable than MS when using Oracle. We can’t afford to but 100 copies of RH Enterprise each year. If Fedora will still run Oracle, fine. If not, we are kind of screwed. RH in the past has been very reluctant in the past to offer academia deals on their products, which wasnt a problem before. We did pay for RH 9 for our infrastructure servers. And now support for them is being dropped less than a year later?!? Using Fedora means upgrading at least once a year because you know they won’t support anything more than 2 versions old and they predict 2-3 versions per year. I’m sorry if I sound a bit ungrateful, but RH is really taking a step backwards here.
What about continuing to use the version of Red Hat that you use now? Would it really matter when all you are doing is teaching a quarter/semester class on Oracle? Just because they will no longer be supporting it does not mean that the products will cease to exist. If you are worried about security RPMs just use rpmfind.net to aquire new ones when security bulletins are released.
I believe support for Redhat 9 is at least one year. All the others are having more than one year. Now, RedHat may not support it directly, but i’ll bet if you use yum or apt-get (which was taking business away from RHN anyways) you’ll be okay.
Anyways, I think a dumb terminal solution with one ES server and 40 dumb clients should solve a lot of the problems. you only have to update the server during security updates and your cost per machine is pretty low ($800/40=$20). Then 128k should be plenty. Well, I mean as L2 cache.
Quickies:
I wouldn’t run gentoo in the enterprise.
Fedora could end up replacing LSB and encourage cross distro compatibility.
Consolidation is okay between Novell and Suse or Linux will end up like Handspring vs. Palm.
Linux is not going to solve all the worlds problems, but it doesn’t hurt either.
Distros are like women. It’s fun to play around with a lot, but you eventually have to settle down with one. (applicable for both sexes).
Capitalism relies on mans basic movitvation to take care of himself. So far this central motivation has defeated every other economic system. It would be nice if we could find a better system. What did you have in mind?
Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is free software, you can pay for just one copy and duplicate the installation (and the patches) onto as many computers as you wish. (However, the duplicates will receive no support from Red Hat Corporation.)
Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is free software, you can pay for just one copy and duplicate the installation (and the patches) onto as many computers as you wish. (However, the duplicates will receive no support from Red Hat Corporation.)
Redhat Enterprise linux is NOT free software. If you want to make copies of the product, you must remove the Redhat name and logo from every copy, or pay redhat.
I really don’t know why people are so stupid. Just use fadora, is it that hard to understand? They change the name from redhat X to fadora, and your tiny little brain can’t make the leap? Jesus people!
And btw, banner adds can’t support companies. Also, giving away stuff can’t support a company. I’m just posting this obvious fact, because you people seem to stupid to see it yourself.
Since RHEL is GPL, you can copy it, even if RH doesn’t put it up on mirrors! People have been confused by Red Hat into thinking that if THEY don’t put it on the web in binary form, that WE cannot. You don’t need to re-compile from source. The binaries are GPL too. People need to start mirroring the ISOs and binary RPM updates. So far noone has.
The enterprise people that use Oracle, and need support contracts will still pay Red Hat for that. I have purchased from RH several times (I’m not a freeloader). They got my money several times. I have never used RH support.
I am interested in the AMD64 version (expensive). I checked the Fedora mail archives, and didn’t find a peep about AMD64.
I believe the current kernel supports amd64, and that’s all that’s important. I KNOW 2.6 supports amd64…brb let me check…hold on , I’m checking…just a second well, 2.4 doesn’t support amd64, but amd64 should work with 2.4. amd64 is backward compatible. Now, to be HONEST, I haven’t downloaded fedora so I don’t know if they added patches to make it 64bit optimized (if not it will run amd64 in 32 bit mode).
The article mentions using Red Hat with Samba, Ximian, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. Considering that one can replace Red Hat with another distro (or a BSD) yet keep the other software, I don’t understand what the problem is. If the managers disagree, then maybe they should get rid of the Microsoft mentality which consists of sticking to an operating system even when it adversely affects the business line. With Open Source, there is choice. It is up to the sysadmins to remind this fact to their clients or bosses.
Hey, everyone knows that 640k is enough for anyone, 128k isn’t too bad then surely?