[NTLUG:Discuss] Red Hat 9.0 End of Life 04/30/2004

[Cameron, Thomas]

> Please don't tell me that a company making a living from OPEN 
> SOURCE is 
> going to charge a per box per year fee for it!!!  Did they 
> move the RH 
> headquarters to Redmond while I wasn't looking?

I am constantly amazed at people who say that you shouldn't charge for F/OSS software support.  You have to remember that software development - even just packaging and testing - is very expensive business.  The folks at RH have to get paid, and RH is a commercial entity with responsibilities to its shareholders.

Red Hat has done more to gain mainstream F/OSS acceptance than any other distro in the US.  They have given away their distros since, what, 1994?  Now people are pitching a fit because RH has the "unmitigated gall" to focus on the most (possibly the only) profitable market segment - the enterprise.

What these gripers (not you, Greg) won't recognize is that by any standard, a RH desktop machine with support is still only a fraction of the cost of an XP workstation - the same is true of a RHEL server vs. Windows 2003 plus Exchange with MS client access licenses.  Red Hat is still a better deal, a better product, and cheaper.

RH has committed to supporting Fedora.  I believe that Fedora will probably have a more rapid development cycle than RHL did, and I suspect that security updates will be released as fast or faster than RHL updates were.  Why doesn't eveyone just settle down and see what happens instead of jumping to slam Red Hat?

Just my two cents.
--
Thomas Cameron, RHCE, CNE, MCSE, MCT
Assistant Vice President
Linux Design and Engineering
Bank of America
(972) 997-9641

The opinions expressed in this message are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer, Bank of America.