Red Hat

bscott at ntisys.com bscott at ntisys.com
Mon Oct 6 10:17:57 EDT 2003


On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, at 7:46pm, plussier at mindspring.com wrote:
> Debian.  Long release cycles, stable, testing, and bleeding edge 
> versions all available for the same price ($0), and a ton of community 
> support :)

  Unfortunately, also near-zero support from major third-party vendors, who
need a "traditional company" and a "traditional product" to do business
with.  :-(  These same problems, BTW, apply to the "new" RHL.

  With these changes by Red Hat, we're re-evaluating our plans here at Net
Technologies.  I'm seriously considering Debian, but the lack of support
from our vendors (e.g., Dell) means other problems.

  There's at least one project that exists to independently build binary
RPMs for RHEL, from the SRPMs which RHS must, by law, provide.  See:

http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/rhel-rebuild-l.html
http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/rhel-rebuild.htm

  I'm thinking that might actually be the best bet for us.  Some of our
customers are interested in paying RHS the big money for support, but most
are not.  Their needs are small, and all involved (except maybe RHS) feel we
can handle them without help from RHS.  If they run into a huge problem,
they can also pay for support at that time.  All we want is a supported
distribution.

  This is, to some extent, freeloading, and thus may not be sustainable, in
the long-run.  With the "old" RHL, we were willing to "work with" RHS, but
the new pricing structure simply isn't feasible for us.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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