Red Hat

[Mark Komarinski]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 10:17:57AM -0400, bscott at ntisys.com wrote:
> 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 :)

That's only if you want to stick with Debian stable.  Which is usually great
for servers, but pretty bad for desktops.  There are a number of bugs in
Debian that have not been patched in over a year.  I'm sure you can
find similar problems with Red Hat, but there it is.

>   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.

Vendors schmendors.  We're running Oracle on Debian.

>   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.

I'll probably give Fedora a shot and see what happens over the next few
releases.  As long as kickstart is still around, reinstalling desktop
boxes every 6-8 months won't be that bad.

>   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.

$179/yr/machine is a LOT of money.  And it doesn't even provide support:

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/purchase/

-Mark
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