[CLUE-Talk] RedHat - friend or enemy?

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Sun, 2003-09-07 at 00:28, Gary Threlkeld wrote:
>  
> Is RedHat positioning to become the Microsoft of the Linux world 
> or are they truely serving as one of the "point" organizations 
> leading the charge for acceptance of Linux and the champion 
> of those fighting SCO?

There is a world of difference between Microsoft and Red Hat. The whole
"Red Hat's trying to be Microsoft" thing is beyond old at this point. It
crops up every few months, and it's ridiculous. It's one of those tired
cliches that hack writers and editors like to pull out every now and
again to get the Slashdot crowd to pump up page views on their site. I
think I've even been assigned that angle before by an editor that will
remain nameless... for those without long memories or a long history
with the open source community, this has cropped up every time Red Hat
has done something to try to make money. They were dissed when they
announced they'd have a twelve month end-of-life policy for their
"consumer" distro. They were dissed when they cracked down on people
using their trademark to sell cheap Red Hat CDs on eBay. And so on. 

The article makes it sound like Red Hat won't allow people to get
updates or patches, which isn't true -- Red Hat simply charges for
access to the Red Hat Network. If you want to follow security
announcements from Red Hat and download the RPMs for free, and manually
install them, you can. You can sign up for a single freebie RHN
subscription and save the RPMs (I think) and distribute them to other
boxen to install by hand or write your own method for updating the
machines. You can install APT for RPM and use that to automate updates.
You can forgo Red Hat altogether and run KRUD and get a yearly
subscription for updates from Tummy.com. 

Let's not forget that the company still puts everything out under the
GPL or a similar license. Let's not forget that the company has no
prohibition against letting people distribute their distro. How
Microsoftian is that? 

If you don't like the terms of Red Hat's support agreement then you can
run SuSE or Slackware or Debian or Gentoo or Mandrake or any number of
other Linux distros. Who else will you buy Windows from if you want to
run Windows, but don't like Microsofts EULAs? 

God forbid that Red Hat should charge people for their services.
Something else that the article doesn't mention is that part of what
you're paying for is not just access to RHN, but support. Support of any
kind means warm bodies that have to draw a salary. That means that Red
Hat has to bring in enough money to pay those people. Bandwidth also
costs money, in case people have lost sight of that fact. 

People on the corporate side have bitched for years that Linux isn't
supported -- so Red Hat starts providing support that the corporate
customers want, and then the other side starts bitching that Red Hat
doesn't want to give it away for free. 

You want free? Use Debian. Get ready to roll up your sleeves and do some
work if you want to run bleeding edge software, but that's what Debian
is for -- a community distro that's non-commercial and completely freely
available. 
 
> Would be interested in thoughts from those running RedHat as well
> as those running other distributions.  Please mention your Linux
> distribution with any comments that you can share.

I run 'em all. I've been running Slackware since 1996, and I also use
Debian on two of my internal machines, I use Coyote Linux on my
firewall, my primary desktop and my laptop use SuSE 8.2, my "game"
desktop runs Mandrake 9.1, the server that I host dissociatedpress.org
on runs Debian, and I have virtual machines running Red Hat, Debian and
Slackware (thanks to UML) available for any testing that I want to do.
My youngest brother is living with me for the next year to finish high
school out here, and I set him up with a computer running Xandros. 

Red Hat' isn't my first or second choice of distro, but not because of
any similarities between Red Hat and Microsoft. I simply prefer other
distros. 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
Aim: zonkerjoe
http://www.dissociatedpress.net