[H-GEN] which Redhat?

Tue Apr 8 21:22:23 EDT 2003

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On Wed, 2003-04-09 at 09:11, Peter Arnold wrote:
> So what happened to RH 8.1 etc? I was sitting back and waiting for the
> "mature" version of 8 when they seemed to have moved on to version 9....Sigh...
> 
> Should I wait till version 9 matures? Is 8.0 mature and stable?

This was discussed yesterday right here, so this is a repeat of what was
said then.

My take on this is Red Hat is changing their business model.  They want
to get more money out of their business customers - the number they are
aiming for seems to be $1000 per year.  But, Red Hat is open source, so
there aren't too many levers they can wield to make you pay that $1000. 
I, for example, have never paid them anything.  Its not something I am
proud of.  Here are the levers available:

- They can try and make you buy the CD's.  This is a reason Red Hat's
  rpm format does not download and upgrade as easily as deb, and it
  has nothing with "deb technically is better than rpm".  Technically,
  there is very little difference between deb and rpm.  It is because
  Red Hat does not want you to upgrade over the web, they want you to
  buy Red Hat CD's, so they make upgrading hard.  They do have the
  equivalent of apt-get - up2date.  But mysteriously only Red Hat
  seems to offer up2date servers, even though it is possible for
  anyone to set one up.  It looks like they will be charging a fee
  for access soon (but the free will be included in the purchase
  price of the CD's).  Up till now this is all they have done.

- They can make it hard to get hold of the binary CD's.  They did that
  the Enterprise edition.  You can find source rpm's on the servers,
  but no binary rpm's and no CD images.  Certainly it is possible to
  build your own CD image from the source, but would take you days.
  I am not sure how they get the big file servers to co-operate in
  this endeavour, but they do.  For example, 9 appeared on
  files.bigpond.com, very briefly, then disappeared.  It is now back.
  It was always Red Hat's intention to make it available to
  subscribers for a week prior to general release.  Ie, you want it
  early, you pay money.  Bigpond releasing 9 early on their public
  servers undermined that policy, but for whatever reason the mistake
  was quickly fixed.

- They can control the release of security updates.  A distribution
  without timely security updates is useless, making it a pretty
  powerful lever.  Before Red Hat used to release security updates
  for every Red Hat release (including those done years ago) free
  of charge.  That policy is going to end.  In future Red Hat will
  only release security updates for one year.  Security updates for
  Red Hat 7.1-3 and 8.0 end at 31/Dec/03.  Security updates for 7.0
  and prior have already stopped.  This means if you are running
  Red Hat 7.0 or prior on a machine exposed to the internet YOU
  MUST UPGRADE NOW.  Don't even think about not doing it.  In the
  longer term, it means any machine running Red Hat must have its
  guts ripped out and replaced every year.  This is not a viable
  proposition for a Sysadmin running 50 machines in a business.  But
  Red Hat has the solution, they have introduced ... taaadaaa, the
  Enterprise series.  Red Hat Enterprise will have security updates
  released for 3-5 years.  But it will cost you $1000 to purchase and
  $1000 per year to subscribe to security updates.  (There are very
  ballparkish figures.) They  still have to release the security
  updates as source, and they are not hard to compile, so the $1000
  per year is optional.

- They can control the quality of the release.  Traditionally, the
  Red Hat releases 7.x got better as x got higher.  Well, there will
  be no more .x's for the home edition.  No 8.1, no 9.1 - just 9, 10,
  11 and so on.  Not only does that mean the releases will not be a
  stable as before, it also means the releases no longer have to be
  compatible with each other.  The libraries do not have to be
  compatible, the version of the C compiler can change, and the
  configuration file formats can vary.  Moving programs between
  releases will become dammed hard.  This has an up side of course.
  It means they can include the latest and greatest version of
  everything in each new Red Hat release.  For example, they coped a
  lot of flak for the version of the C compiler they based Red Hat 7
  on.  We were stuck with that version for 2 years.  That will be a
  problem no more.  We will get the latest software, together with the
  latest bugs.  I presume the Enterprise versions will be based on
  some Home release, and then just have bug fixes and minor
  improvements back ported.  So whereas the Home edition will be less
  stable than before, the Enterprise edition will be more stable.

The general consensus from yesterdays discussion seems to be that if you
are a hobbyist of grass-roots user who just uses Red Hat at home, you
are probably better off with Debian now.  If you are a business user
then Red Hat will be better than before - but it will cost you more.

IMHO, Red Hat no longer has a "Desktop" solution for your mum - if they
every did.  Your mum needs security updates for the life of her machine,
but she is not going to pay $1000 a year for it.  She does not need
servers of course - no Apache, no sendmail.  Red Hat does not produce a
product like that.

In fact I am having trouble finding out just what Red Hat does produce
"right now".  Their web pages have lots of fluffy words that describe
their Enterprise releases, but no hard data.  Not even a version
number.  I have not found any detailed information of what is actually
in them.  Something as simple as the output of "rpm -qail" would
suffice.  They are not even answering emailed queries.  I will have  to
resort the to phone (shudder) soon.

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