[H-GEN] replacement for RedHat9/KDE

Russell Stuart russell at stuart.id.au
Sun Oct 26 20:46:44 EST 2003


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On Mon, 2003-10-27 at 10:56, Robert Kearey wrote:
> If there's any misconception in the HUMBUG community viz Red Hat's 
> future "product" plans, please take the time to ask me anything which 
> can help keep things clear.
> 

Now there is an offer I can't refuse.

My understanding is that RedHat will be supporting two versions of
Linux.  They are Fedora and RHEL.  Fedora is free but will only be
supported (in terms of security patches and bug fixes) for 9 months. 
RHEL will be supported for 5 years, but costs between $544...$4.4k in
licencing frees per year.  I got those prices off Everything Linux. My
understanding is that if you run RHEL you must pay the yearly licencing
fees for each installation, ie $544k per year per machine if you run
workstation, or $4.4k per year per machine is you run premium.  My
understanding is that as some of our machines are SMP, I would have to
run RHEL AS standard, which is $1.5k per year.

To put that in perspective, I manage about 15 servers scattered around
Australia.  Two of them cost $15K each, the remainder $1.5K each.  That
price includes 3 years on site hardware support, and in the case of
$1.5K machines a Windows XP license I don't use.

I am not willing to run a different distribution (or even a different
flavour of a distribution) on each machine.  Life is hard enough as it
is.  I also want to keep my software upgrade cycle as long as possible -
2 years minimum.  And finally, I do not expect to pay more than the
purchase price of the machine in software license fees during their five
year life time.

What does Red Hat suggest?


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