> You don't expect them to still support Red Hat Linux 4.2 either, do you? > Red Hat, Inc. has to spend money to continue to support products, and no > company on Earth with a commodity product can continue to support it > forever, especially when most of its users pay nothing for it. However, Red > Hat Linux and all of its updates still are, and will continue to be, > available for you to download, use, copy, and distribute at no cost > whatsoever. How much more "free" (in any sense of the word) can you ask for? [notice in the following, I use "you" in an indirect manner (globally, referring to everyone)] I agree, and there is another aspect to it. Beyond a money perspective, legacy support taken to extremes can mean that all tech resources are spent on legacy support. Hey, if you have an old system, run an old OS, or one specially tailored by a 3rd party person. If the tech industry didn't do this at some point, we'd have 99% of tech people doing legacy support. Computer technology moves fast, and legacy would slow things down. I believe that 5 years (most likely average computer life) is long enough, then ship legacy off to 3rd party people if they are willing to pay. Furthermore, things like the TCP protocol should be dumped too... The problem is people would rather continue patching old junk instead of doing it right from scratch because they believe it saves them time of money. That's a big mistake, and is shortcuts (hack jobs) companies and people take that end up becoming more expensive and take longer in the end. Not only a tech problem, since holdng onto the old measurement systems in the US and not spending the billion or so to switch in the 60s or 70s (I wasn't alive then) has cost us a lot more, including a space probe sent to Mars. Its a prime example of the way people think. Therefore, I praise this new direction Redhat is going, and it seems like support is still there, just in a different manner. Btw, you don't need to subscribe to RHN to get the Enterprise version. Just buy it, and then use apt or yum to get your packages from their servers. That's what I did with RH8 and 9 after I bought 7.2. It seems, though, if you know what you are doing, Fedora will do you fine if you are willing to spend the time to scan mailing list archives. Enterprise seems to me more for those that just don't have the time to sit there fiddling around, and have a lot of money, aptly coined Enterprise. Microsoft have set a bad example making people expect legacy support (though not truly delivering it since they want to sell new versons), leading to bloated code, slowing of the industry, etc. Yet, no matter what they say about their record, they don't support their products after a certain time, and have even done things I believe to intentionally weed out programs and users from old versions. One example was to name "Program Files" instead of "Programs", which seems to me to be an intentional action to weed out Windows 3.1 programs since they couldn't handle spaces in filenames.
