Yes, that was my point.
I have been purchasing RH box sets since 4.2, and RHN since 7.something to support the community.
I knew RHL 9 would be discontinued, but I didn't expect that the whole RHL
line would disappear and I would have to choose between an enterprise product
or a loosly supported comunity based product.
If RH dropped off the map, I would just use something else, it's not a big deal.
Not long after RHL 8.0's kernel broke wine, we moved all our servers to FreeBSD,
and are very happy with the performance, security and cost. I have one machine at
work with Fedora, but I will be replacing it with an OS X box soon. The machine
I have with RHL 9 is a home machine, and to be honest FC1 doesn't work well on
it, because it's harware is not supported and the kernel is too hacked up to make the
availble drivers compile with the RH patches. Since it is a home machine behind a
firewall on a DSL line, I am not all that concearned about it.
Yes, I believe in supporting the Linux community, but I am not about to fork out
for enterprise software, when I just want an alternative to Windows.
I will download the RHEL WS iso's , but I don't think they are what want for a
home machine. I'll check them out, but from what I have heard they are not well
suited to what I wanted {RHL}.
The point is, I _feel_ RH did not act in good faith and I don't trust them now.
As other people put more eloquently than I; it was not the fact that RHL 9 was
EOL it was that RHL was EOL, that broke the Camel's back. After a couple of
QA problems that broke programs I liked, and then RH dropped other programs
I prefered. I was able to get the programs working again thanks to others in the
linux community.
For people who were using RHL as a server platform, RHEL would be a
reasonable alternative, but to assume that everone who paid for RHN was
using RHL to run a server for a business, is not a good assumption. I was
paying for RHN to support the Linux community by proxy through RH's
contributions. As RH progresses with RHEL, they seem to be moving away
from helping the Linux community, and more towards making expensive
proprietary software run on Linux for the benefit of Corporations. Granted
some of the work being done will help the Linux community in general.
Due to lack of support for open source software that was once supported
and apparently replaced with support for proprietary software in it's place, I
don't feel RH is providing the support it used to. For that reason I will not
financialy support RH, I will instead have to find another way of providing
the level of support that I felt I was giving in the past.
Preston Crawford wrote:
On Wed, 2004-04-14 at 09:29, William Hooper wrote:
RHL 10 isn't that big of an issue. You still have 6 months to decide what to move to and test how it will work. Waiting until April and saying "the sky is falling, Red Hat is EOLing RHL 9" is just plain dumb.
--
William Hooper
Yes and no. Just keep this in mind. Microsoft, the "Great Satan" in the
...snip...
released it it was EOLed. That's not good for PR. That doesn't make the
company look good.
Most of us, who have been buying Linux distros forever (I've bought Red Hat 6.something, 7, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, Mandrake 8, 8.1, 8.2 and SuSE 8, 8.1 and 8.2) did so because we believed in supporting the Linux community in that fashion. Now that that model is quickly being replaced (since the companies doing the distros are public and have to answer to shareholders first, customers second) with a model where you're herded into subscribing to more expensive "enterprise" packages. Not everyone is an enterprise. In fact, I would venture that most people who got "hosed" by the RH9 deal were probably small businesses or individuals. They may or may not have the nimbleness to do a switch to a different distro, but that doesn't mean that they're going to be happy or should be happy. Upgrading isn't easy or painless and many of us, regardless of how few computers we have would prefer not to have to do it often.
I know for my part that once I saw what was going on I switched to Fedora. Yeah, I have to upgrade more often, but at least I'm not paying to be forced to upgrade. I will never give another company my money
...snip...
desperately want to support Linux. But until someone can prove to me they have a product I can buy and rely on for a couple years at a price cheaper than Win2k Pro, I see no reason to pay for a distro.
Preston
