It gets worse than that. Many of my clients are semiconductor startups which use a lot of design tools (think Mentor, Cadence, etc). Over the last six months I've been pidgeonholling techs as they come by, asking what the plan was for tools which required a particular version of RedHat was. Some tools are extremely version specific -- you absolutely must run them on RedHat x.y, and if you call looking for (the very expensive annual) support, and you answer the "what rev of RedHat are you running this on?" question incorrectly, you get a "sorry that's not a supported platform we cannot help you [click]" response. So we have customers who will be caught in between the platform vendor (RedHat) which is going to stop supporting releases (doesn't everything older than 9 stop getting supported January 1?) and a tools vendor which is insisting on a now unsupported OS. In the case of at least one major vendor (I'm not sure I can say who) the answer to the question is going to be to transition to RHE/ES. This boosts the cost of running the tool by, what, US$300? -- per CPU. I'm sure this is in RedHat's best interest as a business... but I suspect it will have a long-term negative impact on RedHat's position as the de-facto Linux community 'standard' release. Especially if Fedora diverges significantly from RHE. On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 09:24:10AM -0500, Raymond, Jeff wrote: > > I agree also. We have invested so much in Red Hat here at the > University of Pittsburgh. I and another colleague have been fighting up > hill battles for Red Hat, against the Solaris admins and other Unix > sysadmins. We have a lab that was installed 2 years ago to promote Red > Hat on campus and let students get exposure. Now we have a > product(fedora) that at first glance seems in no way associated with Red > Hat. all of those users we were trying to get using Red Hat and show > them something different are now stuck with figuring out what to use > next. If fedora is the next version of Red hat, like someone said > earlier, why did they have to change the name and drop support for it? > Red hat is obviously moving to a more corporate stance and we must ask > ourselves is that what linux is all about? I understand the need to > make money but they are abandoning the methods and practices that made > them successful. It is going to be bad for their business in the long > run. > > Any way a co-worker has been really pushing for us to look at Suse and > now we will really start to look at other distros. I wonder if anyone > at Red Hat thought about how many customers they were going to send to > other distros by doing this? Anyone? > > Sad to see a great product end this way > Jeff > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Zate [mailto:zate@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2003 8:57 AM > To: kickstart-list@xxxxxxxxxx > Subject: Re: new release? > > Totally agree, if there isnt a freely downloadable version of Redhat > that has regular errata and can be updated with RHN, then I for one will > be looking at Suse. RHEL is great, but there is a real need for what > they have now. > > > Mandrak and Suse are going to kill them if they go though with it. I > > am a long time user and not happy at all about this. > > > > ~joel > > > > -- > IT is Dead. The industry is Shot > Join Others Who Feel Your Pain > http://www.internalstrife.com/ > > > _______________________________________________ > Kickstart-list mailing list > Kickstart-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list > > > _______________________________________________ > Kickstart-list mailing list > Kickstart-list@xxxxxxxxxx > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list > > <!DSPAM:3f9e7eb02579124553966> > -- /\oo/\ / /()\ \ David Mackintosh |
