On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 07:59, Keith Winston wrote: > Red Hat recently made it less convenient to use up2date for free (they > now require an online survey to be filled out every 60 days). This > follows what I perceive to be a trend to herd Red Hat users into > subscription services the higher priced packages. > > Also, Yum appears to be almost a drop in replacement for both up2date > and the Red Hat Network Proxy server, which they sell for over $1000 > (last time I checked). > > And, since Red Hat is a business, they will natually want to maximize > "shareholder value" over the long term. > > As a new yum user (and it is fantastic BTW), does anyone else see yum as > a potential threat to the Red Hat Network and does anyone think Red Hat > may take steps to make yum less effective in the future? I don't see yum as a threat to up2date/rhn for the following reasons: 1. It's not doing all the fancy rhn stuff - actions, system grouping, etc. 2. Red Hat provides support and priority network access to their paying customers 3. People aren't just buying into up2date/rhn b/c they get fast access to their updates, they're also doing it b/c they get a support contract and someone real to call. I had a brief support contract with Red Hat before - just the low-end one - I wanted to test it out. I was greeted by knowledgeable people who didn't treat me like an idiot and understood actual problems. It was so amazingly refreshing. So I think that they have a functional model. 4. Believe it or not, there are still a lot of companies that would rather have a corporation behind their support mechanisms than trust their internal staff and an open-source-no-company-backing product like yum or apt-rpm. In response the rpm stuff - well at some level you can say rpm is already difficult to understand. ;) However, rpm is part of the LSB, many distros and non-linux oses use rpm. I think it would be a fast track to a fork if red hat wanted to do something like that. However, from what I've seen the people in charge of red hat "get it" and wouldn't want to do that. But shareholders can be a tricky lot to obey. In that regard I'd suggest that those of you using yum instead of rhn/up2date buy some red hat stock. It's selling at ~$6 a share so it's quite affordable. You help their market capitalization when you do that so you're inherently helping the company. And you get to be a shareholder. We'd all be in a different world from a systems administration standpoint w/o red hat - so I for one encourage people to buy their stuff. They've got a lot of good folks working for them and the longer they stay in business the better for the rest of us. > They could do things like make tricky changes to RPM (yes, I know we > have the source), or delay patches to the public FTP servers, or even > stop posting patches to the public FTP servers. Look closely at the stop posting patches problem - if that occurs then you could: 1. watch bugtraq and do it yourself 2. Check carefully the gpl - things in RHL will get sticky license-wise if they post patches somewhere and don't post source. So if they just post a src.rpm and you want it for yourself then you can just rebuild it. 3. join a group of people packaging stuff and act like a debian security group but for red hat - the fedora people come to mind for packaging stuff. Does that make any sense? -sv
