I must have been in a fog and just learned that RH9 was the last in the line. I'm looking in the RedHat website and it is unclear to me what is the natural upgrade path for an ordinary user (not a server).
If you want a 12-18 month release cycle, a 5-year guaranteed support and life cycle, maximum possible stability at the expense of not being leading-edge, and can live with an annual subscription fee of $179, then you want Enterprise Workstation (WS). Note that this product is licensed on a per-machine basis: you cannot pay $179/year and put it on 10 boxes.
If you can live with a newly-defined product with (possibly) shorter support cycles than WS but still with the same software included, and definitely cheaper, then RHPW is possibly your best bet. I am not clear on whether this is per-machine or not, but I believe it is not. RHPW cannot be downloaded, it is retail only, but at buy.com it is $82 including a year of updates (worth $60 on its own). Much cheaper than WS.
Alternately, Fedora is the next version of what used to be Red Hat Linux. It costs you nothing to download it, and you can use tools like yum, current, and apt-get to keep it up to date. You can also (I think) pay $60/year IF YOU WANT TO in order to get priority access to patches, packages, updates, and new releases. Fedora will try to advance as quickly as possible, like RHL has, while staying pretty much stable, like RHL has. However, Red Hat Inc. will not offer commercial (paid) support packages for Fedora and they will not be responsible for patches, the community will. That may sometimes mean that things come out more slowly, and it may sometimes mean that patches come out more quickly.
Who is in charge of this Free Fedora project? Is there any assurance that the kernel or glibc distributed with the Enterprise WS will match the Fedora kernel? I don't know how I could distribute applications if there weren't some assurance of fundamental interoperability of systems running the 2 things.
In the long term, I would confidently guess that a 4-year-old WS system will NOT be running the same glibc as a recent Fedora system. However, I have yet to run into a program that wouldn't work on 7.x, 8.0 and 9 RHL distributions, so I don't see this as being a major problem. Then again, I'm a user (and a happy one) not a programmer. Someone else will have to comment on this.
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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