On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 12:22:07PM -0500, Thomas E. Dukes wrote: > I was just wondering if there is a general concensus (sp) of what everyone > is planning to do when RedHat 9.0 is no longer supported? > > Are most going to the Fedora Project or paying to go to the Enterprise > Linux? I can't recommend Fedora for a production site. I can't even feel comfortable running Fedora for a personal site if I HAVE to trust it to keep running. Anecdotal reports aside, it just doesn't have any believable quality committment from RedHat; it's bleeding-edge experimental, by their own admission. The problem I've found is that under the "new" model, the cost vs. risk differential, for at least small clients, isn't enough to wean them away from Microsoft. Larger clients are as bad--unless they've some political commitment to Linux, they're looking at risks--both the uncertainty of new software packages + compatibility questions, and the legal risks from those morons at SCO--that make the choice questionable at the pricing models RedHat has in place for its Enterprise distros. Probably the worst killer for RedHat is that you can't download RPMs from a different platform--that is, if you buy Professional Workstation, you can't DL RPMs for, say, sendmail, since that wasn't originally part of the package you bought. (This confirmed again yesterday from a sales person at RH). You didn't pay for it, you may say; neither did RedHat. They _built_ it, and integrated it--but the cost for just turning it into an RPM is marginal. Their fees, supposedly, are to cover the installation and ongoing support costs. So how about allowing you to install an RPM that's not provided with the platform you bought, but you don't get support? Maybe a (much reduced) fee for DL access? But that's not an option. This *is* a killer; what's the advantage of buying RedHat if you can't justify the expense of a particular platform, need some services RH has arbitrarily decided belong in another platform--but can't use RPMs and have to build packages not delivered with the platform from source? You'd just as well go with any other Linux distro; RedHat and RPM aren't helping you. This model is ill-conceived, and has effectively means I can't recommend RedHat to small to mid-sized clients. -- Dave Ihnat ignatz@xxxxxxxxxx -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
