On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, John Haxby wrote:
I may be wrong, but didn't I read somewhere that RHEL *sources* would be freely available for download (by which I understood src rpms) which means that it wouldn't be beyond someone, a lot of people in fact, to maintain a binary version of RHEL built from source.
They are, at least on any of the ftp/rsync mirrors I've seen so far. Maybe even a bigger question are errata (update) rpms. So far all I've seen/heard is that the RHEL subscription provides for a quarterly update cd. And I haven't seen these in srpm form yet.
After someone reminded me of the URLs for RHEL 2.1, I went looking to check on my favourite mirror. Sure enough, the SRPMs of the original distribution and the errata are all there.
My original point, reinforced by Tom Diehl, was that it's possible to build RHEL if you don't want to or can't afford the RHEL binary distributions. Maybe it's a lot harder that it would first appear, but surely this is an option worth following.
I quite understand RH wanting to move out of the home market. At one time, say six months ago :-), there were a lot of people willing to part with hard cash for an RH boxed set because downloading it simply wasn't practical. Two or three years ago I would have hestitated before downloading CD images at work (and working for one of the big computer names, you would've thought we had good Internet connectivity). I wouldn't have even considered downloading two CD images for RHL at home as it would've tied up the phone line for days. Just the other day though, I mirrored a tree of 1.7 gigs-worth of files. At home. Twice because I blew it the first time. And it didn't cost me anything.
So if RH release RH10, am I going to rush out to the shops (figuratively speaking) to buy the RH10 boxed set? Let me see ... do I spend around £100-£150 pounds on CD images I can get for nothing? No, of course not, I just kick off an ftp or rsync or whatever and get the CD images overnight and stick them on CDs in the morning. Disk space is extremely cheap.
Fast home Internet access (DSL, ADSL, broadband, cable, whatever) is going to be not so much eating at as totally destroying RH's income from the home market.
On the other hand, the enterprise market has different considerations. Stability. Timely fixes for bugs. Backported fixes rather than functional changes. Server software that has been put together properly with thought and careful consideration. I shall certainly be recommending RHEL 3.0 for work and gladly paying the subscriptions -- it's strikes me as good value. And for RH this is good news -- they'll actually be getting income.
-- jch
http://www.thehaxbys.plus.com/cv.html
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