[NBLUG/talk] Free RH Linux is coming to an end....

[Warren Raquel]

E Frank Ball wrote:

>On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 01:09:58PM -0600, Warren Raquel wrote:
>} 
>} From what I gather it looks like the freely available version of RedHat 
>} will only have a reliable use window of 7 months before official RPMS 
>} are no longer produced for it. 
>
>} This is a headache. How do you get around  this? 
>
>Debian?  SuSE?
>  
>
Yep. I'm thinking of moving to gentoo..... Just for my desktop, of 
course. ;)

>} So, now, with RedHat Enterprise it looks like the product lifetime is 
>} around 5 years. What's the catch? Enterprise is licensed. The plus side 
>} is you don't need to go upgrading your server to a new release every 
>} half a year to make sure you don't get hacked. With Fedora or previous 
>} releases of RedHat you could just keep going as is but no official 
>} upgrades will be available.
>
>Lifetime is 5 years.  License for upgrades is 1 year, so you gotta shell
>out $179/year (or more).
>  
>
Yes, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you're cheap like me and want free 
then you'll want to stay with Fedora since it's no cost but that means 
the constant upgrading every few months. I like having uptimes in the 
the range of years and not months... I'm sure it's not going to be as 
big of a headache as it sounds having to upgrade every time a new core 
comes out but I like just running apt-get every night and not having to 
go to my colo every few months to do a new install.

>I've got about 20 redhat machines at work now.  I don't mind buying "a"
>license, but 20 gets kinda pricy for my budget.
>  
>
I think they sell batches of 100 licenses for around $25 per license but 
that's something that every large company needs to work out with RH.

>We are going to have to get one RedHat Enterprise machine going and then
>figure out what's open source and what's not.  I'm hoping we can get
>updates with one licensed machine and put them on a server, then upgrade
>many unlicensed machines.
>
>We have closed source software we purchase that will only be supported
>on Enterprise, so that limits my options.
>
>  
>