[WBEL-users] RH Desktop

[Kirby Bohling]

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 05:40:52PM +0100, neil wrote:
> 
> 
> maillists@crescentdigital.com wrote:
> 
> >Hmmm..  Redhat's back to take a stab at the desktop market..  Tell you the
> >truth, don't know if I can trust them again.. After what they did, I've
> >switched to SuSe as my desktop system and WHEL for work servers..  Anyway,
> >here's the link..
> >
> >http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/desktop/
> >
> That's interesting - considering WBEL is RHEL compiled from source. You 
> trust the product - but not the company. Very curious.
> n
> 

	I trust RedHat's technical merit, but I'm very reluctant to go
back to them.  They left people high and dry with no upgrade path
out of RedHat 9 to a supported platform.  Fedora's nice, but it's
intentionally designed to be so bleeding edge that you're insane to
use it as a platform for production use.  I also am unwilling to
rebuild my home machines every 6-12 months once security upgrades
stop coming out.  I've got better things to do with my time.

	They did give a year's worth of notice, but they left you with
no sanely priced option for personal use.  Sorry, but I'm not going
to pay RedHat $100-$150/year/machine for a crappy non-server edition of
Linux.  I'm surely not going $250-750/year/machine to use on my home
machines.  I have no need of any type of support at all from them.
In the 7-8 years I've been running RedHat, at no point have I ever
needed to call them to make something work.  If it was just
$250/year or $250/machine, I might do it.  

	RedHat just increased their pricing an order of magnitude, and
left anyone who was willing to pay for the products but don't want
support, no way to contribute to the company.  I'd buy a copy of
their new versions if their were binary updates publically available
(even if only from mirrors, so they didn't have to pay for the
bandwidth, or via RHN subscription fee), and if there were a
non-support version for something on the order of $100-$300.  I know
of probably 10-20 people just like me.  If they sold it only direct
order, they'd probably have pretty good margin on the thing.

	It's their business I know why they did what they have, I'll
happily donate my time to working with WhiteboxLinux.org instead of
paying money to RedHat.  I'm the proud owner of a boxed set from
RedHat of 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, and RHEL
Personal Desktop.  That's the last copy I'll ever personally own of
RedHat.  I've tried to be a good customer for years, but I can't
afford their current pricing personally.  I've found that WBEL, is
just as good and it's free as in beer and speech.  

	Other then for a couple of Oracle servers we have at work, as
long as there is a source rebuild of RHEL, that's what I'm going to
use from every box I have a say in.  At this point, I know I'm now
in a group that has exactly the same problems I do, and they have
exactly the same interests I do.  If something happens to the guys
at the library, someone will take up the torch.  If they don't,
they'll be other source rebuilds.

	RedHat in some ways has interests that are directly opposed to
my interests (they want money from me, and I'm not inclined to give
them as much as they want).  It was that conflict of interest that
caused RedHat to drive away a lot of their faithful believers.  I'm
not interested in getting back involved with RedHat in case they
come across another conflict of interest.

	Everybody in WBEL needs exactly the same things I do.  A stable
OS, that I can install on a ton of machines with no worries about
licensing compliance, and on going security upgrades.

	Thanks,
		Kirby