What is RH doing?

[SAJChurchey]

Recent developments in Red Hat's strategies are starting to scare me.  Pushing their Advanced Server line and discontinuing support on the latest (8.0) by the end of the year in order to force updates.  Has RH lost site of its Open Source orgins?  RH is next in line after Linux pushes M$ out, but at this rate, I'm wondering if that will be any better.

[preacher]

The truth is that Red Hat makes most of its money on the server market. Companies spend millions to have rock solid linux servers. Red Hat has to keep focused on the server market to remain profitable. As for discontinuing support for old versions, you must realize that it costs a lot of money to support a lot of old versions, besides upgrading to the newest version is free, and even if Red Hat doesnt officially support its old versions, it doesnt mean that you have to stop using it, you can still update the packages yourself. The real problem is that there are too many new versions of unix based operating systems in a short period of time. Every 3 or 4 months a new version is out. Maybe we need to slow down.

[slave]

How can forced updates be bad when they're free?  Besides, you can get support from someone else, red hat isn't the only option.

[Calum]

do you mean free beer or free speech? forced upgrades are contrary to free as in speech, so i presume you see nothing wrong with forced upgrades at no monetary cost to the user? in that case why are you on the microsoft eradication society board? that is one of microsoft's favourite marketing ploys. it's the reason we all have to suffer the knock on effects of internet exploder for a start.

[preacher]

quote:Originally posted by Calum: Member # 81:
do you mean free beer or free speech? forced upgrades are contrary to free as in speech, so i presume you see nothing wrong with forced upgrades at no monetary cost to the user? in that case why are you on the microsoft eradication society board? that is one of microsoft's favourite marketing ploys. it's the reason we all have to suffer the knock on effects of internet exploder for a start.

First of all you are suggesting that red hat is forcing an upgrade. This just isnt possible with free open source software. Simply put users can continue to use old versions for an extremely long time as long as they update their kernel and glibc and et cetera. Now this is in no way like the microsoft tactic of writing programs that can not be used on Windows 95, not because it cant run them, but because they want you to upgrade to XP. Give Red Hat a break.

[slave]

What I really mean to say is that forced upgrades aren't *that* bad if the software is free, but you're right, I could be running red hat linux 6.2 and, it being open source software, I could maintain it myself without the red hat network for as long as I want.  People just need to see that Red Hat isn't obliged to freely update their old systems forever.

[Calum]

quote:Originally posted by ThePreacher:
First of all you are suggesting that red hat is forcing an upgrade.

i am not. churchey suggested that. i did not in any way suggest that.

quote:This just isnt possible with free open source software. Simply put users can continue to use old versions for an extremely long time as long as they update their kernel and glibc and et cetera. Now this is in no way like the microsoft tactic of writing programs that can not be used on Windows 95, not because it cant run them, but because they want you to upgrade to XP. Give Red Hat a break.

arm or a leg? i didn't say ANYTHING about red hat. i am suspicious of them because they have interests at heart that are not the same as mine, that's only sensible. anything else would be stupid of me.

[Master of Reality]

well. red hat did get rid of MP3 format support because it was proprietary, so maybe they are just a bit confused right now?

[dishawjp]

Hi All,

I like Red Hat and am still running RH 6.1 on one machine, 6.2 on another and 8.0 on another, but I'm not too thrilled at the idea RH will not be supporting their older versions for more than a year or so.  Manually keeping up with security updates will be difficult, and if RH ever wants to break into the business desktop environment they won't want to try and force IT departments to be upgrading their OS every year or so.  It may even adversely impact general user adoption.  I will be upgrading to RH 8.1 when it somes out in a few months, but it will be a bit of a hassle.  Reinstalling Nvidia drivers for the video card and etc.  The general public doesn't like doing that sort of stuff.  It could turn people off, especially if they don't update and their systems become insecure and they get rooted.

It jsut seems lke a bad idea to me.  I switched to Linux because I was pissed at M$ trying to force me to upgrade every few years among other reasons.  I hate to see Red Hat heading down that road.

Jim

[Calum]

i like red hat and i have red hat 8.0 installed right now among others (mandrake still my workhorse OS though) and i also think it's a bad idea. they're cutting costs by saving a few pennies but the large amount of people they will alienate will hopefully knock them from the top spot and give somebody a chance who brings out a more versatile version of linux.

[SAJChurchey]

I agree entirely that they may not be forcing upgrades.  Ultimately, the IT depts. will more than likely choose to upgrade to keep their costs down, rather than find and install updates manually.  I just think RH is taking advantage of this mindset, and you have to agree that RH is trying to set itself apart so that it can appeal to the desktop market.  They've changed KDE and GNOME to satisfy what they feel is the need for a unifed WM.  The question is will Linux lose it's identity and just be known as RH to the general public in a few yrs.  Especially, w/ Mandrake failing.  For instance, when people think of Lindows, they tend to forget that it's Linux.  It's just not all that important to the typical computer user.

[rtgwbmsr]

quote:Originally posted by The Master of Reality / Bob:
well. red hat did get rid of MP3 format support because it was proprietary, so maybe they are just a bit confused right now?

I'm happy with that decision. Ogg is a far superior standard.

And about supporting older versions - they keep the older manuals on their site (as much as I haven't been there in over a month). Thats all you need - RTFM.

[SAJChurchey]

quote:Originally posted by The Muffin Man:

I'm happy with that decision. Ogg is a far superior standard.

Are you trying to say that RH is trying to stop supporting some standards in the promotion of others, rather than support all of them.  Doesn't that sound a little bit shady?  I like RH, but I also don't trust any company blindly.

[flap]

No, he's trying to say that OGG is a better standard. RH should be promoting free and open formats like OGG at the expense of patented ones like MP3.

[SAJChurchey]

Sure OGG may be an open and better standard, but that doesn't necessarily mean exclude mp3. All formats should be made available to the user.