Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Chuck Wolber]

> I don't think it's RHEL's license in question, but what about RHN's?  
> Isn't it RHN's license that states if you have one hooked up, you must
> have all, or is it RHEL's?

As a support company, we don't need RHN. We need a solid OS (given the
that RHN is not the only vector for keeping RHEL solid). We would gladly
pay for a copy every year, or even a reasonable monthly fee for the rights
to deploy to our customer sites. Otherwise, it's actually advantageous, in
a business sense to support Microsoft. If you are paid to do support,
always deploy the most defective product (assuming integrity isn't a big
thing to you).

That being said, I recognize that RH needs to make money and we're happy
to work with them in that area. However, if I went to my customer and told
them that I had to tack on an extra $350/$800/$1500 to the install bill,
they'd tell me to jump in a lake. That's a lot of jumping considering that
we do hundreds of installs each year.

Is RedHat really telling me that I have to purchase support that I do not
need in order to provide my customers with a stable platform (where stable
== supported with updates and patches for >= 1.5 years)? As a business
person, this is a clear signal that it is time to look for another
distribution to deploy on. As a hacker, I don't care, I can support and
update the darn thing myself. Time is not free, so the business
personalilty wins out here.


-Chuck

P.S. I believe this is beginning to diverge from the topic. Where is a
good place to take this discussion?

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