doughnuts on a fish hook

[William Hooper]

Steve Bergman said:
[snip]
> Except for the long term availability of errata...  And this is a sore
> point with me.  Why can't I purchase extended errata availability for
> the non-RHEL RedHat distro?  I did ask, once, on the support or sales
> line, I can't remember which, and was told that it could be bought for
> *about* 35,000 USD a year, "because we would be doing it just for you".
> To be honest, it may have been 3,500 USD, but it was a sum that would
> have had my small clients clamoring for a Windows(tm) "solution".
>
> It seems like there should be a market for errata, which is a service,
> after all, at a reasonable price, for more than a year.

There probably is.  All the software is Open Source, anyone could provide
this support.  For example you can a year's support from KRUD linux
(Redhat based) for 7.3 at $195 a year (see
http://lists.tummy.com/pipermail/krudusers/2002-October/000321.html).

Backporting patches to old versions isn't just plug and play.  The point
of the Enterprise line is that the versions will change as little as
possible, so when Oracle certifies the distro to run their software, it
will still run it in two years.  Red Hat has made the business decision to
not try to keep three or four different trees going so they they can
provide Errata for the older RHLP distros.  Makes sense to me.

-- 
William Hooper