Fedora and the System Administrator

[Bill Anderson]

On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 18:11, Chuck Wolber wrote:
> > > I dont expect that this will be any different for any of the Linux
> > > companies and volunteer orgs (Debian) in the coming years. Everytime
> > > there is a new Debian, the security volunteers say they will only
> > > maintain the old release for 6 months and there is great wailing and
> > > nashing of teeth about how shitty Debian is.
> > 
> > The difference of course is, Debian offers a stable release life of over
> > 2 years prior. That is hardly as aggravating as making a major migration
> > potentially twice a year. I think you will find very few orgs willing to
> > deploy Fedora under those conditions, and even fewer able to justify
> > paying for RHEL being that it is quite expensive compared to other
> > options.
> 
> That's our point. When you deploy on hundreds of servers, like many of the 
> consortium members do, there's no chance in heck that we're going to pay a 
> minimum of $179 (on up to $2500 IIRC) *PER* server. I'd much prefer to 
> pool resources and distribute the cost.

Well if you need no support from RH ....

-> Buy as many licenses as you feel you can, you can even use these on
your priority production machines for the support aspect
-> Download the SRPMS[1]
-> Use an installed system to build the SRPMS into a distro, since they
are GPLed.[2]
-> Deploy the GPL version to your other systems, "branding" it a "Common
Operating Environment"


There is a project already underway on making a system to build an
installable release from the SRPMS. 

To me, this is the best of both worlds for those unable/unwilling to
negotiate w/RH over unit pricing. You can spend what you feel you
should, pay for some support, and have the rest of your systems
supported by you, yet running a longer term install.

Another alternative is to not upgrade each and avery time Fedora Core is
released. Especially if binary compat. is/is not broken in *every*
release.

Cheers,
Bill

[1] Funny (in a good way) thing, RH goes *beyond* the GPL requirements
by making these available. Outside of stripping those, there is no
getting around needing to pay a license fee for those bits.

[2] I am assuming that like AS2.x WS/ES contain licensed third party
binaries

-- 
Bill Anderson
RHCE #807302597505773
bill at noreboots.com