Re: RedHat support changes

• To: ldm-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
• Subject: Re: RedHat support changes
• From: Jeff Wolfe <wolfe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2003 23:15:20 -0500

On Thursday, November 6, 2003, at 09:34 PM, Steve Ochani wrote:

What do you mean by "dropping support for it's free versions"?

They will still put out patches,software udpates etc for there "free" versions.

Other support such as e-mail/phone has always been on a cost basis.

The problems as I see them are:

http://fedora.redhat.com. Some of this is in the FAQ there.

-JEff

From owner-ldm-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 07 2003 Nov -0500 15:30:23

Date: 07 Nov 2003 15:30:23 -0500
From: Dan Vietor <devo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
In-Reply-To: <00086718-10D9-11D8-A329-0003938E60B8@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Jeff Wolfe <wolfe@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: RedHat support changes
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On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 23:15, Jeff Wolfe wrote:

RedHat presents 2 options; either pay for RedHat Enterprise Linux, or switch to the new "free" fedora distribution.

Actually, Red Hat will present only one option, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
with 3 sub-options.  My main complaint is that it looks to be more
expensive than Solaris.  We can get a full server edition of Solaris x86
for $90 but may have to pay up to $800 for RHEL/ES.  Even the WS version
is $200 in its base configuration, lacking FTP and mail server software.

Fedora, even though it will be managed to an extent by Red Hat, won't be
really supported by Red Hat.  It will be community supported and thus
will be, initially, a level below releases like Mandrake, Gentoo and

The problems as I see them are:

1) The release cycle on Fedora is supposed to be shorter than the old RedHat and they've said that errata for Fedora will tend to be version upgrades, rather than backported bug fixes. In addition, if they run into problems getting security fixes into packages, they'll drop the packages from the distribution. Also, it's not clear that there will be much more than a year or so of guaranteed errata.

Red Hat put out 8 releases in about 4 years (6.0 in mid 99, to 9.0 in
early 03).  The twice a year release schedule is expected to continue
with Fedora.  RHEL is only going to see new releases about once every

Bug fixes and security patches may be a problem for Fedora.  Its not
clear at this point how this will be managed but I tend to agree with
you, it will mostly be addressed by issuing new versions rather than
back-fixing release versions.

2) Many vendors will only support their hardware and/or software on "approved" versions of linux. In the past, RedHat linux versions like 7.3, 8 and even 9 were "approved". It is not likely that vendors will approve a fast moving target like fedora. Users who need a supported platform to run apps like Oracle or TSM will have to choose between running on a free, unsupported distribution, or paying for RHEL.

3) There is essentially no support, at all, other than the community. RedHat is still controlling the distribution, but If you decide you need some commercial support later, you'll have to switch distributions again.

This is a major problem now.  We send out complete systems with either
Solaris or RH Linux on it.  Many of our customers were willing to buy
into Solaris but were leery about taking on Red Hat because it was open

Recently, we've seen a big switch.  Red Hat has become reputable enough
that we can sell RH systems.  Now that changes with the Enterprise
setup.  The licensing and fees will make it a harder sell than the OTS
RH Linux product.  Plus, the higher cost of RHEL may push people back to
Solaris.  But this leads to driver support for Solaris x86 which has
been seriously lagging and has all but forced us to move to Linux.  Talk
about a catch 22.

4) Old RedHat Linux support has a hard end date. Unless some interested 3rd parties pick up the torch, everyone running current versions of RedHat will have to switch, or face the unavailability of errata. This forces everyone to change distributions (upgrade?) to something by the end of the year, or April. The alternative would be to live on an unsupported distribution until the next security hole comes along. For some people, including myself, that's a tough pill and a lot of work.

This is a potential BIG problem for us.  We now will have to look at
other distributions of Linux for our commercial products and may have to
test and support 3 or 4 other Linux distros.  We may see a lot of our
customers move away from Red Hat to a Mandrake and as a result, we will
have to make sure there are no problems with compatibility.

I will probably stay with Red Hat 9 for my development platform for
probably another year or so.  I don't have the hardware available to me
to test Fedora or another Linux distro at this time.  But for
operational computers, I may be forced to move those to something other
than RH sometime in the next 6-9 months.  Not an easy task.

FWIW, I've booted and played with Fedora 1. It would appear to be essentially RH 9+. Assuming errata will be available for a reasonable time after a version is released, I don't see any reason not to consider Fedora.

I'm sure this will all be worked out in the next 4-6 months and we'll
see if Fedora is an adequate replacement for the free RH Linux.  I
suspect initially, it won't be but it may mature rather quickly given

--
Dan Vietor <devo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Unisys

• References:
  • Re: RedHat support changes
    • From: Steve Ochani