Re: Red Hat Network ...

[Leonid Mamchenkov <f.l.linux-admin@news.francoudi.com>]

Dear Scott Taylor,

Once you wrote about "RE: Red Hat Network ...":
ST> >>     and yet another reason NOT to depend on RH ...
ST> 
ST> Well put Terry, depend only on yourself.  

Agreed. :)

ST> Still, there is nothing wrong with RH, other than they are looking 
ST> more and more like M$ every day.  Oh well, someone has to make money
ST> off this thing, and RH has put a lot into it, they deserve to get 
ST> some back, as do others that back and support Linux.

While I can understand the feeling some people have about RedHat these
days, I certainly disagree.  RedHat is a profit-oriented company and is
very well expected to charge for something.  RedHat's product is
service.  RedHat Network is one of them.  You want a service, you pay
the money.  As simple as that.  If you just need the updates, then you
can easily get them from ftp://updates.redhat.com using either wget or
any of the numerious scripts from http://freshmeat.net .  Updates are
_FREE_, and you have the _SOURCE_ for all of them.  That's something M$
has a lot of troubles with. ;)

ST> So, now for all the time RHN saves me in searching for downloads to keep my 
ST> one out ten servers up-to-date, I'm not going to whine about filling out a 
ST> simple little survey.  I might fudge anything personal and give them my 
ST> freemail.com address that I never check, but what can it hurt to give them 
ST> 2-3 minutes, even 10 minutes, of your time every 60 days.  Compared to the 
ST> time I'm saving right now, as I respond to this silliness and RH updates my 
ST> server for me, and the time it took to grab that next coffee and fill out 
ST> some survey, it is nothing.

Actually, all comes down to money anyway.  RedHat offers a "Basic
subscription" which is only 60$ per year (
https://rhn.redhat.com/info/purchase_info.pxt ).  Now, count 10 minutes
every 60 days in the year, you get roughly 1 hour.  If you make less
then 60$ an hour, you are better of with the survey, otherwise just buy
the damn thing. :)

ST> <snippet from previous link>
ST> The carrots? There are implied sticks to most of these. Paid
ST> subscribers will get instant access to ISOs as soon as they're out,
ST> which means "no more long downloads from ftp sites, driving to the
ST> store, or waiting for your friends to finish with their copy."
ST> </snippet>
ST> That doesn't sound so bad to me.  If I was running 20 RH servers, this 
ST> would be a blessing.  Back in the days of SCO Open Server I was paying a 
ST> large amount of money for their yearly support and updates products, not to 
ST> mention their per-user license.  Now I do more work, serve more users on 

-- 
Best regards,
  Leonid Mamtchenkov, RHCE
  System Administrator
  Francoudi & Stephanou Ltd.