From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Leonid Mamchenkov Subject: Re: Red Hat Network ... Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2003 09:19:54 +0000 (UTC) Sender: linux-admin-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <20030305091954.GB3555@francoudi.com> References: <5.1.1.6.0.20030304063004.00b02ae8@mustang> Reply-To: Leonid Mamchenkov Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <5.1.1.6.0.20030304063004.00b02ae8@mustang> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-admin@vger.kernel.org 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> 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> 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.