Re: Red Hat Network ...

Re: Red Hat Network ...

[Leonid Mamchenkov]

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 
ST> more servers, for next to nothing, and I even have options to go it alone, 
ST> or choose something to save on time; excuse the cliche, time is money to me.

I am responsible for about 80 RH servers over here, and RHN actually
SAVES us lots of money.  Even considering the fact that we are running
Enterprise subscription on half of them.  That's a blessing.  

ST> No, I'm not a RedHat Advocate, but I do believe in the Linux movement and 
ST> anything that makes it easier brings more people to the cause, that's a 
ST> good thing to me.

Nice words indeed. ;)

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