With apologies to Scott Sawyer, I have moved his top posted reply to the
bottom of the original post just to keep this flowing from top to bottom
so my comments have a chance at making some sense...

On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 13:03, Scott Sawyer wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, Shawn Nguyen wrote:
> 
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I am new to this list and have just recently gotten back to Linux, it has changed quite a bit since two years ago, but I have a nagging question.  I hope someone can answer this for me.  I am a Debian guy since that is what I started out with when I started using Linux.  Recently I tried to use Red Hat and I have to say that it's not like Debian and its more or less more corporate and a little hard to figure out because things are hidden.  In any case I have gone back to Debian.  My question is now that Red Hat has gone to the RHEL3 is it actually a release that they made on their own?  I am thinking that its actually just a version of Linux that is just like any other version but that they are marketing it differently am I right?  Please explain as I'm quite puzzled by what they are doing.
> >
> > Shawn
> >
> Red Hat is trying to sell it to the enterprise (read business with big
> pockets.)  That requires support, maintainability, etc.  With the RHN they
> are trying to get rid of the pain of updating os patches (anyone remember
> dependency hell?).
> 
> They are also lining up ISV's, providing 5 years of support and all the
> other things that business putting the OS into production care about.
-----
I have no intention of becoming a Red Hat apologist and the jury is
definitely still out on the effectiveness of Fedora, the elimination of
their RHL. 

The fact is that their RHEL products are selling extremely well and
making money and like it or not, they are a publicly traded corporation,
determined to be profitable and they will make decisions that don't
always favor people like me that actually can derive some income from
their product which for a large part costs me next to nothing and in
many cases has cost me nothing. The key has been the ability to provide
updates in a reasonable, effective and timely manner.

In the case listed above, Red Hat makes the source code for their RHEL
available and it can be altered by removing the Red Hat logos, the
proprietary legends, and then compiled to provide a working
distribution. They aren't required to make the source available to all
via the internet, they only need to provide the source to all purchasers
of the binary product for 3 years per GPL (I am not a lawyer and that is
my paraphrased understanding so I may be wrong).

What this means is that people want to dance to the music without paying
the fiddler as if the assemblage of this distro, the timely updates over
a cycle of 5 years will be without cost and the people paying for this
privilege are the actual purchasers of RHEL. I know I would feel like
Freddy the Freeloader if I were to download and install it for someone.

More importantly, the Fedora release allows for community maintenance
and updates and there are forces in place to maintain the distro(s) for
a much longer period than Red Hat intends to. This would seem to be fair
to all concerned and a much better place to put one's efforts.

Obviously there are non-commercial releases such as Debian and many BSD
distributions but they too have projected short maintenance cycles which
really has been the problem for servers.

I give Red Hat some credit for identifying the needs of the community
that they to some small part helped to create, identify their
opportunities to generate the revenue that their stockholders demand and
offer the community at large a means to embrace and extend (hopefully
not extinguish) their present/future product. As I have seen Derek
agree, Red Hat has been a good citizen in the open source community,
whether you agree with their latest change of direction or not, they
certainly deserve some benefit of doubt to see the way things turn out.

Craig