For me, Linux is all about choice [LWN.net]

For me, Linux is all about choice

Posted Oct 23, 2003 18:20 UTC (Thu) by ssavitzky (guest, #2855)
Parent article: No More Free Beer?

Since 7.3, RedHat has been steadily dropping programs that I use. First it was ical (a nice little calendar program) and frm; they've finally gotten to the point where they're dropping xtoolwait (the excuse in the package list is, if I remember correctly, "no longer used in distribution"). Since when does that have anything to do with what users need?

Add the pain of using RedHat Network to keep up to date, and the deficiencies of the apt port for RPMs compared to the Debian original, and it's no wonder I'm joining the growing ranks of those switching to Debian-based distributions. Sure, it's a little painful, but at this point it's actually less pain to go from RH7.3 to Woody than it is from 7.3 to 9.

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For me, Linux is all about choice

Posted Oct 23, 2003 20:42 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

Since 7.3? How about since 6.0... My first exposure to their "practice" was when they dropped xface support from xemacs because they said the xface library had too many security problems.

And I would be happy to buy and use Enterprise WS for $179, but it lacks dhcp and bind, which will cost you an additional $170 to get them in ES. Want CDs and printed documentation, but not Support? Forget it. Red Hat won't sell them separately. It would seem that they want to get out of the printing business pretty badly.

I was buying each Professional release on it's twice a year release schedule to get CD's and printed docs. And I've been paying the $60 per year RHN basic update fee for each of my systems. For my three systems, that came to almost $550/year. Three Enterprise ES Basic's are going to cost me $1050 per year and I can't even get CD's or printed docs with that! It's hard not to imagine that Enterprise customers are completely subsidizing Fedora users, provided Red Hat can convince former RHL customers (like me) that their Enterprise product is still a value at twice the price and none of the extras...

For me, Linux is all about choice

Posted Oct 30, 2003 18:12 UTC (Thu) by wmshub (guest, #3995) [Link]

I'm also planning on leaving red hat. Not because of the missing software packages, but it just seems they want too much money for too little. I have three systems on RHN, and I've been happily paying the $60 per year for each of them to get the security patches. Now I have to either switch to fedora, keep my money, but do a full upgrade every few months, or else pay $400 per year for my DNS server and $170 per year for my workstations. God forbid I ever am bold enough to buy a 4-cpu system, then my costs become truly astronomical. Sorry, but this kind of price increase for no additional benefits just doesn't sit well with me. I haven't decided yet which distribution I am switching to, but as soon as my RHN updates stop coming, I will switch to a disctribution is willing to accept $60 per year for timely security patches. Debian looks like a good choice, but I'll look at the prices of SUSE and maybe Mandrake as well.