Red Hat Linux ends - now what? [LWN.net]

November 5, 2003

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

Red Hat's announcement earlier this week that it would be ending the Red Hat Linux product line should not be too surprising for those who have been reading the tea leaves -- or LWN. Red Hat announced the end of the Red Hat Linux product line in July, and merged the Red Hat Linux Project and Fedora Project in September. Still, the end-of-life announcement sent to Red Hat Network (RHN) subscribers this week seemed to catch some by surprise:

Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 as of December 31, 2003. Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 9 as of April 30, 2004. Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.

While Red Hat will continue to sell and support its enterprise line of products, users who have grown accustomed to the (relatively) inexpensive Red Hat Linux line and RHN support are now looking for other options. Users have about six months to decide what direction they want to go. RHN channels with updates for discontinued versions will remain available for at least six months after the end-of-life, but the April 30 date will be the end of new errata for regular Red Hat Linux products. RHN subscribers who are paid-up past April 30 will receive an evaluation ISO for Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS and channel access to updates for that distribution until their subscription expires. Red Hat is no longer allowing subscribers to extend their subscription past April 30, though subscribers can renew up until April 30 for $20.

The first option for Red Hat loyalists is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is offering introductory pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS or Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES; the deal is 50% off either product for up to two years, putting annual cost of the workstation product (WS) at $89.50 per system and the server product (ES) at $174.50 per system. This pricing structure, while not overly expensive for a single system, may not be popular with Red Hat users who have been maintaining multiple systems with Red Hat Linux.

Another likely choice for hobbyists and users who have grown fond of Red Hat Linux is the Red Hat Linux Project's successor: Fedora (which has just made its first core release). Fedora will likely replace Red Hat on many systems as Red Hat Linux 9 approaches end-of-life. However, many users are likely to be a bit wary about adopting Fedora as the project is still in its infancy and it has yet to be seen how well the project will evolve. Fedora will will also be a more volatile distribution, with each release being, essentially, a "dot-zero" version.

Users might also choose to move to derivative products like Tummy.com's KRUD, or KRUD Server. KRUD is based on Red Hat Linux and users can opt for a monthly subscription with updates via CD-ROM. A one-year subscription to KRUD will run users $65, a one-year subscription to KRUD Server is $190. This may be an attractive option to many users, since Tummy.com does not require a per-machine subscription. Thus, a KRUD subscription is usable on any number of machines, unlike subscriptions to Red Hat Enterprise products.

There are, of course, other distributions which will be more than happy to pick up customers left behind by Red Hat. Red Hat's termination of the "consumer" line of products may be a blessing for other commercial Linux distributions with a strong interest in the retail Linux market. SUSE, Mandrake Linux, Xandros, Lindows and other commercial distributors may pick up some of Red Hat's audience still looking to buy a supported retail product. Non-commercial distributions like Debian might gain users as well; see this week's Distributions page. In the commercial arena, Mandrake is still working to emerge from bankruptcy, leaving SUSE as the strongest contender for the retail market at this point, particularly with the backing of Novell.

Joseph Eckert, SUSE's Vice President of Corporate Communications, told us that he is optimistic about SUSE's prospects in the retail channel. He noted that SUSE has seen a jump in sales with the 9.0 release, though it has not been available for very long. Unlike Red Hat, SUSE's retail products still account for a significant portion of their overall sales. According to Eckert, SUSE expects between €35 million and €40 million in sales this year, with the SUSE's desktop products accounting for more than 50 percent of their business.

Eckert also said that SUSE has no plans to cancel its desktop products. "As Red Hat continues to distance itself [from retail products] we consider it a service to the community to keep the desktop alive...it's not just about the enterprise desktop, it's about making sure that our community of developers and enthusiasts are satisfied."

Indeed, it may be important for any vendor interested in the enterprise to keep developers and enthusiasts happy. Red Hat's decision to abandon retail products and focus solely on its enterprise products may help boost Red Hat's rivals in the enterprise market as well. Red Hat found its way into many organizations because that was what IT staff used at home. With some of Red Hat's user base looking at moving to different distributions, they may decide to bring those distributions into the workplace with them.

(Log in to post comments)

Fedora Legacy

Posted Nov 6, 2003 18:29 UTC (Thu) by oconnorcjo (subscriber, #2605) [Link]

I would like to point out the Fedora Legacy project, which intends to maintain 7.3 and 9 releases into the foreseeable future. There are a number of us who have installed clients with these releases and support (at least for security fixes) remains important.

Redhat is providing an alternative but it is an unknown. I have grown to love the network download solution which Redhat and Ximian provide. I don't know if Ximian will support Fedora and I know Redhat won't have updates so where does that leave me? I believe Redhat has lost its way in general. The "regular" Redhat distribution may not have been making money but it was important to their business. It provided the community with a quality distribution for which to make a sound basis on whether to get the enterprise edition for businesses. If a large chunk of the Redhat users move away from Redhat, a large chunk of their enterprise sales will go too. The regular Redhat edition is similar to advertising; it costs money but brought in sales. I am seriously considering whether to go with Debian, Mandrake or SUSE for the future of my desktop.

Red Hat Linux ends - now what?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 2:38 UTC (Thu) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link]

> Users might also choose to move to derivative products like Tummy.com's KRUD, or KRUD Server. KRUD is based on Red Hat Linux and users can opt for a monthly subscription with updates via CD-ROM. A one-year subscription to KRUD will run users $65, a one-year subscription to KRUD Server is $190. This may be an attractive option to many users, since Tummy.com does not require a per-machine subscription. Thus, a KRUD subscription is usable on any number of machines, unlike subscriptions to Red Hat Enterprise products.

--Dude, are you SERIOUSLY trying to advocate a move to a product with a name like KRUD?? WTF are you thinking?!

--Now Libranet, that's been getting some good reviews - and it's Debian-based. But they probably need to grow quite a bit more before businesses can rely on their support, from what I saw on their website.

--Mandrake might be someone to turn to for corporate support, but I haven't used their stuff since moving to SuSE 6.4 and 7.3.

--Hmmmmmm... Well, there's always FreeBSD I guess. :) (I use Knoppix personally, but hey I'm talking about corporate-level support here.)

Non-Intel

Posted Nov 6, 2003 7:56 UTC (Thu) by jwharmanny (guest, #971) [Link]

For a RedHat PowerPC version, you should probably take a look at Yellow Dog. It is strongly based on RedHat Linux, but runs only on PowerPC hardware.

Non-Intel: Forthcomming (at least alpha)

Posted Nov 6, 2003 11:05 UTC (Thu) by kreutzm (guest, #4700) [Link]

At least for alpha, there are plans of some Red Hat engineers together with other Alpha developers to support an Alpha branch. See www.alphalinux.org for more details.

Non-Intel

Posted Nov 6, 2003 13:52 UTC (Thu) by zonker (subscriber, #7867) [Link]

Neglected in the discussion I have seen is the subject of non-Intel platforms.

Yeah, I didn't go into non-Intel platforms because RHL proper has been more-or-less Intel-specific for a while now... that is, if you're using a recent release (say RHL8 or RHL9), you're pretty much on Intel. So Red Hat's end-of-life for the RHL products isn't going to be a big issue for Alpha, Sparc and PPC users because they weren't using current RH retail stuff anyway... It would be nice if Fedora can eventually branch out to other platforms, I've got an UltraSPARC 10 that I wouldn't mind running Fedora on. For now, though, I'm happy to use Debian with it.

Non-Intel

Posted Nov 6, 2003 17:03 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

Fedora is released *only* for x86, and is compiled for the Pentium instruction set

A minor point perhaps, but there are still i586, i686, and Athlon-specific kernel packages in the Severn beta, so they are probably in FC1 as well.

Red Hat Linux ends - now what?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 14:49 UTC (Thu) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

Maybe you could point out to your clients that, sometimes, paying a little for your software actually saves them work.

I guess you couldn't save any work by paying for RedHat, but after I was last persuaded by a vendor to install RedHat for free on a larger system ... well, I would have spent somewhat less time with SUSE, trying to straighten out the glitches in the setup. No offense to the vendor, they did a lot of the ground work smoothly, but ...

I also know that paying is not everything - the most expensive specialized distribution I've ever seen shipped a kernel with a rather bad memory leak in our installed version ... and refused to even comment on that when I asked for the guaranteed support. Not so excellent either.

Red Hat Linux ends - now what?

Posted Nov 7, 2003 22:34 UTC (Fri) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link]

They don't really know that they are using redhat. I'm sort of letting it grow on them. When they ask about one of these nameless obxen that we have in their office we let them know that's it's running linux, redhat. Problem is, we just moved from using New Internet Computer's for $199 to Dell Optiplex Ultra small form factors for $600. I don't wan't to have to add any cost to that.

On a different note, I'm trying core 1 right now, and I like it. It's as nice as a Ximian XD2 system. The only major difference is the teaking to OpenOffice, and something like RedCarpet. I think I'm going to drop Ximian.

One RHEL for multiple systems

Posted Nov 12, 2003 11:55 UTC (Wed) by ateras (guest, #10113) [Link]

Interesting. I asked the same thing and got a quite different answer pointing to section 4 of the subscription agreement, which says (in part):

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4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement.
----------

It seems that the answer depends on the wording of the question, on who at Red Hat answers the query, or both. ;-)

Some people are taking an alternative approach by taking SRPMs and compiling the system themselves:

http://www2.uibk.ac.at/zid/software/unix/linux/rhel-rebuild.htm

Could someone who already owns a new RH Enterprise Linux 3.0 package give more information whether it contains any software with a proprietary license? If yes, are they essential components to make the system work? Of course, this is a thing which may change in the future.

I am quite sure that at least distribution of the images is not allowed. They probably to include some copyrighted documentation and graphics for which redistribution is prohibited even if the software would all be Free.