These new prices are ridiculous [LWN.net]

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 12, 2003 18:11 UTC (Wed) by vondo (guest, #256)
Parent article: Red Hat revamps premium Linux plan (News.com)

$300 for the cheapest version of Linux that will sit on a desktop? And even that will only have guaranteed support for about 3 years? Tell me again how Linux is so much cheaper than Windows?

I agree, RH is trying to squeeze us now that so many of us are running their version of Linux. I wonder if they couldn't make more money selling it at $100 a crack? Then I'd consider buying a copy or two for home, but not at these prices.

Eric

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These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 12, 2003 18:44 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (9 responses)

If you'd read the article, you'd see that you can play $179 for a year's support for the basic workstation version. Of course, this doesn't mean the standard Red Hat distro is going to be dropped -- this is just the enterprise level. Your copy or two for home is still much cheaper than "$100 a crack" -- and it's still released under the GPL. No one is squeezing you.

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 12, 2003 19:50 UTC (Wed) by vondo (guest, #256) [Link] (8 responses)

Let me explain our situation. We're an educational institution. We have a cluster of roughly 25 machines, mostly serving as people's desktops. That means yearly fee of $4500. The standard distro ceases to be an option at the end of the year, when RH drops support for 7.2 and moves to a 12 month support time frame for their standard linux.

How does keeping Windows + Office up to date compare in cost? What about just XP + StarOffice.

If this isn't being squeezed, I don't know what is. I suspect we paid less when we were an OSF/Alpha shop.

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 12, 2003 20:27 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (5 responses)

Uhm. No you can download the distro from ftp.redhat.com or mirrors for FREE. I do not see where you are being charged 4500.

If you have to have the Enterprise support level contracts then you are being asked to pay for that support so that Alan Cox, et al can make their mortgage payments.

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 12, 2003 21:42 UTC (Wed) by vondo (guest, #256) [Link] (4 responses)

Let me try to put this simply. The downloadable version is not an option because of the 12 month support window. The Enterprise versions are VERY expensive.

I don't need support, per se, I need patches so that I can keep our cluster running for something like two years between OS upgrades.

With windows, you can do this. You buy XP for ~$100, Microsoft patches the holes for 5 years or more.

With Redhat, no such luck. You either get basically no patches (with the downloadable version) or you pay through the nose for Enterprise products which only have a 3 year window before being end-of-lifed.

What I want is patches for an OS that can live for 2-3 years for a reasonable price. $180/machine/year is not reasonable. Maybe my university will be able to work out some reasonable pricing scheme.

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 12, 2003 22:05 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Maybe you can get XP server for 100.00 and 2-3 years of free support. We surely haven't been able to.

While I am not too happy with Red Hat putting release life-times to 1 year per release.. I also realize that they have to make money to pay the bills.

There are a lot of small companies like owlriver.com and such that will be doing support contracts for releases that have been dropped by Red Hat. I do not think that the costs will be that much different per machine.

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 12, 2003 23:28 UTC (Wed) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link]

Updates are available from mirrors, and can be downloaded with a simple rsync script (I'll send you mine if you want), and can also be applied automatically (using rpmfind or your own scripts) or you can implement a system for automated application with minimal syasdmin support. Whether we have to pay for access to updates beyond a year is another issue, but I don't see how you get "basically no patches." If you have technical ability in your team, you certainly can get the updates and a system for getting and applying them for zero money. Not a bad deal. Now, where does Alan Cox's wage come from...?

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 13, 2003 0:50 UTC (Thu) by torsten (guest, #4137) [Link]

"What I want is patches for an OS that can live for 2-3 years for a reasonable price. $180/machine/year is not reasonable."

Maybe I'm out of the loop. I've been using Linux for about five years, and I've never paid a dime for a patch - or even for a single piece of software. Has everyone become umbilical cord'ed to RedHat?

Torsten

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 24, 2003 21:35 UTC (Mon) by barrygould (guest, #4774) [Link]

I don't need support, per se, I need patches so that I can keep our cluster running for something like two years between OS upgrades.

But the way you make it sound is your cluster will suddenly become useless without updates from RH, which doesn't make sense to me.

If your cluster is well firewalled, you may not need to worry about most of the updates, as they're usually security patches for public services (bind, sendmail, apache, ssl, ...)

If not, then you have the option of applying the patches yourself.
I'm running a customized sendmail on 7.3 (because I wanted TLS, etc., which RH didn't compile in for some reason), so, when the recent vulnerability was announced in Sendmail, I had to patch it myself. Wasn't so bad.

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 13, 2003 2:39 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

I work for an educational institution too. I estimate that we've got about a 1000 linux boxes (not counting students), about 300 of which I am directly or indirectly responsible for. We don't pay Red Hat anything except for a boxed set here and there. The one year cycle is going to be a bit of a pain, but a large portion of our users are clamoring for the latest and greatest anyway.

These new prices are ridiculous

Posted Mar 13, 2003 8:56 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link]

Yup, I'm just praying someone else sees the opportunity to make a few bux before the end of the year. Ok, maybe not enough to show up on RedHat's .com scaled radar but enough to feed a couple of geeks by providing subscriptions to security and other critical updates for RedHat's normal distro.

One year is a joke. I just wish someone at RH would realize that everyone is NOT going to pay for their Enterprise level product, yet still have production machines like labs that need a fairly stable product. By stable I mean .2 or .3 releases only. With a minimum 18 month (plus a few months for a .2 to really stabilize, get tested and rolled out, etc) interval between .2 releases and only 12 months of security patches...... does anyone else see a problem here?