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There has been a lot of grousing on discussion boards about people unhappy with Red Hat's marketing moves just being whiners who were unhappy they weren't getting it for free any more. Well, I was absolutely furious about it, but I'm not a Red Hat freeloader.

I have been a paid subscriber to Red Hat network for almost three years (at the office and also at home.) Although I mostly downloaded the CD images for free, I always considered Red Hat Network to be a good value at the $60 basic subscription price, and bought it for each of our systems. The new educational pricing plan, IMO, is a terrific deal. I had grudgingly decided I would go with RHEL ES ($349 per year, with first two years half-price) for my more important servers, and Fedora Core for the utility boxes.

Now Red Hat is offering their RHEL AS product ($1499 price tag) for $50 a pop to anyone at the University. At that price, I'm buying it now, even without Postgres and MySQL. It costs less than RHN did. But I'll probably keep Fedora on my workstation. It still has up2date, and you don't have to mess around with entitlements. And it gets updated more often that every 18months.

With this new pricing, Red Hat has redeemed itself in my eyes.

Gene

Koos, Missy wrote:
[log in to unmask]"> Loss of Red Hat as a free OS

Is anyone considering going with a BSD based system? FreeBSD isn't
based on any specific company so it would be immune from something like
RedHat is pulling. Its also secure, stable, fast and has a Linux
compatibility library. OpenBSD is another great OS and is (In many people's
opinion) the most secure in existence.

For those who aren't willing to go to a non-Linux system, what about
Debian? I just cant see paying for something that has always been, and
should always be, free.

Just wondering.

--
Gene Willacker
Systems Analyst
H&FS Systems Operations Group
Michigan State University
Food Stores Building
East Lansing, MI 48824
1-517-353-1691