full-disclosure - Re: Fw: Red Hat Linux end-of-life update and transition planning

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Message-ID: <20031104161803.GA22250@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG>
From: petard at sdf.lonestar.org (petard)
Subject: Re: Fw: Red Hat Linux end-of-life update and transition planning

On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 03:30:17PM -0500, Jonathan A. Zdziarski wrote:
> > Were you a customer? Was Red Hat actually deriving any revenue from the
> > machines you were running Red Hat Linux on besides a trickle of money
> > for Red Hat Network subscriptions? If not, why do you think they should
> > be concerned about what you run now?
> 
> It's called bait and switch.  By providing a free solution over time,
> they've managed to generate a captive audience of RedHat users (arguably
> by deception) and are now cashing in on the false premise that their
> software was actually free... informing their cattle that they will have
> to
> 
>  1. Pay additional infrastructure costs to upgrade
>  or
>  2. Pay additional infrastructure costs to migrate to something else
> 

To be fair, Red Hat alerted the user community months prior to the release
of RH 9 that their support cycle on downloaded and retail product would be
reduced to 1 year from the time of release. So if you were installing
RH 9 on anything, you knew that you'd have to "migrate to something else"
within one year. Unless you don't consider upgrading to the next version
to be "migrating to something else". If that's the case, installing their
new Fedora version in March when RH 9 support is terminated will be
equivalent to the new version you already knew you'd have to install then
anyway. 

If you remember that Fedora == RH 10, your situation really hasn't changed.
You're still using an OS that only promised security updates for a year,
so you *were* planning to either start rolling your own at that point or
to upgrade anyway, right?

Or does the fact that they changed the name of RH 10 to Fedora and now will
*only* supply it for free rather than sell it to you disturb you that much?

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