Posted by: Charles Tryon
on November 04, 2003 03:51 AM
Who's the "Dumb Cluck" here???
The beauty of Open Source is that, if Corporation X says, "We can't afford to support these old products for free any more," then you aren't simply screwed like users of older versions of WinBlows are. Those users have no choice other than to either keep running with unpatched software, full of more and more security holes by the day, or to shell out major $$$ to upgrade not only their version of Windows, but probably their hardware too. Linux is Open Source. That means that OTHER people can pick up support for it, such as... perhaps... the Fedora project maybe?
I still think it sucks that RH is dropping support for these packages, but to be honest, I haven't used their support for the past two or three years anyway! I've been using Ximian Red Carpet, which for a free patch server, blows the doors off the Red Hat Network any day of the week!
Over the next couple of weeks, I have plans to stand up a couple Red Hat servers at work here. We're going to pay real money for real support contracts, and it is still going to be thousands less than the equivalent Microsoft or Sun servers. On the other hand, the little network I support at the small school where my wife works will keep running on Red Carpet support. It all depends on what the needs are. In both cases, the servers will look very much the same. It's just a question of what level of support I need for them, and how it gets paid for.
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Re:MS of Linux - NOT!
Posted by: Charles Tryon on November 04, 2003 03:51 AMThe beauty of Open Source is that, if Corporation X says, "We can't afford to support these old products for free any more," then you aren't simply screwed like users of older versions of WinBlows are. Those users have no choice other than to either keep running with unpatched software, full of more and more security holes by the day, or to shell out major $$$ to upgrade not only their version of Windows, but probably their hardware too. Linux is Open Source. That means that OTHER people can pick up support for it, such as... perhaps... the Fedora project maybe?
I still think it sucks that RH is dropping support for these packages, but to be honest, I haven't used their support for the past two or three years anyway! I've been using Ximian Red Carpet, which for a free patch server, blows the doors off the Red Hat Network any day of the week!
Over the next couple of weeks, I have plans to stand up a couple Red Hat servers at work here. We're going to pay real money for real support contracts, and it is still going to be thousands less than the equivalent Microsoft or Sun servers. On the other hand, the little network I support at the small school where my wife works will keep running on Red Carpet support. It all depends on what the needs are. In both cases, the servers will look very much the same. It's just a question of what level of support I need for them, and how it gets paid for.
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