Re: Redhat and Tetex

On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 11:27:11PM +0000, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> brett mccoy wrote:
> 
> > A.Mani wrote:
> > 
> > > Fedora Core has the latest version (2.02) of tetex. I think debian
> > > is unduly obsessed with stability...mandrake 9.0+ also includes the
> > > latest version of tetex.
> > 
> > Debian Sid also has v2.02 of tetex.
> 
> both of which are irrelevant to the original question.  redhat always
> has been cr@p with tex, and the fact that a non-redhat thing, on a redhat
> server, is better doesn't help.
> 
> and they're also irrelevant to people who've been using redhat up to
> now.  redhat has washed its hands of the home/academic market; where we
> all go depends on what level of personal/sysadmin effort we can afford[*]
> to expend.
> 
> linux stands a chance of long-term impact, so long as it remains free.
> there are powerful forces, in redmond and the like, wanting it not to
> remain free.  redmond has now won the battle that started when redhat
> became a commercial operation.  next target...?

Well, the good news is that all this is GPL. For instance there are
already legal clones of RHEL (whitebox, caos) crafted by the
community. There are also projects extending life of EOLed products.

Note that tetex 2.x was first packaged for (not by ;) Red Hat
distributions. In fact there were rpms available already during the
last weeks of the beta phase. One shouldn't always count on the vendor
;)

> [*] note, there's no _money_ available for sysadmin effort, in
> universities, to first order.  which is why the paid-for distributions
> can probably count on a tiny percentage of the academic user base.
> academics _have_ to pay m$, so there's nothing left for anything else
> significant.

There is a shift in this paradigm especially in Germany, where
academics don't have anything left to pay for nothing, so the "market"
of free Linuxversions grows eating Tru64, Solaris and anything costy
in its way. It already nags on M$, too.
-- 
[email protected]

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