Re: Plea for a reasonable RHASv3 license option
Ed Wilts <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.linux.redhat.taroon |
|---|---|
| Organization | (ewilts) |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Tue, Sep 02, 2003 at 12:57:51PM +0100, Lance Davis wrote: > On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Ed Wilts wrote: > > > You either pay redhat $$$ per year per system, or you will have to upgrade > > > all of your systems, with all the problems and changes > > > that involves. > > > > That's true with every operating system ever released. > > That is no reason why it should always be so ... Actually there is a good reason. It takes a lot of resources to backport the security fixes. The general development philosophy is to apply fixes to the current version, not previous versions. If you want the latest versions, with all the implications that are involved, then the problem is a lot easier and cheaper to solve. > > > That is why a new community distro is being developed, if you want to be > > > able to use the product you are you involved in totally freely for ever > > > then have a look at www.caosity.org - its still in its early > > > pre-release stages and is looking for people to get involved. > > > > There are other distributions available that have the same goal (such as > > debian). You will not find a totally free distribution that makes > > backported security fixes available for free for all versions in a > > timely manner. That is simply not realistic. > > Maybe not, but the current version will always be totally 'free' . The current version of Red Hat Linux has always been free, and to the best of my knowledge, always will be free. If you want to Enterprise Linux with all the backported fixes, then you will need to pay for that. If all your new community distro is trying to do is to provide the latest version of the packages and not provide backported fixes, then you'll be no better off than RHL and are likely doomed to failure like the dozens of other distros that didn't take off. Don't get me wrong - most of the distros that failed were probably technically good enough to make it, but just didn't have the resources to compete. Providing timely backported security fixes is a lot harder than it looks. -- Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA mailto:[email protected] Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program -- Taroon-beta-list mailing list [email protected] http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/taroon-beta-list