Re: Product cycles too short for small businesses (esp. Red Hat)

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, John Andersen wrote:

> But the fact of the matter is that the contract for the SuSE 8.2 Pro
> is non binding on you, and  the SuSE ftp site is still offering
> updates for 7.2 which must be at least 2.5 years since it was released.

You are correct that SuSE are still releasing updates for 7.2, but it should
be noted that according to <http://lwn.net/Articles/31827/>, 7.2 should have
been EOLed about 3 months ago (it was released June 15 2001, according to
<http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2001052900920PRSS> and SuSE's policy
is to supply updates for two years after release). RH7.1 will have enjoyed
about 20 months of updates by the time it is EOLed at the end of this year.

> They charge no money for this update and patch service.
> Am I missing something, or are you talking about something
> altogether different?

RH charged nothing for access to
<ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/updates/>. Using Up2date/RHN is not
mandatory, although RH obviously hope(d) that RHN provided enough value to
customers for them to justify taking out subscriptions.

It will be interesting to see how long SuSE can a) maintain support for
older distros and b) stay in business. I hope they are successful.

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>