Re: OT: RH end-of-life

On 28 Jan 2003, Jeremy Portzer wrote:

>On Tue, 2003-01-28 at 06:50, Arthur Clune wrote:
>> 
>
>The end-of-life issue is a problem for me too.  I run Linux servers for
>several "mission-critical" applications, which require even more
>planning to upgrade/reinstall than desktops.  I inquired about Advanced
>Server for the sole reason that it has a long life cycle, but there is
>no way to buy it without the expensive support contract.
>
>I'm wondering, however, if there won't be third-parties who will
>continue to make updates for previous Red Hat versions.  If there are
>sites like freshrpms.net that will make security patches available for
>say, Red Hat 7.3 after Dec 31, this could help us.  Obviously you'd need
>to do your own QA, but this could reduce your work considerably.
>

There are several small companies (owlriver comes to mind) who would be
willing to support RH 6.2/7.3/etc beyond Red Hat's end of life. The
problem I have found when I was researching doing this was that there
are very few people who want to pay..

And here is the secret of closed source software... you can charge such 
a premium that you can pay for tons of engineers who are just 
maintenance people... Open source cant do that it would seem.

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