[lug] Fedora *MEETS* KRUD comments wanted

[Ed Hill]

On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 15:25, Nate Duehr wrote:
> Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 16:03, Nate Duehr wrote:
> > 
> >>I do not trust RedHat anymore.  They have the appearance of no longer 
> >>having my best interests at heart, as a non-paying user of their system 
> > 
> > 
> > My guess is that, as a non-paying user, they weren't really worried
> > about your trust.  In fact, they probably had no idea you existed unless
> > you somehow registered as a non-paying user.  They aren't running for
> > congress.  They're running a business.  And doing a much better job for
> > paying consumers than MS has.  Had you paid for the service, you might
> > have stronger arguments here.
> 
> I guess I wasn't clear enough -- the "as a non-paying user of their 
> system" was meant to say something along the lines of:


[*SNIP* : Long but well-reasoned discussion trimmed...]


Hi Nate,

OK, theres still one area where I think a lot of people are perhaps
(severely?) overestimating the cost of RHEL when used for multiple
machines.

Whats to stop you from buying a small number of copies of RHEL (WS, ES,
or AS) and a small number of RHN subscriptions and then using your own
INTERNAL (to your company) mechanisms to distribute the updates to
multiple internal machines?

Remember, Red Hat is very careful to include only Open Source packages
in their distributions so I don't see where you'd be violating any
copyright laws.  So far as I can tell, theres nothing illegal about this
sort of (again, strictly internal) distribution of Open Sourced and/or
Free software.  Its not the software (per se) that Red Hat is selling. 
Its primarily the support and service.

Using such a strategy, a company or individual can keep many machines
updated from a relatively small number of "standard" configurations that
are automatically cloned or otherwise copied.  And lets face it, theres
nothing new about this strategy.  So the trade-off becomes: your time
and effort to setup an update service versus a per-machine subscription
where Red Hat conveniently does it for you.  If your time is worth much
less than the extra RHN subscriptions, then go for it.  If your time is
valuable, then perhaps the RHN subscriptions are a bargain?

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Room 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
            Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
email:   eh3 at mit.edu,  ed at eh3.com
URL:     http://web.mit.edu/eh3/
phone:   617-253-0098
fax:     617-253-4464
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