[lug] Fedora *MEETS* KRUD comments wanted

[Nate Duehr]

I feel pretty much the same way as Andrew, and I find it crazy to spend 
hundreds to possibly thousands of dollars on server licenses for when 
alternatives are out there that do everything RedHat "used to" including 
free updates, security backports, etc.  Especially since my employer 
runs a lot of really simple servers.

My employer has no applications that need commercial certification -- 
the Oracle databases are staying on Sun boxes, for now -- at least.  So 
paying for RedHat buys us nothing, really.

Apache and tomcat and mysql run on any linux kernel.  Why pay for one 
when there's plenty of free -- as in beer -- ones?

I guess it comes down to this:

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 
-- even though they never really owed it to me in the first place.  I 
can't blame them, but I also can't trust them anymore.  They're no 
longer a "helpful partner", they're someone who just caused a very 
difficult decision about what to run in the future and demanded a big 
check to not have to make that decision.

Maybe that's the biggest damage... lots of people probably feel similar. 
  The "rules" changed without warning.

Kinda like Verisign's DNS wildcard records for .com and .net this week...

Nate, nate at natetech.com