[lug] Red Hat Professional Workstation

[Nate Duehr]

On Friday, Jan 16, 2004, at 06:50 America/Denver, BOF wrote:

> There has been much confusion over what Red Hat has been doing in 
> regards to its split into the Fedora and Enterprise lines.

Yep, they did a bad job of organization and communication.  Oh well.  
Why do you have to fix it for them?  That's their job.

I don't understand the "hey let me help you figure it out" postings on 
ALL SORTS of mailing lists (not just CLUE and NCLUG) with "helpful" 
people trying to help me figure out this fact...

*** What was once free as in beer, is not anymore. ***

That's easily deduced and is no big deal.  So RedHat wants people to 
pay for their distro now.  Oh well.  So what?  Since all of the 
software is also Free as in Freedom... why not would anyone in their 
right mind simply use someone else's distro with the exact same things 
in it?

There was a point in time when Kudzu and RH's hardware auto-detection 
on i386 hardware were King, but there are at least four solid distros 
that do a BETTER job nowadays.  What's the mental block against using 
those instead of the big Red fuzzy headwarmer?

When we all figure out Linux is Linux... and move on when someone says 
"you must pay for Free Software"... things will make more sense.

Because of the GPL, Linux is forever Free... even if the companies that 
sell it die and the "product" is no longer "cool"... that's the 
important part.

For me personally, RedHat's shift in pricing from $0 to anything >$0 
says... "time to move on."  And yes, I am still a paying RedHat Network 
member.  Blindly thinking that paying $60 a year (originally $99) would 
cover the expenses of RH putting together pieces parts from all over 
the globe, that they didn't even have to write in-house, was naieve of 
me I guess.  I paid my money and took my chances, no harm done here... 
but definitely... time to move on.  They screwed people over when they 
dropped UltraSparc support too, but I just moved that box to Debian and 
have all the same software on it I always did.  Gee, go figure.

--
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com