From: Collins Richey crichey@gmail.com
It's just too bad that there is really nothing on offer for these former customers. Please don't suggest Fedora. The customers who are complaining the loudest are not interested in experimental versions.
To me, the quality of Fedora Core is no better or no less than Red Hat Linux before it. One thing I _do_ find is that people are making claims on Red Hat Linux that were _never_ true.
SLAs were _never_ offered, except on Red Hat Linux 6.2 "E". Support was virtually never offered as standard beyond installation. Yes, there were and still are professional services, but they are typically more for development anyway (which includes Fedora).
Updates were typically cut off for all releases except the last .2 once the next series came out. This all changed in the version 7 series, because companies and users started demanding it.
But after the version 7 series, 2 years before Fedora, Red Hat switched back to no more updates beyond one year.
So as far as "abadonment," I never saw anything Red Hat did above and beyond as unofficial charity. And I rather tire of claims that Red Hat did this or did that on Red Hat Linux when they _never_ did.
Which is why I scratch my head. Especially when you compare what people want and the fact that there's virtually no other company that offers it. Even SuSE doesn't make it's 2 year guarantees, and they are yanking support on SuSE Linux 7.
It's almost like there is this Red Hat Linux product that existed like a myth, a word-of-mouth fairy tale. And that's what just makes me roll my eyes.
At the same time, people still complain about the GLibC 2.0 change, the GCC 2.96/3.0 change, the NPTL change, etc... It's like even the critics sometimes contradict themselves -- much like I also see done with Microsoft as well.
It's not that Red Hat doesn't have its issues or focus. It's just that people need to focus on those details that are actual issues, and not invent things. Like this Red Hat Linux product I never knew existed.
;->
-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
On 5/29/05, Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org thebs413@earthlink.net wrote:
From: Collins Richey crichey@gmail.com
It's just too bad that there is really nothing on offer for these former customers. Please don't suggest Fedora. The customers who are complaining the loudest are not interested in experimental versions.
To me, the quality of Fedora Core is no better or no less than Red Hat Linux before it. One thing I _do_ find is that people are making claims on Red Hat Linux that were _never_ true.
[ snips ]
Which is why I scratch my head. Especially when you compare what people want and the fact that there's virtually no other company that offers it. Even SuSE doesn't make it's 2 year guarantees, and they are yanking support on SuSE Linux 7.
It's almost like there is this Red Hat Linux product that existed like a myth, a word-of-mouth fairy tale. And that's what just makes me roll my eyes.
You're probably right. Some of this is mythology, but it's an all-pervasive myth!
I roll my eyes when I hear how good and great and all-virtuous RedHat is, and I roll my eyes when I hear some of the complaints about RedHat. As is always (at least since the time of ancient Greece) the case, somewhere in the middle lies truth. I'm just thankful that CentOS makes the RedHat software with all its benefits AND warts available to a wider audience. I'm essentially a believer in FOSS. I would never purchase a shrink-wrapped RedHat were it still available, nor do I have any need for an SLA, but I'm very thankful that RedHat fully subscribes to the GPL and makes its SRPM's available.
As a wiser person than I said in another post, it doesn't help much to tell someone who is used to having a particular feature that he can't have that any more and why. Even less does it help to tell that person that he is an ignorant fool and better off without that feature. He's still going to be bitter about the missing feature(s), and he will assign blame to the vendor even though it may not be the vendor's fault.
As a fitting end to this discussion on my part, I offer the PotShot cartoon I've had on my fridge for many years. The cartoon shows two people on the opposite rims of a vast canyon, and one of them says: "Come over to my side. The view is much clearer from here."
On Sun, 2005-05-29 at 01:00, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
To me, the quality of Fedora Core is no better or no less than Red Hat Linux before it. One thing I _do_ find is that people are making claims on Red Hat Linux that were _never_ true.
Here's a classic example: somewhere in the updates of RH 7.2, the apache DSO module for mod_perl was finally compiled with the correct options and became usable as shipped so people running web sites with it no longer had to recompile apache with mod_perl included statically. This was also supplied in the 7.3 release. Unfortunately it broke again when RH 8.0 moved to apache 2.0 but that's beside the point - or perhaps it was the beginning of the new era.
What, in fedora, is ever going to be equivalent of that RH 7.2 -> RH 7.3 transition where features weren't exactly frozen but there was a focus on getting existing things right without introducing new problems. No one here is interested in SLA's, or we wouldn't be having this discussion on the mail list of a distribution that doesn't offer them. We just want a product that mostly works and isn't too far behind the developers.
It's not that Red Hat doesn't have its issues or focus. It's just that people need to focus on those details that are actual issues, and not invent things. Like this Red Hat Linux product I never knew existed.
Come on - I would have guessed that you still had some RH 7.3 boxes in production too. Or do you only work with companies that will pay for vendor support on everything?
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Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith＠ieee.org> -
Collins Richey -
Les Mikesell