From: Martyn Drake martyn@drake.org.uk

To be quite honest with you - that's been and gone so quickly I can't ever remember what my position was at that time.

It actually happened over the span of 2 years before any name change. With the introduction of RHEL as a separate product, RHL was having an identity crisis. It used to be that ".2" was the "enterprise release" (and they even sold SLAs as RHL6.2E), but now there was a 2nd product.

Some suits insisted that RHL was still a product -- and some even viewed it as a "competiting" product. I noticed this first hand when RHL7.3, RHL8.0 and RHL9 were "missing" a few things that suddenly "reappeared" later with FC1.

Most developers wanted the "shackles off" because RHEL was now the "SLA" product, and RHL was just the incubator for that product now. There was also the continuing nags from CompUSA and other resellers about selling a product that is outdated every 6 months.

The result is that Red Hat Linux was deprecated to a project, no longer a product. Vendors largely stopped certifying on RHL after RHL7.3 as the announcements came that updates would only be released for 1 year. Then there were the other projects that added RPMs, etc... and all that finally came to a head in the grand re-design.

I seem to remember it had something to do with Progeny and them supporting the releases as part of their transition solution.

Had _nothing_ to do with Progeny. Progeny just decided to take advantage of the situation and offer $5/month subscriptions in the absence of RHN as of 2003Dec31 (RHL6.2-7.3 EOL) and 2004Apr31 (RHL8.0-9 EOL). Of course, anyone who follows Fedora Legacy knows that even RHL7.3 continued to have updates -- and more ".0" releases like RHL8.0 were dropped due to lack of popularity.

Usually I've gone down the route of using dedicated server providers that can supply RHEL with the system.

That's _exactly_ one of the markets Red Hat was tapping. Red Hat either wants system integrators to use Fedora Core and support their own, or buy RHEL and share the burden with them.

What prompted me to buy my own subscription was that there were at least two providers that had issues with getting their RHN satellites/proxies/whatever working and left the machine in a potentially vunerable state if their install image was a fair a bit old.

That doesn't sound like a Red Hat issue, but a system integrator one. Furthermore, the system integrator _could_ have provided you a YUM repository in the meantime.

Again, I've no problems with this whatsoever. I just wish I could have purchased a cheaper service with less frills.

When Red Hat reaches the economies-of-scale that Microsoft does, then that will happen. But right now, Red Hat has to sell at a price point that is 10x that of Microsoft to get equivalent operating funds for just development.

People forget economies of scale is everything. ;->

Most of Red Hat's move into the black came from their Cygnus purchase, and not sales. It wasn't until the subscription model later that they started making a profit atop of their already profitable developer/services unit that Cygnus bought them.

Yggdrasil was my first too. I then worked my way up to Caldera (spit! spit! spit!)

Why? Caldera was a _good_ company until May 2003 (2 months after the original lawsuit, prior to the addedum). Caldera bought SCO and was going to have a split Monterey/IA-64 and Linux/x86 solution.

20 days after the purchase, IBM pulled out of Monterey, yet started to sell their Monterey/Power platform (aka AIX 5L). IBM essentially _squashed_ a _good_ Linux company overnight because it wanted to be the _only_ dual-UNIX/Linux vendor. It saw Monterey/IA-64 (UnixWare 8) as a competitor so it squashed it while it could.

Caldera-SCO tried to continue for 18 months, but their entire future was built on low-volume, but high-end sales of UnixWare 8 while their Linux volumes increased. The result was the March 2003 filing, one that I questioned at first, _until_ I read items #50-55.

That's when I realized Caldera-SCO was suing for: A) Breach of Contract: Withholding Monterey/IA-64 B) Breach of Non-Compete: Developing Linux/IA-64

Caldera-SCO figured IBM would want the rights to UNIX(R), and IBM would settle in short order. When IBM didn't, they expanded the lawsuit and put up a "smokescreen." They want people to believe their various contractual disputes with IBM, Autozone, Chrysler, etc... are about Linux IP, when they have _no_ ground to stand on.

So far, the gambit has worked, largely thanx to the rabid Linux populous who knows nothing about Monetery, and the fact that even the most pro-Linux company is _not_ IBM's friend if you threatened their Power/AIX platforms. Just ask IBM customers who can't buy Linux/x86-64 systems from IBM because IBM tries to sell them Power/AIX, and what IBM does to them if they buy HP Linux/x86-64 systems. ;->

I felt a bit vindicated when Ransom Love, co-founder of Caldera, came out in a Fall 2003 interview with eWeek and basically verified it was all about Monterey, and he didn't agree at all with the May 2003 change of strategy. What really scares me is if and when Caldera-SCO _does_ win on a few counts against IBM, that people will think Caldera-SCO has asserted IP rights on Linux.

So far, in all the rulings, on anything Linux, Caldera-SCO has gone no where. But on anything having to do with IBM's Monterey dealings, and possibly "non-compete" violation in the Linux/IA-64 space, the rulings have gone Caldera-SCO's way. I'm afraid a ruling on "non-compete" terms with regard to Linux might be taken as a Linux IP by the media -- and that is very justified given the type of articles we have seen (short of Ransom's interview).

To date, Red Hat, Sun and HP have donated about 10x as much in GPL than IBM. People scrutinize Sun for their non-GPL licenses, but don't seem to do the same of IBM -- who has several "non-GPL compatible" licenses on the _majority_ of their so-called "donations." It's like there is the "Linux Quiz Show" and people are tuning in for the money, not the substance. The $1B went to maturing IBM's product line, not Linux donations. The latest $100M is to port 100% proprietary IBM software to Linux, but not open source it.

IBM is not our friend. Thank God Linus & co. have watched every donation into the kernel, and made sure no IP was attached (which has held up many of IBM's donations).

but found my footing and went over to Red Hat from that point onwards. These days I help look after many render farm boxes and workstations running a combination of Red Hat 7.2 and Fedora Core

1. We're still converting to FC1 and it's a long and laborious

process given the number of machines that need updating.

I adopted APT-RPM for all Red Hat Linux 7+ systems a long time ago. I largely use APT repositories for configuration management. On x86-64, I try to use APT-RPM, but when I need to load both i386 and x86_64 packages, YUM-RPM gets the call.

From that point we'll then going to have to look at 64bit support.

YUM-RPM does an outstanding job. My only complaint is that Red Hat stupidly doesn't put the i386 version of Firefox in its repositories alongside the x86_64 packages (it does both for Mozilla though).

Much of our needs are dictated by the software we run, and our vendors will only support certain distributions. Which is why Studio Linux http://www.studio-linux.org was born.

Why not base it on Fedora Core x86-64?

That's one of the things that I'm seeing in Fedora Core like Debian. Instead of just forking from Red Hat Linux never to return (such as Caldera, Mandrake, SuSE, etc... did), people are now forking, but returning to Fedora Core as a base for the next version.

That's largely how Debian-based distros work too.

Difficult since we don't have CompUSA here in the UK ;)

Or whatever superstores you do have.

The last time I saw a shrink-wrapped Red Hat anything was back in the days of RH 7, 8 and 9. I even bought some of them to support Red Hat.

I have Red Hat Professional Workstation from both RHEL 2.1 and 3. They renamed it (and added volume licenses) the Red Hat Desktop to get the IT media to stop mis-quoting Tiemann that Red Hat _never_ left the desktop.

I'll be good.

Has nothing to be with "being good." ;->

I just find that people have an intrinsic feeling that they must define their choice in not only a like of their choice, but a dislike for another. It's not only self-defeating, but many times the facts are not correct.

Or my personal favorite, I've seen people state things about Red Hat that actually affect their distro too. I've just seen far too many bugs listed as "Fedora Core-only" when they have been Linux 2.6, Parted, GRUB, cdrecord, etc... issues.

-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org