[plug] Just what did Red Hat do?

[Craig Ringer]

Derek Fountain wrote:
> I vaguely saw the news from a few weeks back when Red Hat decided they weren't 
> going to continue with their free RHL product. Not being a Red Hat user, I 
> didn't take much notice at the time. Now I come across a debate on /. which 
> seems to imply that Red Hat actually did something quite important. The 
> postings seem to suggest that there is no longer a free Red Hat distro, and 
> that those who used to use it now have to pay for some form of enterprise 
> licence, or change distros.

Pfft. In fact, Red Hat has moved closer to Debian's development style - 
much more community-based, open mailing lists, etc.

If you want commercial support for business etc, I'm not sure they'll do 
that for the basic RH. They plan to use it as the /base/ for their 
commercial offerings, which will have support etc.

I find it interesting, and look forward to some changes (an apt-like 
tool for RH will take very little time to be added, I suspect). In the 
end, people are making a lot more fuss than they need to.

> Is that what happened? Even people who have a RHL box in their spare room as a 
> hobbiest thing now have to hand over enterprise level money if they want to 
> update it?

Nope - you'll just get better software out of RH (at least hopefully).

> If I've got this right, what are RHL based PLUGgers doing? Bailing out to 
> debian?

Rather the opposite. Watching with a /great/ deal of interest.

I can't seem to find the original info from RH's website, and don't have 
time to look, sorry.

Craig Ringer