[TriLUG] Red Hat 9.0 ?!?!

[Kevin Sonney]

Look, before I get too heavily into this next bit, and it's a long
one, full disclosure is advised: 

I work for Red Hat. Specifically, I work as a Sales Engineer for Red Hat
Inside Sales. So take everything I say with the following things in mind:

1) Yes, it sounds like a pitch. Deal. 
2) If you don't want to read it, and just moan that "it should all be free
forever and Red Hat sucks" use your delete key now.
3) I am not arguing for/against Red Hat Linux. I'm presenting the
facts as I see an know them. Ultimately, you choose what distribution
you are going to use. I/we respect that as well. 

Read this, think about it, then feel free to flame me - just do it off
list, because the SC doesn't need a flamewar to deal with.

All that being said...

On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 09:00:46AM -0500, Brent Fox spoke thusly:
> If we were just going to release beta quality code for the consumer OS,
> we wouldn't have bothered to do three public betas for the upcoming
> release.  
>
> The Enterprise line is based on the consumer line, so it would make no
> sense for us to undermine the quality of the consumer line.

Right. I think there's a misunderstanding here. The consumer line is for
those people that need bleeding edge features, and a place for us to
debut new features that aren't quite ready for the enterprise. Look at
NPTL for example. It's in the public Betas. Is it stable stuff? Yes! Does it
improve performance? Yes! Is the technology mature enough to deploy
Oracle 9i on at this time? Not yet. Do all the hardware vendors &
driver authors and software vendors need time to write their code to
it, to test it, to get feedback from the public on it? Certainly.

For the home user, or personal desktop, a 5 year lifespan with bug-fixes
and technical support isn't anywhere near as important as getting new
features, new hardware support, new performance tweaks. Thus, the
consumer line. It's free of you want to do it that way, it has a
shorter life so that our developers (Brent included) don't have to
debug two or three year old code from *7* distinct releases (actually,
until March 31. That's when 6.2 and 7.0 are taken out of that
mix). Wow, that frees them up to make even more innovations, all of
which end up back in the community since it's all open source. That's
a great thing. 

Will you upgrade more? Yes. Is it still worth running? Yes. Just not
in those mission critical spaces. 

Now for a small office, for a large enterprise, the longer lifespan,
the stable platform, the ability to get quality technical support,
&etc. are critical.  The Red Hat Enterprise Linux product line has the
maintenance and support options that these customers need. And it also
takes the features from the consumer releases, puts even more
engineering into them, and works with the hardware and software
vendors to insure support.

Is it stable? Yes. Is it a helluva-lot more tested than the consumer
line? yes. Is it a deploy once, update as infrequently as possible,
keep running until the hardware falls over platform? Well, yeah. We
have a list of accounts who deployed it for that reason.  Is it a
single platform to support, since all three Red Hat Enterprise Linux
variations in each release share the same codebase? Yes. 

I think the guys who came up with this stuff had a pretty good idea
when they did it. And this is it in a nutshell :

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux for your enterprise, large or small
  - Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS for the technical/developer workstation. 
  - Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES for the SOHO, Small Business, and
    edge-of-network.  
  - Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS for enterprise deployments - oracle,
    fail-over clustering, etc.  
- Red Hat Linux for the need-it now features, home desktop, or gaming
  machine.  

-- 
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--         Kevin Sonney         --
--  ICQ: 4855069  AIM: ksonney  --
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