David Kewley wrote:
...
Many folks are going to have to change their local release policies and
methodology.
It seems a lot of us are in this position, and none of the options are good.
Our choices seem to be:
* roll out new releases *far* more often than we're used to, based on FC
Can't do that - not enough hours in the day already.
* fork over some significant cash e.g. for RHEL licenses (which many
can't
afford)
Definitely not affordable. Based on the pricing i've seen (here in
.au), Solaris, Mac OS X, and NetWare are all cheaper, but none of them
thrill me as a good alternative to RHL. For an academic institution, i
can get an *unlimited site license* for NetWare for less than the cost
of two RHEL ES licenses. It's possible that even Micro$oft licensing
would work out cheaper in some scenarios.
* try to make our own distro based on the RHEL srpm's (which
feels like
cheating RH, but if it works, it could be a practical solution for us)
When they're releasing SRPMS, how can you say you're cheating them? The
process is working as designed.
* rely on community security updates (so far, too little concreteness
to make
an organization's plans around this!)
A variant on this would be to roll your own security updates from the
upstream sources and the sources in FC1.
* leave RH and Fedora
Unless the community effort to produce a modified RHEL distribution is
very successful, i see this as being the best of a bunch of bad
alternatives. I'll be looking at Mandrake and possibly SuSE over the
Dec-Jan period. If i switch, i'll be switching my home, work, and
another .edu where i volunteer over to the new distribution - i simply
can't afford the time committment to
This is a *big* decision for a *lot* of folks.
Is there a way we could get together and try to make some co-ordinated
effort to help RH understand what they've done in alienating the
.edu/.org sector?
And of course, if that fails, making a co-ordinated effort to help each
other by providing a more stable FC or a free RHEL derivative would be a
reasonable alternative.
BTW, has there been any discussion on backporting RHEL features into FC?
Does RH have a policy on this? It seems to me that getting FC to a
state where security errata from RHEL could be applied to it would be a
reasonable compromise.
--
Paul
http://paulgear.webhop.net
--
A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: Why should i start my email reply *below* the quoted text?