[TriLUG] Red Hat 9.0 ?!?!

[David A. Cafaro]

On Sun, 2003-03-23 at 09:00, Brent Fox wrote:
> 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.

Actually this is one spot I'm a little confused by.  Reading the
Descriptions of the new ES and WS systems (small server and
workstation?), it sounds like they are based on the old RH 7.2 or 7.3
series (Gnome 1.4, XFree86 4.1, etc...).  This isn't what I was hoping. 

Also I have to say I'm very confused with the pricing.  I was hoping
there would be a base server that you could purchase ($200-400) that you
could install on any number of systems (or even a limit of 5-10 would
have been fine for a small shop).  It would include 1 year of updates
for one system, and if you wanted more than one system to have those
updates you would have to purchase a 1 year subscription to RHN for the
others.  From what I'm reading, it sounds like I have to shell out $350
a system just for the OS (and 90 days support) and then another $96 or
$350 a year (confused by the entitlements prices).  That starts racking
up pretty quick for a small shop that only has 2-3 production servers, 1
test server, and 1 desktop.  Feels like I have lost my pricing advantage
of RH vs MS (I know it's still cheaper but read on..).  I'm in a
University, and though we will spend money on Linux (I have
subscriptions to RHN for my systems), I'm going to have a hard time
justifying those prices compared to Windows (large site licenses = deep
discounts) which most feel like they get for free. :-(

Sorry, I'm pretty sure no one on this list makes the pricing decisions,
and I have yet to talk to a Red Hat sales person to confirm or deny my
fears.  I just got this horrible sinking feeling when I read through the
stuff on the website.  I'm not looking forward to moving my stuff off of
Red Hat. :-(

Cheers,
David