[TriLUG] Red Hat 9.0 ?!?!

[Scott G. Hall]

Kevin Sonney <alchemist at darkcanvas.com> wrote:

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>On Sun, Mar 23, 2003 at 09:00:46AM -0500, Brent Fox spoke thusly:
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>>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.
>>    
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>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. [...]
>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. 
>
>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.  
>  
>

Readers of this list should take note.  Red Hat is not the only to adopt 
this model; Sun uses this exact product-offering model for their Solaris 
OS and their own version of Linux.  So does IBM -- both the product 
model for their AIX, and for their own Linux.

I think that a lot of folks out there forget that Red Hat is making 
strides into mainstream business now, and that they have to adjust their 
product offerings to fit into that environment.  And like he said, if 
you don't like it, there are always other distributions out there.

Oh, and another comment that was not made: the testing and feedback from 
the Enterprise edition also back-benefits the Consumer edition.  You 
just cannot find some bugs and problems unless you load a server with 
300+ users or run some mondo heavy processes on them.  Not likely in the 
home or hobbiest markets.

I applaud Red Hat for work and effort, has who has contributed the most 
to the Linux community.

-- 
Scott G. Hall,
Raleigh, NC, USA
ScottGHall at BellSouth.Net