jwulf (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jwulf) wrote,@ 2006-01-28 00:44:00 |
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Red Hat BOF at LCA 2006
We did the Red Hat BOF tonight. Dave Woodhouse, Dave Howell, myself and Seth Vidal (disclaimer: who doesn't work for Red Hat!), and Menno Smits were there.
Before we went I got the low down on the Fedora distro upgrade situation from Jef Spaleta and Seth Vidal.
If you go here you can see that Fedora allows an anaconda upgrade of one version of Fedora to the next. Check out Jef's comments to find out about the current situation of this in FC5 testing.
Doing an upgrade of a live system without rebooting, which is actually what our friend was after, is not officially supported, or recommended. Seth explained that nasty things can happen if you try this. However, Seth himself does it, and has a page where he talks about it - here.
There were about fifteen people, and I introduced them to Seth, who then kept them entertained for about an hour, at which time I gave everyone a t-shirt and handed out some FC4 DVDs for the peeps who wanted them.
A number of the people who came are in an academic environment. There are a number of options for academic environments. I believe there is a special academic pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (I'll have to check on the details of that - I'm not in sales). Seth uses CentOS (he's a maintainer) at Duke, which is a rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source packages. It costs $50 a year for a machine. You don't get technical support with that, or the centralized management of your machines that you get with Red Hat Network or Red Hat Satellite (all of which can save you a lot of time), and some third-party apps like Oracle that are only certified on RHEL won't run, but if you don't need those things, it can work for you.
If I had a business which had the skillset internally I'd probably run CentOS like Seth does. Otherwise I'd just pay for RHEL. Whatever the yearly subscription is it might seem like a lot for software, but you're not paying for that, you're paying for support staff, and for support staff that's pretty cheap. The guys that I work with are top notch and can fix all kinds of problems. A lot of the time I just help people to administer their machines. Sometimes we work to solve complex problems during implementations (they always ring just before their deadline!). Sometimes I connect people with engineers to get bug fixes done (people with subscriptions get priority on engineering resources). There are a lot of people whose work is something other than Linux, and they don't have time to spend on getting their system working, and they don't have the money to hire a consultant or a full-time Linux person. It's perfect for them.
The other night I was explaining the Red Hat business model to someone on the bus. The original idea? Give the Linux away for free, and make money selling the t-shirts. It actually hasn't changed much. We still give the software away for free. You can get it in binary form from CentOS, White box or Tao, or build it from source yourself, like they do. We make more money supporting it these days than from selling t-shirts, but t-shirts are still in the mix.
Have to get some more t-shirts. I gave away all the medium sized ones, and now there are only a few XL ones left. The new Fedora logo will look good on a t-shirt.
We did the Red Hat BOF tonight. Dave Woodhouse, Dave Howell, myself and Seth Vidal (disclaimer: who doesn't work for Red Hat!), and Menno Smits were there.
Before we went I got the low down on the Fedora distro upgrade situation from Jef Spaleta and Seth Vidal.
If you go here you can see that Fedora allows an anaconda upgrade of one version of Fedora to the next. Check out Jef's comments to find out about the current situation of this in FC5 testing.
Doing an upgrade of a live system without rebooting, which is actually what our friend was after, is not officially supported, or recommended. Seth explained that nasty things can happen if you try this. However, Seth himself does it, and has a page where he talks about it - here.
There were about fifteen people, and I introduced them to Seth, who then kept them entertained for about an hour, at which time I gave everyone a t-shirt and handed out some FC4 DVDs for the peeps who wanted them.
A number of the people who came are in an academic environment. There are a number of options for academic environments. I believe there is a special academic pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (I'll have to check on the details of that - I'm not in sales). Seth uses CentOS (he's a maintainer) at Duke, which is a rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source packages. It costs $50 a year for a machine. You don't get technical support with that, or the centralized management of your machines that you get with Red Hat Network or Red Hat Satellite (all of which can save you a lot of time), and some third-party apps like Oracle that are only certified on RHEL won't run, but if you don't need those things, it can work for you.
If I had a business which had the skillset internally I'd probably run CentOS like Seth does. Otherwise I'd just pay for RHEL. Whatever the yearly subscription is it might seem like a lot for software, but you're not paying for that, you're paying for support staff, and for support staff that's pretty cheap. The guys that I work with are top notch and can fix all kinds of problems. A lot of the time I just help people to administer their machines. Sometimes we work to solve complex problems during implementations (they always ring just before their deadline!). Sometimes I connect people with engineers to get bug fixes done (people with subscriptions get priority on engineering resources). There are a lot of people whose work is something other than Linux, and they don't have time to spend on getting their system working, and they don't have the money to hire a consultant or a full-time Linux person. It's perfect for them.
The other night I was explaining the Red Hat business model to someone on the bus. The original idea? Give the Linux away for free, and make money selling the t-shirts. It actually hasn't changed much. We still give the software away for free. You can get it in binary form from CentOS, White box or Tao, or build it from source yourself, like they do. We make more money supporting it these days than from selling t-shirts, but t-shirts are still in the mix.
Have to get some more t-shirts. I gave away all the medium sized ones, and now there are only a few XL ones left. The new Fedora logo will look good on a t-shirt.
