[ale] Enterprise Linux's

[Brian MacLeod]

On 10/6/05, Brian Akins <bakins at web.turner.com> wrote:
>
> I want to see if I'm interpreting something correctly. Various vendors
> offer "Enterprise Linux's" (RedHat AS, SLES9, etc.) They charge
> $250-2500 for a "license," but 99% of it is GPL'ed. From some digging
> on their websites, they seem to acknowledge that you can use the
> software without paying anything, unless you want support. In some
> spots they try to steer you towards the SRPMS and I know CentOS, for
> example, is built from these.
>
> So, if I download RHEL, for example, iso's and will never use support,
> it's "free," right? I know I can download and compile all the SRPMS.
>
> This was asked by someone else, and I was hoping to get a more succinct
> answer to them.
>


Yes. You money if you buy the product gives you:
1) Support, as you have indicated
2) Update services, including a nice web interface to manage your machines,
as Geoffrey indicated
3) Convenience and time where you do NOT have to download and rebuild the
SRPMs.


For RHEL or any of the clones, you can find tons of mailing lists that would
provide support, and occasionally, get faster support than RH proper (CentOS
list is VERY active).

Update services are available with free repositories with the clones, or you
can even roll your own.

Convenience and time cannot be replaced. If your time is very valuable, it
may not be worth the effort needed to maintain the "free" RHEL. That alone
can make the pendulum swing towards the paid up RHEL. If your services are
mission critical, it might be a better idea to pay up.

All things we had to consider when our contract went up almost a year ago.
We decided that while our servers were important, we could easily work
around any problems, and with the few servers we have, it doesn't take too
much time to maintain them, so we switched. We've saved quite a bit of
money, especially since we never actually used the support we had bought. We
took care of all of the difficulties ourselves.

bnm
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