[Cumbria] Red Hat shoots itself in foot?

[Schwuk]

Not quite sure how I feel about this one...

Apparently [1] Red Hat are introducing a one life span to their consumer
OSes (i.e. anything free). After this one year, no new errata or updates
will be produced, although existing ones will remain available. This is, as
pointed out in the articles linked below [2] [3], obviously done to push
people (or rather companies) towards their advanced products.

Whilst I agree with why they are doing it (to cut interal support costs, and
try to make people keep up to date), I think the time frame is too short for
businesses. Most home users will either upgrade regularly or not at all, but
why should a business have to upgrade their perfectly good server just to
maintain support after a year? If I were to recommend that a small
business/school were to replace their costly Windows server and licenses
with a Linux server, there is a very good chance - especially if that server
is on a private network - that the server will be running for a lot longer
than a year with very little done to it... What about co-located servers -
they aren't exactly easy to upgrade are they? It's certainly going to make
me re-evaluate which distribution I recommend for professional use...

I think this will be a shot in the arm for UnitedLinux adoption...

Oh, and to save Ken the trouble: Yes this does relate to running Linux on
big boxes (although it will also impact all usage of linux), and yes we all
know that SuSE (and UnitedLinux in this case) are worthy alternatives...

[1] https://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/
[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29053.html
[3] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/27/239231&mode=nested&tid=110
-- 
Schwuk