[Cumbria] RH in Give us your data and money shocker!

[Michael Saunders]

On 3 Mar 2003, Ian Linwood wrote:

> Still fond of RH?
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/29542.html

Stop trolling.

"Getting Red Hat Network support for free just got harder. With the
impending rollout of Red Hat Advanced Workstation the company has made
another move to 'encourage' users to pay for Red Hat Network support."

Wow, a large company wants people to pay for its services! What is so
wrong with charging for something like this? The distro is still
freely downloadable, as are all updates and errata packages. A solid
and professional operating system is still totally free. Red Hat are
trying to make money out of extra support services. What is wrong?

It's always interesting to watch Red Hat bashers as they talk about
new Linux software. They fail to see that the recent HUGE advances in
GCC (turning it into a viable professional tool and not just "that
free compiler"), along with major work on glibc, XFree86, the kernel
and GNOME were all funded heavily by Red Hat.

All the other distros PUT TOGETHER don't contribute as much money and
manpower into developing Linux; if you dislike Red Hat, go back to GCC
2.7.2, XFree86 3.3.6 and kernel 2.0. No, I don't agree with everything
they do, but they still make their distro and updates completely free
to download, and are doing an enormous amount of work on making Linux
even better.

Red Hat and IBM are the only Linux companies with strong market
traction at the moment -- you wouldn't want them to die.

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk