RedhHat Linux 9

Sun Nov 9 19:32:25 GMT 2003 RedhHat Linux 9

I thought I'd take a look at what will be the last non-commercial version of RedHat (sort of - more below). The install went fine right up till it asked for CD 2 - it insists that the disk I gave it is not CD 2. There's nothing apparently wrong with the CD; I don't yet know exactly what is supposed to be on it, but it's not obvious garbage. There are the store bought $39.95 CD's, but I guess I'll have to download at least that.

This whole RedHat thing puzzles me. First of all, what's Fedora if not a "free RedHat"? OK, no support, and no absolute relationship to the RedHat Enterprise product. While they say that some Fedora features may end up in Enterprise RedHat, there's no real relationship. But I bet darn few of the non-Enterprise users of RedHat ever cared about any of that anyway. Obviously the $100.00 a year stuff couldn't have been worth much overall or RedHat wouldn't have dropped it.

But those boxed $39.95 and $79.95 sets couldn't have been that unprofitable, could they have been? Mike Desrosier asked "Do they know something we don't?", wondering if perhaps this has something to do with the SCO/IBM mess.Well, if it were not for Fedora, maybe, but Fedora seems to throw that out of consideration. If they were worried about paying licensing fees, Fedora would be just as affected. Besides, the low end of the supported versions starts at $179.00 - not free, but not very expensive either.

I can't see this being a smart move though. Wouldn't you think that an awful lot of Enterprise RedHat came from original installs of free or inexpensive boxed sets? Aside from that, I can't imagine that RedHat's popularity in the low end isn't a big reason for people choosing it at the high end. This move may not be suicidal, but it doesn't seem particularly smart.

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