But the upgrade is FREE. Once you have a subscription, you are entitled to an upgrade. It costs you nothing extra, if you want it.

RHAS 2 IS still supported. They make good on their EOL promise on it, should you still want to use it instead of uprading to the new version.

Redhat cannot continue to support every OS they make indefinitely. Its not about your freedom. In fact, you have all the freedom to keep using it, but you cannot expect support on an EOL'd distro. Its entirely uneconomic. Its nto even about your freedom, if I can reiterate. If you really want the extra support, I suppose you can make them an offer which would cover their costs.

RHAS 2.1 is in maintenance mode until 31-may-2007. That is still a long time away from now. And they still provide the free upgrade if you want to. So it you were using it, there is absolutely no need for panic. It has life in it yet.

While it is true that I am not exactly up2date with RH's offerings (I checked briefly), wasn't trying to make a dishonest comparison. The point I was trying to make is that RH released a server-edition that was behind on their workstation edition, too, some time ago. For good reasons, for all I know. But nevertheless.
But you make another point, which is that RHAS doesn't ship anymore. And it is, or soon will not be, supported anymore. In other words, RH asks us to please participate in their upgrade-treadmill. Or more bluntly, RH tries to out-microsoft microsoft. This mean that *my* freedom of choice is limited to what RH supports, and how long they support it. While this may be good for you, it sucks for me.

You betray yourself slack_jaw. RHAS does NOT ship anymore. It was replaced by RHEL, which is a full suite with different capabilities. Comparing Debian and RHEL is a joke. Debian is a good general purpose distro, and for those who want to choose from an infinite number of configurations. If you are comparing a distro that came out years ago with one which just had another update, then you are being a tad dishonest or you are not very knowledgeable.

RHEL has the following.

GNOME 2.2 or KDE 3.1

Kernel is 2.4 with many capabilities from the 2.6 series backported for their enterprise customers. An example is NPTL.

It is Oracle certified.

It is LSB 1.3 compliant.

I could go on, you can go to redhat.com to see for yourself.

deficiencies of rpm (but maybe not apt, yum, up2date etc, since I don't know them): no dependencies(fixed in the other I understand, tho), version incompatibilities, distro incompatibilities (RHrpm, SuSe rpms, Mandrake rpms ...)

And, BTW, RHAS is maybe more backward than a std. deb install.

but my point was that *I* (not necessarily you, tho) prefer Bruce & grass-roots-support helping me make a living than me helping RH make a fortune. It is, IMHO, more in line with OS philosophy than megacorps & megabucks.

And, as to history, I think Bruce has been involved in deb longer than RH exists. And, loo and behold, Bruce has a product, deb, or rather, the community has. On which very many wonderful things have been build sofar.

But, more importantly, a monoculture is a dangerous thing. I would prefer RH doing its own thing (and I wish them luck with it), and Bruce his thing. I don't see (since they seem to have different target audiences) what the problem is with that. And if they do compete, well, the market will determine which one wins.

What deficiencies of rpm are you talking about.

What is wrong with Fedora. Redhat has made it very clear it is very bleeding edge. I personally do not think the way to increase Linux adoption is to cannibalize the little market Linux already has. Which is what Perens clearly is trying to do. rule of thumb, anytime someone badmouths some other product instead of actually telling us what their product s good for, they have no product worth much.

RH is obviously doing something right, otherwise they wouldn't be the biggest. Perens will do good to learn from them rather than dismiss them.

apt is ported from the debian variety, but that does not mean it doesn't use its job. Besides, apt is an extras package in Fedora, but you wouldn't know that if you don't use Fedora. Apt was ported by people who wanted it, redhat had never used it. The only distro that used it extensivly was Conectiva. Fedora uses up2date and yum, although up2date can use apt an yum repositories.

Yum is better in many ways than apt for rpm.

I think Perens should really start talking after he has something, not before. And then we can judge his product accordingly.

seems like some of the linux zealots have found a home with Fedora recently, no? ;-)

Anyway, Bruce is taking up the (oft heard) voice that linux needs standardization in order to gain large scale acceptance, and DOING something instead of blabbering. AND creating employment opportunities for you and me (as opposed to a corporate giant-wannabe).

Also, I don't see why UL _must_ have the same "conservative" style Debian maintains (with very good results, IMHO), such as a 2.2. kernel.

Finally, I DON'T see any reason to be proud of apt for RH or Fedora, since it is a) just adapted from apt-get, and b) a covering blanket for the deficiences of rpm.

All in all an initiative to applaud, I think.

And no, I am neither a debhead or a RHowdy. Just because I like my freedom of choice, and experimenting, doesn't mean I think everybody should be like me. Businesses (and most normal users) have different requirements. But I am not convinced that docs are all that necessary since I seldom meet a user who RTFM's. Stuff (according to the needs of the many) should _just_work_.

If UL can give the many that much, Bruce (and Paul, and countless others) gave linux the key to the world.

(P.S. standardization here means have 1 tool for 1 job, and have that tool do the job well, if not better)

Perl better be included!

You're forgetting Gentoo. It is quite a satisfactory and extremely customizable distribution.

About Red Hat, Bruce Perens is probably right. Corporate custodianship of free software will never work. Look at the strange buildings left behind by Netscape (Mozilla), IBM (Tomcat) and others.

The power of free software is the fact that the project drifts to where the users want to take it. Corporate custodianship invariably pushes in other directions. So, indeed, I won't waste time with Fedora. It will turn into a strange building -- out of place in its environment -- and eventually they will give it up, if only, because, in the end, they also have to make money, and they won't from something like Fedora.

I think increasing revenue is definitely not the sign of trouble.

Redhat does more than just put together parts and hope to sell it. They put together solutions. It does exactly the 20% which Perens was talking about. It has clients coming and saying they want such a feature, and then they go and provide that feature, doing lots of regression testing and back porting to give their clients what they need.

Debian is high quality but SO out of date. It defaults to a 2.2 kernel the last time I tried it. And just try telling a company to run 'unstable'. I hope you do not believe the myth that Debian unstable is as stable as normal RHEL.

Redhat has a product tree which is maintained. Debian is one huge tree where you choose you own confuguration. Show me Debian's provisioning modules, or their developer suite, or their portal server, or their cluster suite. Or their nice database. Not just postgressql. I am talking something well documented and supported. The answer is none of these for a reason. Debian is fine for running non critical webservers and other non critical systems.

How quickly does Debian respond to security issues. redhat is always first to update when these issues arise. That is what people are paying for.

I think RedHat is in trouble. Most of what it does and what it charges for can be done just as well by an open source project. That is what UserLinux is doing. Basically, the customers are working together with the developers to produce an enterprise-ready version of Linux. And if you think an open source project can't produce a high-quality version of Linux, just look at Debian.

I think Perens needs to first make his product work well before he goes off and badmouths Redhat. They have done more for Linux than he has done, and still do to this day.

If Perens wants to run a business where he lets the community make the decisions, then I will confidently make the prediction that his business wil fail, if he is tryign to run a business here. Redhat cannot take the base of their product and tell people to make all the decisions and then they just package the end result. Fedora belongs to them, and they want to keep it that way.

UserLinux rocks,... jadda, jadda, ... Others suck,... jadda jadda, ... me Perens, me the best, ... jadda jadda

Acording to Perens, human evolution sucked until he and UserLinux poped up.

btw. (Perens if you read) I run Fedora now for a long time, and never suffered your package management troubles, maybe you still run RH 7.x, but the rest of the world is happy with yum and apt (yes, for your info, apt does work on RH and it does it's job just as on debian)

ex. Debian user