[wplug] Red Hat AS/ES (was Building redhat from source)

[Keir Josephson]

Well, AS/ES have a different licensing strategy. What your actually paying
for is an annual subscription to a support contract of some type when you
buy the AS/ES offering. They market the product as though you were
purchasing the software, and that was actually the case until recently.
Before they created the Enterprise Server product, you could only but the
Advanced Server product. Advanced Server had with the ISO's, their
proprietary clustering software. However, Enterprise Server is essentially
Advanced Server without the clustering software. The only way to get the
ISO's from red hat is to buy them (i.e. buy the first year of support).

At this point, the licensing model starts to get a little gray. Do you
have to continue to pay the annual fee in order to have the right to use
the ES product, since it is all licensed under the GPL? The answer is no,
but red hat is not really selling it that way. However, if you pin them
down that is the answer you'll get (more or less). They've designed the
product to work with their support solutions and that's what they would
like to sell it as. Can't honestly blame them for wanting to make a few
bucks. The nice thing about the support, is that companies like HP &
Oracle are claiming that they'll keep a support issue in their court and
work with Red Hat behind the scenes to find a resolution for your problem
as long as you have a current support contract with Red Hat as well. While
it may not be the preferred method for those that know the os, it's a
great way to ease the concerns of your average CIO and get linux into some
of the more conservative data centers.

As for the ES 2.1 product itself. Really it's just a mix of pieces from
their 7.x versions that red hat has deemed to be a stable release to give
to software companies to certify their products on. It has a 2.4.9 kernel,
,glibc-2.1.3, etc., etc. I use the word stable, because the stability
issues, at least with oracle, have been that their software doesn't always
jive with a particular linux distro or install depending on the kernel rev
& libs your running that day.

In the case of the os, itself, because it's licensed under the GPL, you
can download the source for free off of red hat's site and run it free of
charge just like any other distro.

-Keir


On Sat, 24 May 2003, Bob Schmertz wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 16:46, Vanco, Donald wrote:
> > It's also worth noting that there are a bunch of folks hoping to circumvent
> > the cost of the RH EL product line by compiling the entire distro from
> > sources.  Sadly, it appears that these distros are not quite fully "self
> > hosting" - builds of some portions of GNOME and things like that fail...
> >
> > My personal experiences with building updates to AS from src rpms bears that
> > out - you really need a licensed, "full" install to get things to build
> > without flaming hoops and spinning plates on sticks....
> >
>
> I'm curious as to how recompiling the distro of Free Software will allow
> someone to have a copy of ES that they couldn't have otherwise.
>
> So far I haven't been able to figure out what the real deal is with Red
> Hat Advanced Server (and now Enterprise Server and all the rest).  Is it
> illegal to copy the ISOs?  If so, how can they do that when all or
> nearly all of the software is free, much of it GPL'ed?  If not, why
> aren't there RHAS/ES ISOs floating around on the Net, and how come none
> of the update mirrors carry update RPMs for the "commercial" offerings?
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Bob Schmertz
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