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

[Keir Josephson]

On Sat, 24 May 2003, Vanco, Donald wrote:

> Keir Josephson wrote:
> > 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. 
> 	No - that was never the case.  It's always been about buying the
> support. 

True to the point, but if you talk to their sales people they don't jump
out and tell you that your only buying support. If you call them up and
make it known that your well aware of how the GPL works, yes, they won't
try to convince you otherwise, but it's not their initial approach. 

> 
> > Before they created the Enterprise Server
> > product, you could only but the Advanced Server product. 
> 	No.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux was a "rebranding" of the Advanced
> Server product and the introduction of the ES and AW products.  There was no

Your right, it is only a rebranding. However, prior to that rebranding
they were only shipping the full ISO's that included the clustering
software. It my understanding, that the ES & Workstation products don't
ship with the ES cd's.


> change to the core OS (save new splash screens)  - only to the support
> wrapped around it.  ES has the clustering stripped out.  AW has more
> compilation / software stuff to the base install.  Additionally, the ES and
> AW products are not supported on anything above a 2-way.
> 	The only Enterprise Linux product that is "different" is the
> Advanced Workstation for Itanium-II - and that's only available with the
> purchase of an H-P Itanium-II box (H-P paid for and owns the port - much
> like Compaq did with RH7.2 for Alpha)
> 
> > Advanced
> > Server had with the ISO's, 
> 	Never was any such thing.
> 
> > their proprietary clustering software.
> 	Wrong again - it's based on Mission Critical's (Open Source)
> Kimberlite clustering.  Red Hat hired 3/4 of the collapsing Mission Critical
> and turned Kimberlite into what is essentially Mission Critical's Convolo
> Clustering product.

Whatever the name, they told me that it's not a free product.

> 
> > 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). 
> 	I have to assume you mean CD's.....
> 

Yep. Sorry about the confusion.

> > 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, 
> 	The "right" to use it?  No.  The "privilege" to get update binaries
> from Red Hat?  Yes.  There will always be source updates posted to the
> mirrors - again, in keeping with the GPL....

No argument here. But if you read their new contract for the ES product,
thoroughly, you will find that there is no clear distinction between the
use of the support and the use of the software.

> 
> > 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. 
> 	It's also worth noting that in order to have the Oracle support
> mentioned above you have to have an "as compiled by Red Hat" kernel
> installed.  They'll run a checksum against your kernel, and if it's not a RH
> supplied kernel you've just voided your support.  This was a big deal as
> there was / is some (now stable) functionality missing from the RH kernels.
> 
> > 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.
> 	It was wholly based off the 7.3 code tree.  Through updates, the
> kernel has updated to near current revs - and it has "split" to provide
> kernels that support both the "old" (pre-2.4.10) and the "new" kernel memory
> architectures.
> 

Have you run the newer kernel revs for Advanced Server, yet? How do they
stack up to the 2.4.9e kernel? How hard was it to upgrade?

> > 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.
> 	Yeah - after a week of compiling :)
> 
> 	If anyone cares, the next release (due out late Q3) will have
> several additional technology advancements - including LVM (sorely missed in
> the current product) and a native clustered filesystem.  It will be a whole
> new code stream that will support all architectures built by IBM, and at
> least IA-32 and IA-64 from H-P (have not heard anything regarding Alpha, and
> to talk to the Alpha guys they're doing more with Debian and Gentoo(!) these
> days...).
> 
> 	There is a whole philosophy behind the Enterprise Linux line - and
> it really makes sense if you've seen the papers and drank the Kool-Aid.  All
> of the stuff is on redhat.com
> 
> Don
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > 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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