This is very interesting. Redhat is well within it's rights to charge for this service.
I would argue that this is a perfectly legitimate way of making money out of open-source.
In fact there might be an opening for an entrepeneur to provide a server inside NZ to supply reliable software updates.
They are providing a real service. This is not making money out of flogging licences for software they are actually doing something for their money. And people can still take copies and give them/sell them.
<scottish>The main issue (for me) would be how much. :-)</scottish>
Regards, Zane
Nick Rout wrote:
<flamebait warning>
up2date/RedHat network is the redhat "equivalent" of apt. It downloads updates when you ask it to, it also calculates dependencies - if you tell it to install a package it willl calculate its dependencies, download them and install them. It will even update your kernel successfully (yes I know most people would not trust this to automation, but it does work - leaving you to reboot and choose the new kernel from the grub menu).
To use it you need to either set up/find an independent up2date repository OR subscribe to redhat network. Up till now subscription was free for one computer per user, and they never seemed to know that several "users" could have one email address and effectively this meant one person could subscribe many machines for free. One problem has been that unlike debian/apt the RHN repository was centralised and prone to being too busy to give the lower priority free users 24/7 access.
Now they seem to have cottoned on or become too overloaded and a series of emails from RHN seems to imply that (1) accounts with different usernames but the same email address will be deleted; and (2) "demo" (read free) accounts will be done away with,
Another blow for the freedom of apt-get and apt/rpm (and urpmi for that
matter).
As I said earlier, you CAN set up your own up2date enabled redhat repository, trouble is there do not seem to be many of them about. (Ryurick had a university access only one at one stage, dunno if it still operates).
So, if people move wholesale to apt-rpm, are we going to see the relatively few redhat-apt-rpm repositories like freshrpms.net falling over or wirhdrawing from the race due to bandwidth blowing out?
</flamebait warning> -- "All that was needed was to parse the cat root slash dev etcetera file for eth0 and pugle the forward identity-locking rehooliginator and symlink it to the libgc perl humongisooler module after a kernel decompile and basic repatch update." - theregister.co.uk
-- Zane Gilmore, Analyst / Programmer Information Services Section, Information Technology Dept, University of Canterbury - Te Whare Waananga o Waitaha Private Bag 4800, Christchurch New Zealand Phone +64-3-364 2987 extn 7895
