The Red Hat Network - or ‘I thought Linux was free?!?’
Posted: June 3rd, 2003 | Author: telcor | Filed under: Linux |Ahh, the rumblings that occur when a new RedHat user first learns that he needs to pay RedHat for the privilege of keeping his system up to date. Often this is when a person says, ‘But I thought Linux was free?’
While Linux is Free, certainly businesses cannot always provide services for free, especially when those services are quite costly. One of RedHat’s revenue streams appears to be the RedHat Network (RHN) subscription. They do offer a ‘demo’ account, which one may maintain by answering a survey every 2-3 months.
What is one to do? Unlike other commercial Operating Systems, there are alternatives to the RHN:
- apt4rpm
- Fresh RPMs
- urpmi
- Download and install the updates from the many mirrors
- Download, compile and install from source
Certainly there are many other options than the ones above, I merely listed those I know.
Essentially what you are paying RedHat for, is the convenience of their RHN updater and (ostensibly) testing and quality of the RPM’s. Is the service worth it? Only you can answer that. As for me, I fled Red Hat long ago, well before the RHN introduction because their distro never satisfied me. Now I run a combination of Debian, SuSe and Slackware. Of the commercial Distro’s, only SuSe is able to satisfy me, which is probably odd…
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