Back in the early 2000's I was given the responsibility of installing a Red Hat Enterprise server at work. IIRC, the initial cost was $1,500 and an additional $750/yr support fee, which guaranteed a response to a email service ticket within 3 working days. Phone support was more expensive. I recieved a cardboard package in RH's red color theme which contained two CDs and a registration number. They were in the pocket of a three ring notebook binder that was about 3-4" thick. It contained complete install instructions, some how-to's and the man pages for about every package in RH at the time. Included was a copy of the GPL, and instructions on where one could find the source code to every pacakge in RH. The Terms Of Service included permission for RH to send a representative to our business location (NE State Office Bldg) to assure themselves that we hadn't installed that single copy of RH on more than one server, which would have been easy to do.
The only problem I encountered was that tar could not create a backup file that exceeded 2GB. I posted an email support ticket to RH's support site and then began a Google search. Within 20 minutes I had located two solutions to the problem, and implimented the better one. A full three days later, within hours of their 3 day limit, I got an email from RH support that listed those two URLs that I had discovered three days before. With that kind of support, and 50 cents, one can buy a cup of coffee. During the next two years that one service ticket was the only one that was filed.
I found it especially intriging how RH offered the source code for the server, in order to comply with the GPL. The website they referenced had around 780 or so individual packages that made up the RH Enterprise Server. Each package was an rpm file. When "installed" it left behind a tar file with gz compression. Running the decompression gave a tar file which could be untarred to get the actual source code for THAT ONE FILE. The files could be downloaded only one at a time. What wasn't on the download site were the tools and support files used to build the binaries, and the file hierachy that the tools worked against, and the envrionmental variables and their settings necessary to successfully compile. IOW, every file, tool or what ever that was NOT on the distributed CD.
While the number of people who have the ability to take such a collection of files and creat a working distro are not rare , it has been done only a few times. It is a LOT easier to activate the source code repositories and download them from there, along with the build-essentials. Despite their efforts to make building a copy of RH from source difficult without violating the spirit of the GPL, several have done so. The most notiable is CENTOS.
Before my bosses decided in favor of RH I told them that just about any popular Linux distro would make a good server and nearly all of them are free. I also told them that free online support was a good as most paid support. I suggested Debian, Slack or SuSE, which was what I was running at the time. They have a fixation on paid support, and wouldn't consider any distro that didn't offer paid support. Since then they've learned that "paid support" isn't always was its salesmen crack it up to be. My son, who used to be the Oracle admin, dropped Oracle technical network support system in favor of a free forum run by oracle users who help each other, just like Kubuntu users on this forum.
The only problem I encountered was that tar could not create a backup file that exceeded 2GB. I posted an email support ticket to RH's support site and then began a Google search. Within 20 minutes I had located two solutions to the problem, and implimented the better one. A full three days later, within hours of their 3 day limit, I got an email from RH support that listed those two URLs that I had discovered three days before. With that kind of support, and 50 cents, one can buy a cup of coffee. During the next two years that one service ticket was the only one that was filed.
I found it especially intriging how RH offered the source code for the server, in order to comply with the GPL. The website they referenced had around 780 or so individual packages that made up the RH Enterprise Server. Each package was an rpm file. When "installed" it left behind a tar file with gz compression. Running the decompression gave a tar file which could be untarred to get the actual source code for THAT ONE FILE. The files could be downloaded only one at a time. What wasn't on the download site were the tools and support files used to build the binaries, and the file hierachy that the tools worked against, and the envrionmental variables and their settings necessary to successfully compile. IOW, every file, tool or what ever that was NOT on the distributed CD.
While the number of people who have the ability to take such a collection of files and creat a working distro are not rare , it has been done only a few times. It is a LOT easier to activate the source code repositories and download them from there, along with the build-essentials. Despite their efforts to make building a copy of RH from source difficult without violating the spirit of the GPL, several have done so. The most notiable is CENTOS.
Before my bosses decided in favor of RH I told them that just about any popular Linux distro would make a good server and nearly all of them are free. I also told them that free online support was a good as most paid support. I suggested Debian, Slack or SuSE, which was what I was running at the time. They have a fixation on paid support, and wouldn't consider any distro that didn't offer paid support. Since then they've learned that "paid support" isn't always was its salesmen crack it up to be. My son, who used to be the Oracle admin, dropped Oracle technical network support system in favor of a free forum run by oracle users who help each other, just like Kubuntu users on this forum.
) to have such a wide range of users with varied experience and interests. Having learned so much like this, I can definitely say I'll be sticking around when I'm more useful!
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