<story><title>Red Hat Is Not Linux (2000)</title><url>https://web.archive.org/web/20000815063125/http://www.redhatisnotlinux.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ytjohn</author><text>When I was young and optimistic, I was doing a bunch of side IT jobs. At one, a local insurance company needed to replace their Windows NT server. Instead of going with Windows 2000, I talked them into me setting up a RedHat Linux server running Samba.  I had a few hiccups as the workstations weren&amp;#x27;t actually connected to a domain originally, but I eventually got them all going with AD login, roaming profiles, tape backups, etc. The big selling point was the open source nature, free updates forever.&lt;p&gt;Less than six months later, Redhat announced that the were going to discontinue RedHat Linux and start releasing their new RedHat Enteprise Linux. This left me rather angry and embarrassed. It was definitely a turning point in my understanding of FOSS. It also made me a lifelong Debian&amp;#x2F;Debian derivative user.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve supported RHEL professionally, even getting RHCEs in it. RedHat has also contributed a lot to the open source community. But I&amp;#x27;ve certainly never forgot that first pivot, so I&amp;#x27;m not surprised with their recent decisions regarding RHEL&amp;#x27;s source code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jzb</author><text>I understand embarrassment, but anger might be misplaced. Red Hat was a newly public company trying to turn a profit. It identified its market and Red Hat Linux wasn&amp;#x27;t serving it, and the model they were pursuing with Red Hat Linux wasn&amp;#x27;t working.&lt;p&gt;But I am a solid supporter of the &amp;quot;pay for RHEL or use Debian&amp;quot; philosophy. If you need promises about the future, pay for RHEL or use a project that doesn&amp;#x27;t have commercial motives. Debian is great and I wish more companies would standardize on it and support it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not such a fan of the middle road of hoping that vendors will continue supplying things of value for free. It&amp;#x27;s especially ironic that an &lt;i&gt;insurance vendor&lt;/i&gt; got burned by placing a bet on a free operating system with no assurances whatsoever. The RHEL subscription is insurance.</text></comment>
<story><title>Red Hat Is Not Linux (2000)</title><url>https://web.archive.org/web/20000815063125/http://www.redhatisnotlinux.org/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ytjohn</author><text>When I was young and optimistic, I was doing a bunch of side IT jobs. At one, a local insurance company needed to replace their Windows NT server. Instead of going with Windows 2000, I talked them into me setting up a RedHat Linux server running Samba.  I had a few hiccups as the workstations weren&amp;#x27;t actually connected to a domain originally, but I eventually got them all going with AD login, roaming profiles, tape backups, etc. The big selling point was the open source nature, free updates forever.&lt;p&gt;Less than six months later, Redhat announced that the were going to discontinue RedHat Linux and start releasing their new RedHat Enteprise Linux. This left me rather angry and embarrassed. It was definitely a turning point in my understanding of FOSS. It also made me a lifelong Debian&amp;#x2F;Debian derivative user.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve supported RHEL professionally, even getting RHCEs in it. RedHat has also contributed a lot to the open source community. But I&amp;#x27;ve certainly never forgot that first pivot, so I&amp;#x27;m not surprised with their recent decisions regarding RHEL&amp;#x27;s source code.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>josephcsible</author><text>&amp;gt; The big selling point was the open source nature, free updates forever. Less than six months later, Redhat announced that the were going to discontinue RedHat Linux and start releasing their new RedHat Enteprise Linux.&lt;p&gt;I wish there were legal consequences when companies lied about future prices of things or durations of support.</text></comment>