Ximian Adds Subscription

GeneJock writes "Apparently the days of free fast updates from Ximian are gone. The latest update to the Ximian suite replaces the old Red Carpet Manager with a newer version which includes access to a subscription service. This subscription service costs $9.95 a month ($7.95 for the first two months if you signup now). You can still get the updates for free but its slow going... looks like I'll be getting my updates overnight. Read all about it here." Can't fault a company for trying to make some money - hope it works. Update: 12/19 16:48 GMT by T : Please note: Ximian isn't cutting back on the free downloads, either -- in fact, just the opposite. Read below for some more information about this, including a link (yup) to a standalone static binary of Red Carpet, so you don't even need to use Ximian Gnome.

Nat Friedman of Ximian points out that the introduction of the subscription service doesn't mean a reduction in the availability of free downloads, from Ximian and the 40 associated mirror sites. "We've actually grown the pipe by 500% over the past 4 to 6 months," he says. "We also have a mirror coordinator." He cites ever-increasing numbers of Red Carpet sessions as the reason for introducing a subscription; November alone saw three quarters of a million sessions.

That number seems likely to increase, in part because of Ximian partnerships with companies like HP, now shipping a preview release of Ximian Gnome on HP-UX, but also because the Red Carpet software update system no longer requires Ximan Gnome; Friedman passed along this link to distribution-specific static binaries which work with other distributions as well.

Despite new servers and more bandwidth, Friedman asserts that some users downloading software for free will inevitably hit servers at times "when they're getting 8k downloads and they'd rather be getting 50k, and that's really who the subscription is for."

I just read ximian webpage

[dago]

In addition to the basic updating service freely available to Red Carpet Users, updating is also delivered through two premium subscription services:

Red Carpet Express provides users with priority high-bandwidth access to Ximian applications and leading third-party software for faster installations and updates.

Red Carpet CorporateConnect provides centralized Red Carpet updating to corporations and workgroups, including special features which allow system administrators to distribute their own in-house applications to their users - quickly and securely - through the Red Carpet interface.

So, it seems that there's still a 'normal' version, for use with 'normal' programs, using 'normal' server and a commercial one, with high-bandwith servers and some commercial soft.

No problems, just use the one you prefer depending, pay if you want/can and use the free version otherwise.

Of course, let's hope that there will still be free updates available.

Re:Stuck with bugs?

[Eimi Metamorphoumai]

Those people can download their bugfixes, they just have to wait a little longer. You should note that the free Red Carpet seems every bit as fast as it has for the past month or so (which is quite a bit faster than it was before that). We're not talking about having bugfixes out sooner, just taking less time downloading them.

Re:Won't work

[Syberghost]

Upon re-reading what I wrote above, I realize I said something misleading.

With Ximian you don't pay for updates. You only pay for the fastest-available access to them. Updates are still free.

With RedHat Network, you pay if you want to avoid having to manage your entitlements via a web page if you have multiple systems. You get the same bandwidth priority either way.

Nevermind the throttling

[Blarfy_Snarflepoop]

Red carpet is a great tool for people learning what's going on in their system, and providing explanations of what all the packages are for. After you've got mor than a few boxes, it becomes really unruly to keep them 'current'. I'm running about 80 redhat boxes here, all of which are nicely kept up to date using autoupdate [univie.ac.at]. The update server fetches from ximian and redhat nightly, and the workstations update themselves from there weekly. No worries about bandwidth!

Re:$119.40 per year

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get it for a yearly rate of $99, look at the subscription page

Re:I hate to say it

[Sircus]

RHN is not free. You get a free year (afair) with your copy of Red Hat, but if you want additional machines to use the service, or you want to use the service thereafter, it's $19.95/month

One word: Overpriced

[Anonymous Coward]

This is way overpriced in my opinion. I am an IT manager for a company with about 30 Linux desktops. According to this pricing I would have to pay about $3000 per year to keep my Linux boxes updated. I don't think I would ever get anything like that approved by the management. If it was less than a $1000 it might be doable but $3k is a little bit too much.

At one point I spoke to one of the Ximian sales reps (who in ultimate irony uses Microsoft Outlook as his e-mail reader) who told me that supposedly an average Linux administrator uses 1-3 hours of his time a week trying to update the software, dealing with software dependencies etc. I don't remember spending so much time dealing with dependencies and such. I also wish them good luck but I am pretty sure we won't be subscribing to Red Carpet Express.

Re:One word: Overpriced

[mcmanus]

In a corporate environment, pay for 1 RCE, operate that
RCE through a squid proxy with a large max cachable
object size.

proceed to operate the other N-1 RC-Classic clients through that same proxy.

Instant and seemless mirror - indeed faster than RCE. Any minor differences in installations can still be resolved automatically against the 'slow' classic server as cache misses.

Saves both you and ximian bandwidth - a win win and very use to do with already deployed tools.

*Cough*apt*cough*

[Greyfox]

Linux has (and has had) several automatic updaters forever now. I prefer Debian's -- apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade is pretty hard to beat. If you run the stable branch, you can pretty much put that in a cron job and forget it. I don't know why it scares you... it's a great solution.

Redhat apparently has some sort of tool (up2date or something) which performs a similar task.

red-carpet was pretty cool, but IIRC the Ximian gnome didn't get along too well with Debian (Mainly dependency naming issues IIRC) so I wiped it off my desktop and installed the standard gnome branch. I really can't tell the difference, either. And getting Ximian off my desktop was a much more miserable experience than it had to be, though this was more Debian's packaging system's fault than anything else. The dependencies cascaded and X and all the X programs ended up getting uninstalled too.

If I were in a corporate situation and getting paid for keeping a Linux network healthy, I'd set everyone up with Debian, have their apts pointing to a machine inside the company and either set them on a cron job or hack out some method of kicking off a apt update on a remote signal. Then I'd thoroughly test new packages before releasing them to the live apt server.

Time will tell if this subscription model works for Ximian. I suspect that in its current form, it will not.

Price Discrimination

[ProfDumb]

Like others, I wonder if the $9.95/month price is too high just for better download times. However, we should remember the basic theory of economic price discrimination (which is a morally neutral term in economics, by the way, unlike other forms of discrimination.)

The point of price discrimination is to divide your consumers into groups based on their willingness to pay. Let's say that the profit-maximizing price -- if only one price is offered -- is p0. Then if a firm offers two levels of service at p1 and p2 (with p2 the higher price), it is likely that optimal p1 is less than p0 and optimal p2 is greater than p0. The reason is that the higher-priced service is aimed at a particular group of service-sensitive/price-insensitive consumers, not at the "average" consumer.

Now, take p0 as the Microsoft price -- we would expect Ximian's p1 to be less that the MS price and it is: zero. Correspondingly, we might expect that p2 could be even higher than the MS price, as it arguably is. It seems to me that most consumers would prefer the Ximian solution -- at least you have a zero-price choice.

Of course, while this argument is in favor of a relatively "high" price for the premium service, the firm still has to worry that even the service-sensitive folks will "defect" to the low-price service. Unless they make the free service really bad, I still wonder if $9.95/month isn't too high. Perhaps they should go for a $10/quarter "Premium" service and a $10/month "Elite" that has further support benefits.

Re:I hate to say it

[Anonymous Coward]

Taken from the RH website:

"Red Hat Network service is available as a monthly or annual subscription. Every registered RHN customer receives one free subscription."

Re:Too expensive, I agree

[wsxyz]

I question whether you have ever used Red Carpet at all. There are not just updates once a month, there are updates several times per week, and this is not a bad thing! During Evolution development I was able to get bugfixes almost every day.

For the whiners who complain that they can get everything for free from Sourceforge, does Sourceforge resolve dependencies for you? Does Sourceforge uninstall stuff for you and delete all the leftover independently installed libraries that are no longer needed afterwards? Does Sourceforge let you see all of the packages you have installed and all of the available packages that you don't have installed?

Red Carpet does all of that and on top of that it's free for gods sake! Don't pay the $9.95 per month if you don't want to. I downloaded the latest Evolution snapshot today on the free "slow" channel. Yes, it took a while, but then again, I was busy doing other stuff anyway so what do I care? It's pretty absurd to see people who are getting great software for nothing complaining that it takes 30 minutes to download it.

Rumor Control

[Peter Teichman]

We'd like to clarify a few of the facts around our new Red Carpet Express service.

Since we launched the Red Carpet service this past April, it has become immensely popular. In fact, usage of Red Carpet has grown over 500% since the service's inception, and we've had to scale our public server's network pipe accordingly. Today, hundreds of thousands of people use Red Carpet on a regular basis to keep their systems up to date. Almost since the day we launched it, we've had a number of users ask us to provide a subscription service to Red Carpet that would offer a higher level of bandwidth. That's what Red Carpet Express is.

Red Carpet Express is not a sign that we're backing away from our free Red Carpet service. As our userbase has grown, it has become harder for us to increase our available bandwidth -- and consequently our monthly colo bill -- to provide everyone with the fastest connection possible. And so, for the users who absolutely must have high speed all the time, there is Express. Red Carpet Express is made up of a new, dedicated network of machines located at major hubs, and doesn't cut into our free service at all. In fact, over the last few months, we have increased bandwidth to our free Red Carpet service dramatically as the userbase has grown.

Red Carpet Express is not a sign that we're backing away from our mirror network. We have a dedicated mirror coordinator who works with our over 40 mirror sites to make sure they have the latest content as quickly as possible. This isn't going to change with the launch of Red Carpet Express. In fact, I'd like to encourage those users of our free service to consider looking for a mirror site closer to them.

Anyway, we hope people give Express a shot. It's the perfect stocking stuffer! :-)

Re:I hate to say it

[Razzy]

That's strange. I never bought RedHat (FTP) and my RHN Update still works just fine.
I "registered," a long time ago but I'm not a registered [paying] customer.

So long, Ximian.....Nice knowing ya.

[Bowie J. Poag]

Let me get this straight, here...

I contributed work (and continue to contribute work) to Ximian's distribution. In return, I get to use their distribution for free. But now i'm going to be charged for accessing my own work?! Hooooray for free software!

Caveat emptor, folks. By going with this scam, you're essentially entering into a pay-per-download arrangement. You're allowing someone to charge you for material you are entitled to obtain freely.

Yes, yes, whiners... I know what the GPL says about charging a reasonable cost to cover mass production. This is neither reasonable, nor is it mass production, plus its been shown that network-based distribution of software does not incurr significant cost to the provider. Have a look at Debian's, Red Hat's, or Mandrake's mirror list if you don't believe me. Half of them have mirror sites in friggin Uganda.

Something tells me all the money goes towards affording progressively larger and larger hats to fit Miguel De Icaza's head.

Cheers,

Re: Mirroring... Gnutella Network!

[eries]

Check out these two projects:
Everything Over Freenet(EOF) http://eof.sourceforge.net/ - they have a version of apt-get running over Freenet already.

World Free Web
http://wfw.sourceforge.net/

Re:Rumor Control

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Peter, I am one of the 'freeloading home users' using your red carpet updater, and I've gotta say I'm fantastically over the moon with both the quality of the software and the service.
Were I a corporate customer (I'm a contractor, so I don't get to make the cash decisions :-/), this would be without doubt my preferred way to keep any in-house boxen up to date.

I wish your company the best of fortune in these difficult times for IT - particularly Linux.

Don't forget the majority of slashdot readership is about 15 years old and thinks paying for a CD is expensive .-)

Mr Thinly Sliced

Why Debian?

[Nailer]

I know debian is harder to get installed than other distros but *come on*.... it is a one time cost.

The Debian developers who wrote APT created it to be independent of packaging systems, and its been out on Connectiva and mandrake (and optional on Red hat) for ages.

Red Hat users:
Download the APT package from:

http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt/redhat-extra-7. 2/ redhat/RPMS.extra/

and put the following in your /etc/apt/sources.list

rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-7.2-i386/redhat os
rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-updates-7.2/redhat os
rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-extra-7.2/redhat extra
rpm ftp://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/apt redhat-freshrpms-7.2/redhat
freshrpms

rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-7.2-i386/redhat os
rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-updates-7.2/redhat os
rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-extra-7.2/redhat extra

Problem solved.
* Standard (i.e, RPM) packages.
* No difficult install.
* Current stable releases.
* Auto hardware detection, and other modern OS features
* APT

More mirrors would be great, and Debian's larger list of packages, better packaging policies and greater amount of mirrors help, but personally I think the other Red Hat features more than make up for this.

Ximian minimal install is broken for Red Hat 7.2

[bball99]

hmm... i used to think Ximiam installs were cool until i just tried a minimal install on a clean Red Hat 7.2 (enigma) system...

the install barfs with dependency errors!

i wonder how i would feel if i just signed up for the service?

or i guess that's what you have to pay money for? a working install?