UNC Linux Users Group

[Andy Ingham <ingham AT email.unc.edu>]

I'm very excited that this discussion is happening, but a little 
dismayed about a couple of things. 

A point that seems to missed is that the $5,000 is an *annual* expense.  
Sure, we can take up a collection, pool our money and pay the bill this 
year.  Then we have to do it again next year?  And the year after that?  
And ibiblio has graciously offered to host the system, but does that 
mean that they have to find the money to buy and replace the hardware?

There seems to be little doubt that there are enough RH installations on 
campus to justify a base level recurring annual expense ($5K plus 
hardware costs periodically) so that each license for individual systems 
is a fraction of what it would be without that initial annual expense.  
Fred indicated that "there are nearly 500 machines that initially could 
be installed with Red Hat."  That, to me, means that we probably 
*already* spend more across the University for departments to 
individually license and maintain RH machines than we would with the RHN 
proxy setup. 

My sense is that a centrally supported (and funded!) RHN also increases 
the likelihood that machines will be kept "up2date" (since it costs 
departments less to do so), which improves the security of the campus 
network.

My 2 cents.

Andy

Andy Ingham
Systems Librarian
University Libraries
UNC-Chapel Hill
919-962-1288
andy_ingham AT unc.edu