Just got this from RedHat:

Thank you for being a Red Hat Network customer.

This e-mail provides you with important information about the upcoming discontinuation of Red Hat Linux, and resources to assist you with your migration to another Red Hat solution.

As previously communicated, Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0 as of December 31, 2003. Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 9 as of April 30, 2004. Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.

I find this terribly, terribly annoying. I've been using RedHat since the 5.0 days. I run a bunch of small servers on RH 7.x and 8.x. If I read this correctly, plain-old RedHat linux is no more. End-of-life. Unless I want to buy the subscription-based Enterprise (read:expensive) version, it appears that I'm SOL.

In looking at the feature comparison, it appears I could choose between the Workstation and Enterprise versions. According to the pricing chart, that would cost $179 or $349. But here is my problem. These products are listed as only "supporting" one or two CPUs. I'm not sure what that really means, but I'm not a linux user because I like using factory-crippled products. I'm getting a bad feeling about RedHat.

Because a number of the servers I run are for non-profit organizations, and the work is pro-bono, I don't feel comfortable installing RedHat Enterprise for them. Seems like too much of a risk. I'm was willing to buy RedHat Network subscriptions for each of the servers, but I'm not going to buy individual copies of RedHat Enterprise for them.

My first instinct was to go totally free, and commit to migrating to Debian. I really like how Debian is put together, and apt-get is a pleasure to use. But they have a spotty history with Java, and I need Java support.

Does that leave me with SuSe? I know they are "officially" supported as a Java platform, and YaST is pretty snappy. I dread, however, learning the idiosyncrasies of another linux distribution right now. I'm way too busy.

Finally, for a while I've been kicking around the idea of creating a small, not for profit hosting deal. I've been spoiled by having dedicated servers on the internet, with fairly good physical access. 6U in a real hosting company with 1Mbps bandwidth should be around $400 per month (minus the needed hardware). Less rackspace or less bandwidth would be cheaper. It wouldn't take many people kicking in $20 / month for unlimited access to a host (DNS, Java, whatever) to start breaking even.

I'm also tempted to switch the whole sheebang over to MacOS X on an X Serve. The latest MacOS X is really nice. I'm just a little nervous about running it headless at a remote site.

I seem to have fallen into rambling here. I'll leave you with these random thoughts.