I think Redhat has staked out the short end -- pay $800 per server per year, or EOL comes in 12 months (or less, for the installed base). The other end, of course, is indefinite support for one low payment (or none, if you download the distribution for free). Obviously, there's a problem for the vendor; the second could bankrupt them, and as Jon points out, the first is unacceptable to its customers. I know my company is NOT going to shell out $800/server/year for some two dozen workstations -- that would double the cost of the hardware by the EOL of RHAS!

We've standardized on RH 6.2 for the last three years, partly because of Redhat's base compiler (the infamous gcc 2.96), and partly because nobody wants to upgrade all the installations. We'll go to another distribution before we have to upgrade every year.

But back to RH's problem. I don't think the RHAS price tag is worth it. I'd be willing to push through some reasonable cost. My major problem is that I don't know just what the RHAS is. If I can buy one and clone it for the workstations we have, that cuts down on RH's revenue, but it's acceptable to me. I'll keep the other boxes up to date manually (OpenSSH has made it easy -- I run one script from one machine for each update). But we are not going to pay half of Microsoft's proposed tax for a tenth of the installations.

(What was Redhat thinking to push this end-of-life policy out before they finalized the RH Advanced Workstation?)

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