my thoughts on package management

Tom 'spot' Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Fri Jul 25 18:06:15 UTC 2003


On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 12:20, Scott Becker wrote:

> If RH actually "is" willing support an array of PHP rpms, etc, 
> for various configurations to cover the needs of people like Robert but 
> "only" in RHEL and Robert is willing to pay for the convienence then 
> that dialog needs to happen. Obviously RH is a large company which needs 
> to make money so this is understandable but RH is being a little tight 
> lipped about what they have going in RHEL and probably haven't decided 
> it all yet.

If you need the ability to call Red Hat and get support for anything
Linux related, you will need to be using RHEL. Do we support the PHP
rpms we ship in RHEL? Of course.

Yes, we are being tight-lipped on what we have going in RHEL, and part
of this is due to the fact that the next release of RHEL is just barely
in Beta. Features may be added/dropped while we're in this stage.

If anyone would like to talk about RHEL, either contact your sales
representative (if you have one) or email me directly, and I will be
happy to discuss it with you as far as I can. Recognize that an NDA may
be necessary to get into the fine details, such is the nature of the
game, pre-release.

> Not formalizing and publishing the volume 
> discounts is very short sighted because more than half of the 
> prospective RHEL customers my size never talk to them after seeing the 
> price and multiplying it times the number of servers (7 in my case). We 
> just say to our selves, "forget it, it cost too much".

Do you pay list price for your hardware? Do you pay list price for ANY
software application? I suspect the answer is no on both counts, but you
HAVE to engage the Sales machine in order to get that volume discount.
Almost no computer business entities publish their volume sales
discounts (outside of the channel). Red Hat is not unique in this
regard.

Striking a middle ground between the needs of the "do-it-yourselfer" and
the "enterprise" is far trickier than you've detailed. Any approach
taken has to be sure not to weaken the position on either side. 

If you find yourself needing telephone support or Red Hat guaranteed
updates, you're sliding onto the enterprise side. Give Red Hat a call,
let us try to work with you to see if RHEL is an option. 

~spot
---
Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> SAIR LCA, RHCE
Red Hat Enterprise Architect :: http://www.redhat.com
Project Leader for Aurora Sparc Linux :: http://auroralinux.org
GPG: D786 8B22 D9DB 1F8B 4AB7  448E 3C5E 99AD 9305 4260

The words and opinions reflected in this message do not necessarily
reflect those of my employer, Red Hat, and belong solely to me.

"Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal." --- T. S. Eliot





More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list