Fedora and the System Administrator -- basic economies of scale ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

Quoting William Hooper <whooperhsd3 at earthlink.net>:
> IIRC your $345 also gets you any new versions of RHEL that comes out.

Basic economies of scale.  $179 and $345 for WS and ES (I assume?) match up 
well against Microsoft's products, recurring support costs, etc... given their 
volume.
 
> I would also ask if you really need that many copies of ES or would WS
> do for most of it (I mean heck, it has Apache even).

That's my attitude.  If I just needed a 5-7 year supported "core," ES and WS 
are perfect as long as the 3rd party Fedora SRPMS will build on it.  WS is only 
$179/year and will do my desktop's nicely.

If I need a lot of goodies on a server, especially NFS/SMB clustering, etc..., 
I'll want to by AS for the broad support.

> You also have the choice of finding a third party to provide you
> support.  I've seen on these lists a couple of places that are
> offering to support Valhalla after Red Hat EOLs it.

I'm sure you'll see this happen with Fedora "Core" releases as well.  You'll 
pay for it, but _you_ have the option of _when_ you want to "stay back" 
or "stay current."

The GPL doesn't guarantee free of cost.  Stallman knows this better than most 
of us.  But the GPL _does_ guarantee you won't be gouged at the same time.  Any 
vendor who attempts to do so will cut its own throat as competitors will offer 
a way out.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I.  mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org  http://thebs.org
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