Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Erich S. Morisse]

Paul,

Have you taken a look at Red Hat's Basic Edition, which is available for
both the ES and WS lines of the software?  The price is lower, and
includes patches/updates, but no support.

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/purchase/

Erich

On Wed, 2003-09-24 at 18:15, Paul Gear wrote:
> Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 15:45, Paul Gear wrote:
> > 
> >>Here's my explanation of what i'm looking for:
> >>http://paulgear.webhop.net/the_page_formerly_known_as_rhel.html
> > ...
> > The costs of producing your distribution would cause Red Hat to lose
> > money on every box set produced. The Red Hat Linux box set model was not
> > profitable. Red Hat is a corporate entity, and we are in this to make
> > money. 
> 
> :-(  It seems that many people are not understanding what i am talking
> about here.  I'm not asking for you to bring back the RHL boxed set.
> I'm asking for a suitable combination of FC and RHEL, or more to the
> point, more suitable .org/.edu pricing on RHEL in exchange for fewer
> features/less support.
> 
> > That means that we might not have a product that fits your needs, and
> > yes, that sucks. But we put source code for everything in the
> > distribution out there for you to use under a license that lets you do
> > whatever you want with it. Most corporations would be horrified at the
> > thought of such a thing.
> 
> I understand why people keep mentioning this, but it's not an option for
> 95% of us.  If i could make "Paul's Perfect Distribution", i would have
> already done it.  I don't have time to make a distro, and it's not my
> job anyway: i'm a school IT manager, not a build engineer.
> 
> > Red Hat doesn't have to do a Fedora Core. We could focus all our
> > efforts on RHEL and tell everyone who doesn't want to pay us $$$ to
> > stop bothering us. We are doing a Fedora Core. We're trying to make
> > the developers and the open source community happy. We're trying to
> > give them a chance to make a really good Linux distribution in the
> > spirit and style of Red Hat Linux.
> 
> And what i'm trying to do here is explain how the amount of money you
> want for RHEL is out of reach for certain types of organisations, but
> RHEL is the only product you are offering with sufficient stability (in
> terms of product releases, not reliability) for our needs.  Thus we will
> have to look elsewhere unless something changes.
> 
> > And undoubtedly, this is going to piss off a lot of people who were
> > quite happily taking advantage of Red Hat Linux with 3 years of
> > errata without paying a cent.
> 
> I'm not asking for that.  I *want* to pay you for maintenance, but not
> support.  We just can't afford it.
> 
> >From the various replies i've received, people seem to be
> misunderstanding what i'm asking for in financial terms, except Richard
> Ames, who wrote:
> > ...
> > I currently have 14 systems subscribed to RHN which I hope results in
> > profit for Redhat.  These are RH 7.3 through 9 boxes serving small
> > businesses.
> >
> > Do I have to take that money elsewhere????
> 
> That is the issue.  I want an option for giving money to Red Hat:
> - One boxed set per year for all my servers is an option.
> - Paying for RHN service on RHL9 (or something with equivalent release
> timeframes) is an option.
> - >$1000 per server per year for RHEL with support isn't an option.
> 
> > ...
> > If you want updates beyond what Red Hat builds for the
> > Fedora project, volunteer to maintain it yourself.
> 
> Fedora is targeted at the wrong market.
> http://fedora.redhat.com/about/rhel.html says that Fedora is targeted at
> "Early adopters, enthusiasts, developers", which the .edu market is none
> of (despite what some people might tell you).
> 
> > If you want to
> > build an RPM that violates 14 patent laws and the Geneva convention,
> > we can't support you or link to you, but we can't stop you either.
> 
> I'm struggling to understand what you're talking about here and why it's
> relevant to the discussion.  Maybe you were trying to be funny.  If so,
> i don't get it.  Sorry.  :-)
> -- 
> Paul
> http://paulgear.webhop.net
> 
> A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
> Q: Why should i start my reply below the quoted text?
-- 
Erich Morisse			emorisse at redhat.com
Red Hat, Inc.			cell: 917-239-0157
Sales Engineer			http://www.redhat.com