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<!--+GtkHTML:<DATA class="ClueFlow" key="orig" value="1">On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 12:58, Stephen Smoogen wrote:
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<PRE><FONT COLOR="#737373"><I>Ok I lets just cut to the chase.. what is the price people are willing
to pay and how many machines are you going to have? Then figure out how
many others you would need to sell at that price for RH to become
profitable and grow (going off of SEC filings or whatnot).</I></FONT></PRE>
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<!--+GtkHTML:<DATA class="ClueFlow" key="orig" value="0">Okay, I'll take a stab at this, but I'm only one person so I'm not sure my comments will be representative of other universities. We currently have around 100 Sun workstations. Let's say we wanted to replace them with Linux PCs. We're probably not going to replace them all in one year so the cyclical cost of $180 each time we replace a machine is probably manageable. However, paying $180 (minimum; more if you want support) per machine, per year would come out to $18000 per year. That is simply out of the question. We need some sort of volume discounts to be able to cover that kind of expense. We could probably handle somewhere in the $2000 - $4000 range for "maintenance" costs each year (ideally that would include support). However, let's say Linux popularity grew and we grow to 200 machines. Should the cost double ($4000 - $8000)? I don't believe so. I could be wrong here, but I don't believe RedHat's cost linearly increase as the number of machines at a site increases. My point is that there should be some sort of volume pricing. For example, $x for 0-100 machines, $y for 100-500, $z for greater than 500. We simply can't afford per seat licensing for a large number of machines.<BR>
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<!--+GtkHTML:<DATA class="ClueFlow" key="orig" value="0">Here's my basic issue right now... if RedHat were to come out and say... "Look, we've examined the cost/maintenance/support ratio and $180/$300 per machine, per year is what we need to survive. If you can't afford that, we're sorry." ...I would be fine with that and would probably have to look elsewhere. But I haven't heard that. So I'm left to wonder why they haven't made an offer for edu pricing.<BR>
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<PRE><!--+GtkHTML:<DATA class="ClueFlow" key="orig" value="0"><!--+GtkHTML:<DATA class="ClueFlow" key="signature_name" value="name:Professional Signature"><!--+GtkHTML:<DATA class="ClueFlow" key="signature" value="1"><TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%">
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<PRE><!--+GtkHTML:<DATA class="ClueFlow" clear="orig">--
Jeremy Dreese
Engineering Computing Systems Integrator
College of Engineering
Bucknell University
voice: (570) 577-3714
fax: (570) 577-3579
email: jdreese@bucknell.edu</PRE>
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