Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Jesse Keating]

On Tuesday 23 September 2003 14:07, Chuck Wolber wrote:
> As a support company, we don't need RHN. We need a solid OS (given
> the that RHN is not the only vector for keeping RHEL solid). We would
> gladly pay for a copy every year, or even a reasonable monthly fee
> for the rights to deploy to our customer sites. Otherwise, it's
> actually advantageous, in a business sense to support Microsoft. If
> you are paid to do support, always deploy the most defective product
> (assuming integrity isn't a big thing to you).

Exactly my situation.

> That being said, I recognize that RH needs to make money and we're
> happy to work with them in that area. However, if I went to my
> customer and told them that I had to tack on an extra $350/$800/$1500
> to the install bill, they'd tell me to jump in a lake. That's a lot
> of jumping considering that we do hundreds of installs each year.

Exactly what we're hearing, but make that hundreds of installs per 
month.

> Is RedHat really telling me that I have to purchase support that I do
> not need in order to provide my customers with a stable platform
> (where stable == supported with updates and patches for >= 1.5
> years)? As a business person, this is a clear signal that it is time
> to look for another distribution to deploy on. As a hacker, I don't
> care, I can support and update the darn thing myself. Time is not
> free, so the business personalilty wins out here.

With us it's a bit different.  Red Hat is easy for us to support.  It 
just works, and when it doesn't fixes are quick to come, or easy to 
pound out.  The idea of going with another distro is very scary, 
especially because of all our infrastructure built around Red Hat.  
We've had to use SuSE in some places, and it's no fun to support.  A 
lot of that could be that we aren't familiar/comfortable with it, but 
thats a lot of retraining to go through.  But, unless RHEL becomes a 
viable solution, and affordable, then we'll _have_ to go elsewhere.  
*sigh*

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE
http://geek.j2solutions.net
Mondo DevTeam (http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/)

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