long term support release

[Vladimir N Kosovac]

On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 21:24 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On Jan 22, 2008 9:12 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I worked out the numbers for doing that at one time.. and it wasn't
> > pretty... especially when people want all of Fedora to be supported
> > for 2 years. The best price I came to was 2x what Red Hat charges for
> > an RHEL license to cover basic costs.. if a company wanted to actually
> > stay in business it was a lot more... especially when you would need
> > to make sure you had at least 200 paying customers. Cutting down the
> > supported packages basically brought it down to a much smaller segment
> > than what is in RHEL before you could get what most fedora users would
> > consider reasonable (say 50/year).
> 
> There's a lesson here. Did you do the same calculation assuming you
> incorporated your company on the Isle of Man for tax benefit purposes
> to see if the numbers became profittable? What if you started off with
> a multi-million dollar venture capital injection and had 10 years to
> get to profitability?
> 
'Multi' is a very wild definition when trying to struck a deal with the
venture capitalist :o)

Other than that any sane person would be really hard pressed to come up
with the business model of successful competition against Red Hat, who
kind of invented the product we are talking about and employs pretty
much everybody (well, maybe not but certainly lot of them) who figures
as an authority in this technology space.

If it is a matter of building Fedora LTS business in the Desktop market,
probably the only real shot at it would have a major PC builder. None of
them showed enough guts to break out of MS stranglehold yet but maybe
some day they will.

Vladimir



> -jef
>