Slashdot is discussing "FC3: worthwhile or not ?"

[Phil Schaffner]

On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 20:28 -0600, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 18:49 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> > I must confess I have this niggling feeling
> > that Redhat  may not feel it is in their interest
> > for Fedora to be too easy to install and use,
> > as this might lesses the attraction of their commercial system.
> > I hope someone will tell me this is nonsense.

Don't think its so much nonsense as a matter of interpretation of
motives.  FC releases are not meant for the commercial market, as
pointed out below, so there's not such a strong motivation to make every
release bullet-proof as possible.  We geeks are willing to deal with the
warts to get the latest fun stuff.

> Here you go: it's nonsense. :-)
> 
> The attraction of their commercial system is for corporations, who are
> the same people primarily and consistently forced to give Microsoft tons
> of money. RHEL-WS costs $180/year IIRC, which is WAAAAAAAY more than
> nearly anyone will pay for a home system.

Ya' got that right.

> But those corporations do pay for it, and they pay primarily to get a
> five-year end-of-life commitment and some support. So "reducing the
> attraction" of Fedora is a non-issue; the people who really are the
> target market for RHEL will, in their large majority, not be interested
> in Fedora anyway. Tell an IT manager to reinstall every desktop at least
> once a year (assuming you skip every other release, even) and they'll
> throw fits. They want the same OS to stay on that box until the box is
> obsolete and removed from the user's desktop.

That's why we're running WBEL on servers and more cautious user's
desktops.  We can't currently afford the RHEL tap, despite having bought
RH boxed sets since about RH3.x through RH9, and don't really feel we
need that level of support.  Tim - you might be more comfortable
recommending WBEL, Caos, Tao, or Scientific Linux Red Hat derivatives to
those who are not ready for the Fedora wild ride.  [And thanks to Red
Hat for "enabling" these other free stable distributions.]

Phil