Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Paul Gear]

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?
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