Robert G. Brown [mailto:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx] said: > What possible justification is > there for > prices of $25 per workstation seat when those seats are installed > automatically from a single, University local server, and consume no > additional marginal resources from Red Hat if one is installed or one > thousand are installed? What possible justification could > there by for > charging $2500 for ANY server EVER? Remember, we're talking about RHEL, so we're probably not talking so much about a software license but rather support contracts. *If* Red Hat's support was useful, I wouldn't think that this was a bad deal at all. However, having been there and done that, I'm now taking the frugal road. The thing that I think is highway robbery is the up2date server, which should be GPL'd or face extinction when more people catch on to alternatives like yum. The up2date paradigm is a different way of handling updates than yum. Some people will prefer it. But making it a proprietary product makes it unusable for me. > This isn't a fair profit -- it is gouging the market, and the prices > above are their LOWEST prices I'm sure offered to a group that has, > collectively, CONTRIBUTED a rather large fraction of their code base. Is it gouging if you have cheap or free alternatives that work just as well? It's only gouging, IMHO, if you take advantage of people who have nowhere else to turn. > They're selling our own stuff back to us with a truly absurd markup. They are kicking a lot of their own stuff back as well, with source. In all fairness, RHL is not just a collection of packages grabbed from 3rd parties but it is pretty well integrated, easy to install, easy to maintain, etc. The new admin tools (when they become more stable) will provide a good alternative to the MCSE's who see the light yet are too afraid of vi/emacs to edit config files directly. Just kickstart & rpm alone make RHL worthwhile for me. Up through RH9 I would always purchase a box set of RHL when buying a new server (though not workstations as it hasn't been an option). With this hard push to RHEL I'm afraid I'll not be able to buy a boxed set with every new server anymore. Since I don't see any value in their support contracts (after giving it an honest try) I don't see any way that a RH sysadmin like myself can justify sending any sort of revenue their way. They've effectively pulled my available options. > It is my own hope that the net result of this is that RH's > absurd prices > are uniformly and even violently rejected by the community, and that > they come to their senses (or should I say are driven to their senses) > by the process. The shame of it is that I think that Universities and > businesses and even private individuals would be perfectly > happy to pay > a fair price for RH. It's just that a fair price model has to reflect > the actual cost scaling (to RH vs the enterprise) of the distribution > model chosen. Maybe there is room for a new distro here. RHEL repackaged & relabelled by a non profit org for .edu's and small businesses. :) > If they wanted to charge a University a couple of thousand dollars a > year for a single up to date (I'd vastly prefer rsync'd to up2date) > primary image of their repository, that seems entirely reasonable. If > they want to OFFER a University a support contract (access to > phone/email/web support services) on the distribution for some sort of > fair market price, that too seems reasonable, as does offering the > service on an a la carte basis. When I was ready to dump their support contracts I asked my sales rep about per-incident support and the idea was flatly rejected. Too bad.
