On Wednesday 07 April 2004 14:32, Stephen Smoogen wrote: > It is probably better in the long run.. just be aware that I doubt > the SuSE low price will stay around. Long term, I think that the > smaller VARs are going to need to build a consortium and support a > distro that fits their needs. As you can tell with the time/effort in > Legacy.. it is an expensive operation to keep going. Thats what I hoped to see out of Fedora. Enough VARs standing behind it, supporting it w/ things like Legacy, providing frontline support for their customers, devoting internal people like myself for helping the distribution along. It certainly makes sense for VARs like mine to do Fedora for the free people, as it DOES prove ground for RHEL for those that can afford it. > I think this is where Fedora/Red Hat have not communicated well > enough. It isnt a product of Red Hat, but everyone assumes it is. Red > Hat management doesnt seem able to separate itself enough from the > kid to let it grow by itself.. but doesnt want to take responsibility > to send it to college :). [Ok I need more sleep.] This is very much the case. So much still happens behind the RH wall that we don't see, don't hear, don't participate in that it's very much a RH product. We just have to wait for whatever RH decides to lob over the wall for public consumption. The "open" development doesn't seem all that "open" in reality. > Well there is always debian. > > To use the fish hook analogy.. you have been using a single prong > hook. Unless the fish grabs on just right, you loose it. VARs need to > come up with a way to make a double/triple prong hook. The issue > comes down to the same way a small retail store has to seperate > itself from WalMart. It can be done.. its just a lot of work to find > the customers to keep, and the ones to jettison. We did have a multi-pron hook. A) Free OS, B) Rock solid support for that free OS. Phone/email/engineering/consulting, etc.. C) Guarantee that the hardware will work w/ said free OS, even going so far as developing custom kernel modules to make it happen and providing these to the customers to maintain on their own. We're providing the whole package, not just "here's some hardware, oh and we tossed Linux on it. Good luck!" > As a 'potential customer', it has become very hard to figure out why > to choose a VAR over say IBM/Dell these days because of cost points. > Most of the VARs who come to sell dont have enough 'Value Add' to > make it worthwhile. Doing reviews of VAR purchases, most have become > more of a 'sympathy buy' versus getting something added we couldnt > get 'wholesale'. It's the support aspect. See above's other hooks. Not everybody wants/needs the support, and we don't market to them. Our price points and overhead cannot compete with the folks that go to newegg.com for their systems (I'm one of those people). We do market to the folks that can't be bothered with building 40 PCs for their office and dealing with the hassle of RMA requests to hardware vendor foo for part bar, tracking what part warranty expires when, keeping original packaging for every individual part, providing internal IT support for the OS, etc... We take care of all that, and give the end user 2 years of full hardware/software support, extendable. Thats why people choose the small vendor over a large vendor, or doing it themselves. -- Jesse Keating RHCE (geek.j2solutions.net) Fedora Legacy Team (www.fedoralegacy.org) GPG Public Key (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) Was I helpful? Let others know: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating
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