On Tue, 2003-03-25 at 18:29, Gerald Henriksen wrote:What about the extra US$60/year for the entitlement, US$60/year x 500 = US$30,000. For each 500 entitlements, a persons salary can be paid for a year.
You cannot expect a
company or joe user to upgrade their operating system every year
(which is now necessary given the 12 month limit on bug/security
fixes).
You also cannot expect Red Hat to provide errata forever on a product
that our users get either for free or in a $40 box.
Creating and releasing errata costs developer time, QA time,
documentation time, and RHN/FTP bandwidth. Some people seem to be under
the impression that our cost of doing errata is zero, but it just isn't
so. Our resources are not infinite, so we're going to do longer errata
support for the products that customers pay more for.
Cheers,
Brent
I buy the proffesional boxed sets, but even at ~US$80/set RH probably doesn't make much per box, especialy when you consider that many people will use each box to install on multiple machines, and it is not recurring income unless boxed sets are purchased at regular intervals.
Of course not every one buys an entitlement, but I do for my home machine.
I wouldn't mind upgrading once or twice a year if stuff I used was not constanly being dropped. I was very annoyed when elm was dropped, then sawfish now wine. The lack of ALSA support means constantly having to fight to get multimedia support.
Another pain in the butt was the decision to disclude all mp3 support from the distribution even from boxed sets. Why couldn't a floppy have been included in the boxed set with the mp3 decoder {$.75 license paid.} I think I know why but it is still annoying. Fixing the mp3 issue was not very difficult. I have purchaed some software and will be converting my mp3's to ogg format, but I doubt my DVD player will play ogg's. By the way, I rip my own mp3's from my own media and I don't share it {I believe in paying for goods and services.}
The points I would like to make are that if RH is aiming Standard and Proffesional distributions for desktop users;
1)Then stop discarding the software that desktop users need and use.
2)Include software that allows desktop users to take advantage of their multimedia needs, ALSA would go a long way since most multimedia software packages will not compile with out it.
3)Rather than supporting Activists, RH should be lobbying software developers to develop linux versions of their software that run natively in X. My Corel Office 2000 is now broken becuase it used a modified version of wine to run. If programs are being ported to Apple's OSX then Linux should be a fairly easy move, but they need to be convinced. RH could make money by helping them.
4)Thank you to RH for the good work they have done up to RH 7.3, but smarten up blue curve is nice but sawfish worked great.
Guy
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