On Sat, Mar 29, 2003 at 09:53:42AM -0700, Guy Fraser 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're obviously not a business person. I would expect that a good percentage of that $60 has to be used to pay for infrastructure, development of the RHN tool itself, the network bandwidth, etc. Whatever is left gets used to pay the developer. A good developer will cost you considerably more than $30K/year. You definitely won't get a kernel developer for that. Heck, they're very likely paying their help desk staff more than that. Add in the overhead costs of having them on staff (benefits, office space, etc) and a more typical loaded cost of a developer will be in the $100K range. So they probably need 2500 entitlements to pay for *one* developer. They've got well over 1000 packages to support. If a developer works 240 days per year and doesn't spend any time doing any training, s/he gets a total of 4 days per product to spend. I think you'll quickly realize you need a lot of developers. > Of course not every one buys an entitlement, but I do for my home machine. I would hazard a guess that 95% of the Red Hat Linux users do not buy an entitlement. > 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. Some stuff gets dropped and some stuff gets added. They can't possibly support every open source product around. Users are already crying for multiple window managers (Gnome, KDE, windowmaker, etc.), multiple MTAs (sendmail, postfix), multiple printing subsystems (cups, lpr), multiple editors (vim, emacs,joe, pico). It's a battle they can't win. > 3)Rather than supporting Activists, RH should be lobbying software > developers to develop linux versions of their software that run natively > in X. They do that. They're got some big companies certifying on Red Hat Linux. Think BEA, Oracle, and many others. There are only so many resources they can throw at the problem. Would you rather they hire lobbyists or developers? -- Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA mailto:ewilts@xxxxxxxxxx Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
