RedHat business (was: Re: [vox] OT: Contemplating the unthinkable...)

[David Margolis]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:

> a lot of kernel and GNU development is largely funded by redhat.
>
> i sure hope they know what they're doing!
>
> pete

I thought these guys were giving up on everything that made them what they
were and shooting themselves in the foot by cutting off their user base
and all sorts of other nasty stuff.  Then I started reading their (heavily
biased, obviously) press releases and started feeling pretty good about
the whole thing.

When is the last time you went to Office Depot and bought that dusty $39
copy of RedHat 9?  I think RedHat realizes their is no viable business in
that market and needs to focus on their enterprise offerings.  Fedora is a
LOT closer to Slackware (my distro of choice) and Debian (which it seems
a lot of you guys use) now that it is a community based project.  The fact
that it is sponsored by RedHat's enterprise efforts means Fedora will be
pretty reliable, stable, etc.  Fedora 1.0 (or whatever it's called) is
also way less conservative than Redhat 9.0 (it seems Fedora will need to be
a bit more _testing_ oriented, which I think is good).  Much more recent
versions of software packages are already there.

RedHat's commitment to support Fedora users for free (via up2date?) seems
pretty generous too.  They probably figured they couldn't charge for
something every apt user was already getting (especially with the recent
howto on apt for rpm that was just printed in one of the magazines).

As far as the customers go, Desktop users still have boxed sets of Suse,
Mandrake, etc. or they can just use Fedora and call it RedHat 10 if it
makes them feel better.

At my work, one decision maker just went ahead and plunked down the $1,500
for the enterprise edition because he figured he really wanted the
support, so we know at least one customer wasn't put off by the changes.

--------

Don, as far as your original question goes -  Don't do it!  If you want to
buy stock in a good computer company look into Apple.  You can have your
open source (somewhat) and your reliable company all wrapped into one.
Don't anybody flame me on this, it's just an opinion based on my view of
that company.  I have no right to give anybody financial advice (although
I'm probably less likely to get flamed than Don was coming in here asking if
he should buy MS stock).

You could also consider stock in HP, Dell, or IBM in that those companies
seem reasonable commited to supporting Linux.