[SC.LUG] So, are RedHat ditching the home user market?

[Mike Stuart]

Here is a question for the group.

<ramble undertone="rant">
Are RedHat ditching the home / small business user by dropping the boxed / 
download redhat distribution?

I have been a long standing RedHat user, and have found their distros to be 
the best of the best over the years.  My view of that has changed recently as 
SuSE have made significant improvements to bring their boxed / download 
products into my personal number 1 spot.

It would seem that the fedora project (http://fedora.redhat.com) is their end 
user linux re-badged but as it is not supported by them officially (only 
sponsored) I have to question if the end result will be worse.

I'm interested in hearing other people's view on this because in the small 
business arena - which is the bread and butter of my company's bottom line - 
customers may find the costs for the ES products still too much, and 
potentially would make Windows a lower cost alternative (insert sideshow bob 
shudder here).  For the small business needing lowest possible cost, the 
generic distributions have always provided a means to have a quality product 
for 50 quid or less (or even not at all with a download edition).

I am currently promoting SuSE for the small business, the Pro edition at least 
because their own "server" grade products are really quite expensive in the 
long run (yearly subscriptions for errata / updates).  But again, based on 
the way RedHat have started moving, I'm wondering how long it will be before 
SuSE do the same?

I know that Debian is the trully "free" distro, but it I find it can be slow 
to adapt despite the fact that it entirely community run (the base distro is 
still on a 2.2 kernel for example when 2.6 is almost upon us!).  I have also 
dabbled with Gentoo and found it to be significantly better in the area of 
being up to date but the compile everything concept although really nice, can 
be costly in a business arena because of the additional time it consumes - I 
mean imagine the onsite time difference between simply updating glibc 
compared to compiling it!
</ramble>

Perhaps this may be an interesting subject for the meeting?

Sorry for the ramblings, perhaps I should have posted this to /. but I'm 
interested in the thoughts on these subjects from like minded people.

Also, feel free to tell me "quit with the doom and gloom" if you like :)
-- 
Mike Stuart.