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

[David Holden]

On Tuesday 04 Nov 2003 11:58 am, aroffe at its-linux.co.uk wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > Personally I'm quite intrigued by Suns Java Desktop, saw a demo of
> > it at linux  expo and it looked pretty cool for $100/year.
>
> The Java desktop is very nice. It won't be $100/year for ever.

Not forever but I will look closely at for how long. A 3 -4year time scale 
would be fine.


> That's why we need to be able to choose. That's how it is.

I'm not arguing against choice, choice is always good. I'm arguing that redhat 
new pricing policy shows a disregard for small businesses. Their recent end 
of life email has already provoke emails to LUGs I'm on saying where else can 
we go.

> I don't like it either. Shareholders demand profits from businesses,
> and businesses have to deliver them or the business ceases to be.
> RedHat are a business and in my opinion have always been clear about that.

I don't entirely agree with this, yes obviously businesses need to make a 
profit or they will cease to be, the point about share holders is that they 
often demand maximum profit  in the short term, as a result Redhat 
(responsible to it shareholders) have chosen to disregard the low margin 
profit they can make from small businesses for the higher margin they can 
make from the enterprise. The market will tell whether this is a good long 
term strategy.

I can definitely say that I would  have had a much more difficult time 
convincing  my bosses to move to linux on their new pricing strategy, 
questions like you want me to ditch what I'm familiar with (at home and at 
work) for something totally different with dubious file format compatability 
and there's little or not cost saving?



I personally find it worrying when *the* major distribution in affect says 
that they don't see enough profit in the small business sector because I can 
guarantee that there are people at M$oft smiling hugely about this.


> You can change distro's. Try buying water from somebody else. Oh oh.
>

Yes hence my reluctant looking at java desktop, reluctant because I have 
serious misgivings about Sun..

> Out of interest, wht not use a "free" distro like debian, gentoo or
> whatever?


Firstly as I mentioned changing distros can require a lot of work, heck , 
getting everything working smoothly again after upgrading a distro is a lot 
of work(hence my being wary about fedora) , users what to know why minor 
thing x does not work like it used to and why aren't you fixing it.. etc.


compared to redhat/suse gentoo is a lot of work to setup although it does seem 
easy to maintain I've no feel for how quickly the gentoo community respond to 
security problems, on previous looks debian has been a pain to install 
(apparently this as improved, but would need to investigate). 


cheers,

 Dave.


>
> andy
>
> _______________________________________________
> SC mailing list
> SC at mailman.lug.org.uk
> http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/sc

-- 
Dr. David Holden. (Systems Developer)
Crystallography Journals Online: <http://journals.iucr.org>

Thanks in advance:-
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See: <http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html>

UK Privacy (R.I.P)  : http://www.stand.org.uk/commentary.php3
Public GPG key available on request.
-------------------------------------------------------------