On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 22:52, Jim Hubbard wrote: > I think that now is a really good time for Mandrake to reconsider their "end > of life" policy. Here's how I see it: Redhat has effectively shut out the > very folks who made their distro popular by changing their update system to > a paid service and by saying that they'll only support a release for 1 year. > So now no admin in his right mind would download Redhat and install it on a > server or even purchase the standard box set for a server installation.
I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment. Certainly something could be worked out that would appeal to the admins of whom Jim speaks, while still meeting MandrakeSoft's needs for cost containment - perhaps tying availability beyond one year to Silver-level MC membership, or narrowing the list of apps thus extended (in a method that is clearly delineated right from the outset, of course) so that a sysadmin can see, for example, that while they can still choose Sendmail over Postfix at install time, only Postfix will be supported beyond the standard EOL date ... there must be a workable solution in there somewhere, one would think, and the potential upside to such a move makes it worthy of serious consideration IMHO. Ideas, anyone? Another possible benefit of Jim's proposal is the shift it could bring in the (wholly inaccurate, but unfortunately all too common) perception of Mandrake as a "limited" distro that is exclusively aimed at the desktop user and the Linux newbie; by making plainly clear that Mandrake has a strong commitment to the server space and the long-term user, the company will be saying to the community, in effect, "Not only do we damn well plan to still be around in three years, thank you very much, but we also plan on being there /for you/ when certain other distros we could mention will have long since forgotten that you even exist, except as someone they can extort more revenue from for whole-distro upgrades that you truly neither need nor want. That is the way of the Dark Side, and we will have no truck with it." Just my $0.02USD ... ;) -- Bill Mullen [EMAIL PROTECTED] MA, USA RLU #270075 MDK 8.1 & 9.0 "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams
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