> Well there is another angle... Assume you want to deploy 50 machines > running Synopsys VCS for example, you have now spent a lot of money on > VCS licenses from Synopsys and they might only support you if you run a > specific Linux distribution. That happens to be RHEL AS in some cases > that I'm aware of. > > You will now have spent quite a bit of money on copies of RHEL for all > these machines, just to be on the platform "supported" by your tool > vendor. In this case a free copy of RHEL might come in handy for some > of those machines since it will look exactly like the supported > version of RHEL. You could now just buy one copy of RHEL and have 49 > machines running an identical "free" copy of RHEL.
I understand that's a common trick, even using RHEL. You have 50 identical machines. The sysadmin owns one. You buy 1 copy of RHEL, and tie its support contract to the sysadmin machine. You install it on all 50 machines. If you have a problem somewhere, you just reproduce the problem on the sysadmin machine and then call Red Hat. You don't need to download an off-brand version of RHEL to do this. The basic problem with software is explained by Capitalist Economics 101: Software's marginal cost of reproduction is basically nil, so in a ideally competitive market its price will tend over time to zero. Ways to get around this iron law of economics are: * Disrupt perfect competition, e.g. somehow become a monopoly, or prevent customers from having a real choice in the market place. * Keep the market in flux via research and/or constant introduction of new features/products, so that prices can never asymptote all the way to zero. * Don't sell software. Give it away as a loss-leader for some other product which doesn't have zero cost of reproduction. You can see all three methods at play in the real world all the time. Stuart
