On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 10:17:57 -0400 (EDT) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [...] > I'm thinking that might actually be the best bet for us. Some of our > customers are interested in paying RHS the big money for support, but most > are not. Their needs are small, and all involved (except maybe RHS) feel we > can handle them without help from RHS. If they run into a huge problem, > they can also pay for support at that time. All we want is a supported > distribution. > > This is, to some extent, freeloading, and thus may not be sustainable, in > the long-run. With the "old" RHL, we were willing to "work with" RHS, but > the new pricing structure simply isn't feasible for us.
I just came across an interview with Bruce Perens, in which he comments on several of the topics we touched upon in this thread. >From this week's LWN, which will be published day after tomorrow (I'm happy and proud to have paid, and to be continuing to pay, for a subscription - LWN is worth supporting!). Bruce Perens, interviewed at the Colorado Linux Users and Enthusiasts (CLUE) this week, has been considering a "community-driven answer to Red Hat's enterprise products". "'I'm wondering if it's time for a grass-roots enterprise Linux, and the way I figured I would do this... is first of all take Debian, why is there a Fedora project when there's Debian, a ten-year-old project with all its policies done...with over a thousand developers? That is what the Fedora project should be. Take that, and get together the community of enterprise users who depend on Linux and really want a zero-cost enterprise distribution. [...] I'm thinking about whether it is time for the community... to provide directly a Linux distro ceritified to LSB and to proprietary software providers that are willing to do so, guaranteed to be free software and free beer, free speech and free beer. A certified distribution that is zero cost, free software... and I'm convinced that creating a Linux distribution is an expense-sharing system rather than a profit-making system, even Red Hat now admits this as they attempt to offload production of their distribution to the community.'" [Later on Perens decribes his scale for commercial collaborators with the community. It ranges from benefactor, through partner, and user, to parasite. Very sapient. (Guess who rates "parasite"?)] _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss