Am 25. Sep, 2003 schw=E4tzte keith smith so:

> I don't get it.  What real R&D is there for a distribution?  At $40.00
> retail RH gets about $20.00.  A few $ for a box and a few disks and a
> small manual.  Maybe $5.00 in direct cost.

There's a lot of R&D. I'm certain they pay Alan Cox quite well :).

There's also packaging and testing.

Creating a distro is time intensive. If you're paying people for the time
their working it's also money intensive.

> Most of the real production is free.  M$ made millions+++++ selling DOS
> for $30.00 a pop.

m$ didn't need to deal with hundreds of types of video cards and they didn'=
t
know what a network card is until almost the end of 1995 :). There's also
that thing about being a monopoly...

> Look at the Debian model. A good distribution.  Package management is
> its selling point.  It is not nicely packaged, however it is good....
> if you have some understanding of how to configure it.  Debian is not
> commercial. I don'tknow a single person that has paid for Debian, Yet The=
y
> Survive....

debian rocks, but debian isn't paying the developers. I think it's a good
example of how things can work. Gentoo is doing the same thing.

>From my limited knowledge of Linux, I feel relatively confident that with
>$5000.00 worth of equipment, a DSL connection and two other fellas, we
>could product a nice distribution of Linux that would be somewhat easy to
>install and comprehensive.

Knoppix is proof that this can happen. Maintenance and upgradability,
however, don't scale near that well.

Free Software is in better shape than non-Free Software, but there's still =
a
significant amount of work.

ciao,

der.hans
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