On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 01:52, Steve Smith wrote:

> They went from being "so good" (free-software citizen-wise) to what they 
> are now. They had a great product available for free, and now it's 
> unaffordable unless you're a big company. I like their dists. I've 
> evangelized for it, invested time learning about it, etc. etc. and now 
> my (Redhat) choices are "way too expensive" or "perma-beta" (Fedora). 
> Perhaps I'll still use it on my personal machines, via Whitebox Linux, 
> and not lose my knowledge investment. I'd surely suggest Whitehat to 
> students rather than have them "pirate" RHES or spend three semesters of 
> textbook money on Free software.
> 
> OK, there's one more thing that bugs me about RH. About 6 months ago I 
> inquired about the possibility of a site license or a price break on 200 
> copies. The response was, paraphrasing, "go away, kid. You bother me." 
> I thought with the release of RH9 that they were "that close" to being a 
> desktop alternative to Windows and MacOS. The price quote I got from 
> them came in %60 more expensive per box than what Microsoft wants for 
> Windows XP plus Office plus Visual Studio plus a bunch of other junk. No 
> site license available, no educational discount. Redhat made Microsoft 
> look like Captain Friendly.
----
"so good (free-software citizen-wise)" should get them a little bit of
patience to see how it all shakes down (Fedora). I'm not so sure that
their RHL hadn't already become 'perma-beta' already anyway. Thus for
'desktop usage' the continually short cycles which incorporate the
latest kernels, Gnome, KDE, and the plethora of desktop apps would seem
to satisfy the people using Linux on the desktop - and this is likely to
be an improvement in the long run simply because the release schedules
are going to be dictated by retail packaging & shelving restrictions.

For servers, Fedora is likely a poor choice and will only be worthy of
consideration if the fedora-legacy system gets traction so that the
maintenance and significant daemon upgrades get incorporated and
maintained over a longer period than Red Hat is/has been willing to
support.

Yours is not the only complaint that I have heard with respect to
insensitivity to volume licensing / educational licensing. Obviously,
Red Hat needs to review their licensing programs in some areas.

BTW - Microsoft is always looking like Captain Friendly. They've made
security a top priority now and from yesterday's news release, they are
going to end the spam problem. They are well aware that the student
pricing is good for their long term because it unleashes more people who
learn their methods and software. Red Hat never had to discount a
student package when you could download it for free.

Craig