the future of RHL

One only need to look as far as Redhat's sec filings to see that retail
costs them more than it makes them. Their last 10K and recent 8K really
show the difference though.

Revenue in thousands
(Subscription & service)
Enterprise technologies             $14,918    $12,289     $6,694
Retail                                3,121      4,462      2,941
Embedded                                490        646        761

(Service)
Enterprise technologies               9,147      9,039      9,993
Embedded development services         1,173        746        845

COGS
(subscription)
Enterprise technologies and   
 retail                               2,220      2,974      1,930
Embedded                                 90        129        129

(service)
Enterprise technologies               4,976      4,865      4,629
Embedded development services           695        784        931

Research and development               6,104      5,779      4,817

In a nutshell there R&D costs continue to rise for consumer Redhat while
there retails revenues declined by a 20%. Enterprise services account
for $25mill, retail $3.2mill down 20% from last year.

I think as well that a redhat based project that aims for more stability
than fedora will emerge off of the RH ES platforms source rpms
repository. All it really needs is a packger and installer, say
anaconda.

A lot more Linux companies are going to be moving to this model like it
or not. If you want nicely packaged and iso-ed distributions you are
going to have to pay for that in the future, basic economics. There will
always be debian but that doesn't necessarily meet the needs of many of
the current redhatters.

I will say though that redhat needs to be careful not to alienate too
much the base of developers and contributors that have made it so
successful. I think you will see some concessions on this front over the
next year or two.

Sincerely,
David Uhlman
CTO 50KM Inc.