Crappy Products Cost More!!

[Kevin Brown]

> RedHat Professional comes with 90 days technical support.  It also has all the
> printed manuals that would cost about $35 separately.
> 
> (A small story, indirectly related.)
> I have successfully setup a new CVS server at work using RH7.3, Webmin and
> CVS, of course.  In explaining what I had done and what I am using to do it,
> our company product manager said, and I quote, "If all that software is free,
> why are we using it.  It is probably crap."  This was followed by a brief
> demonstration of Webmin that left him less "against" the software but still
> not "for" it.
> (End of story.)
> 
> (Another small story)
> A friend of mine runs a technology related service business.  He was getting
> too much work so he started raising his quotes.  He started getting even more
> work from people that had dropped him before because he was "priced too low to
> be very good" as they later told him.
> (End of small story)

This is because you either don't know what your skills are worth, or will take
more time than someone charging more per hour and cost them more in the long run
(time == money, especially during downtime).  At least in their eyes.

> RedHat, I think, is marketing to the people who think they have to pay for
> something for it to be any good.  And if they are right, and people want to
> pay for the support and the manuals, they remain a viable company.
> 
> Some people want to pay lots of money.  Would we geeks pay it?  Nope.  But
> some of the suits and non-geeks will.  RedHat will find out soon enough if the
> market will pay the price they are asking.

I had no problems with the price that RH was charging ($50 for boxed copy).  I
used to buy the boxed versions (6.2 and before) for my Alpha partly for the
documentation, but mostly for the support since I wasn't familiar with the
differences between Alpha and Intel (boot methods and such).  They no longer
support Alpha, so now I'm thinking of switching distros for my little Multias
since I like package based distros (not necessarily RPM) and these boxes will
need patches to what is running on them (Apache being the most notable of
late).  The only things I've had to build from source have been PHP and MySQL,
but MySQL releases a src.rpm to simplify the upgrade process (though it takes
time to compile).