On Wednesday 05 Mar 2003 7:24 am, Bill Mullen wrote: > On Tue, 2003-03-04 at 22:52, Jim Hubbard wrote: > > I think that now is a really good time for Mandrake to reconsider their > > "end of life" policy. Here's how I see it: Redhat has effectively shut > > out the very folks who made their distro popular by changing their update > > system to a paid service and by saying that they'll only support a > > release for 1 year. So now no admin in his right mind would download > > Redhat and install it on a server or even purchase the standard box set > > for a server installation. > > I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment. > > Certainly something could be worked out that would appeal to the admins > of whom Jim speaks, while still meeting MandrakeSoft's needs for cost > containment - perhaps tying availability beyond one year to Silver-level > MC membership, or narrowing the list of apps thus extended (in a method > that is clearly delineated right from the outset, of course) so that a > sysadmin can see, for example, that while they can still choose Sendmail > over Postfix at install time, only Postfix will be supported beyond the > standard EOL date ... there must be a workable solution in there > somewhere, one would think, and the potential upside to such a move > makes it worthy of serious consideration IMHO. Ideas, anyone? > Seems to me that only server apps need this level of support (correct me if I'm wrong), so it shouldn't be too many packages. End users wanting the lates multimedia apps have other choices.
As for the idea of making early downloads available to club members, it would only work if club members don't pass on copies until the boxed sets are available. It could work, though, if club members use that time to get to know the distro before gloating over it publicly :-) Anne -- Registered Linux User No.293302
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