> But RHEL costs ~$800 - $2500 *per year* for usable versions. If that's > not "screwing your customers for profit", then I don't know what is. I > have no problem with profit, but this model doesn't make sense. I would > happily pay a few hundred $ for a stable professionally-supported and > developed distribution, but I'm not paying it every year. M$ is much > cheaper, and you can get updates indefinitely at no cost.
I could write for hours about the economics (or lack thereof) of free software. I also won't try to defent RedHat's exact pricing numbers or policy. However, there is a larger point to be made: The problem with free software is that people think it should be, well, free. Therefore, it's hard to make money in the free software marketplace. Currently, the developers who work on it do so as a hobby, or as a student project, or are supported by large companies who use free software as a loss-leader for some other product. That is to say, it doesn't support its own development. As a consequence, development tends to be slow, and doesn't respond to the needs of the software's *users*. It's slow because developers work on it only in their off hours; It's not user friendly because the linkage between what the customers want the program to do (i.e. requirements) and what the developers actually do is very weak. To illustrate my point, Linux has been around for over 10 years now, and modern distributions have progressed to the point that they look -- to ordinary users -- fairly professional. There is also a moderate-sized collection of interesting apps which fill the needs of non-geek users, and are not too hard to use. Great for Linux, right? On the other hand, Mac's OSX was built upon BSD in only -- what? -- two years. And it presents a beautiful user experience, with a multitude of consumer-grade apps, all of which are easy to use. Mac OSX kicks Linux's butt in every way when it comes to serving the needs of 98% percent of computer users. The reason Apple could do this is that they acutally have revenue, and can therefore support great developers to work on their products full-time. *That's* what Linux lacks right now -- a self-sustaining business model. Finally, I'll point out that Red Hat finally became profitable last year, when the instituted the new pricing policy. Prior to that, they basically ran in the red for 8 or 9 years, living on VC cash and the blind hope of folks who bought the stock at the IPO. Sure, we all like to get things for free, but if Linux is going to develop at the same pace as the rest of the computer industry, it needs to find a way to support itself. > BTW, if anyone has a link to the stripped-out version, I'd appreciate > it. I spent some time looking a couple of months ago and found nothing. Why not use Fedora? Isn't it basically RedHat without support & some server packages? Stuart (who is asking in ignorance about what's acutally on RHEL. . . .)
