I personally think that Redhat is doing a smart thing. They've finally split their offerings so that one focuses on the enterprise where the real revenue comes from, and the other focuses on the random home user where all the word of mouth comes from.
Thanks for the info. I wish I could share your confidence.
But it seems to me there are dangers aplenty with this approach. Some thoughts ...
- The enterprise desktop offering will likely be priced such that a Red Hat branded offering with stability as a major portion of its goal will no longer be available to the SOHO, small or medium-sized business user. They'll have to look elsewhere.
- Once Severen and its offspring have split from Taroon, the two will forever cease to bear any similarity. Severen won't be Red Hat Linux.
- Severen as a "community project" could very well devolve into being little better than the other dozens (nay, hundreds) of half-baked homegrown distros. Of interest only to the hobbyists.
- They are leaving a portion of the market unsatisfied. There simply won't be a Red Hat offering (stable but with a good quantity of reasonably modern packages) that can be purchased at, say, the price point of a copy of WindowsXP Pro (aka $150) with good (printed) documentation, timely security updates, and support available. There will be the free hobbyist version or the unaffordable enterprise version. But nothing in-between.
- And exiting the retail market can only cause the kind of loss of mindshare / visibility that has yet to bring good fortune to anyone who has tried it.
Hopefully I'll be proven embarrassingly wrong on all of this.
Michael
_______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://mail.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
