little better than the other dozens (nay, hundreds) of half-baked homegrown distros. Of interest only to the hobbyists.
Quite true, but it's not intended for anyone else so that's OK.
- 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.
Actually, it's listed at $180 for the base version, and if you count the included office suite ($250+ from MS) it's a deal and a half. Box, manual and support are an extra $120, though. See:
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/ws/
- 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.
Buying retail is rare enough that I don't think it'll hurt them. Besides, the WS version may actually be carried if it gains currency in the market. Just not right away.
Hopefully I'll be proven embarrassingly wrong on all of this.
I hope so too. ;)
I think it's more likely that this will cannibalize their server sales in the SMB and Educational markets where money is at a premium. Larger companies will just buy AS or ES depending on hardware, but those who can't afford it will buy WS (and likely only one copy of that) and use the SRPMS from the ES version (freely available for d/l from RH) to graft the additional technology on. This will give them the advantage of support from 3rd-party vendors without all the cost. I wonder how the company will address this issue, or if they will at all.
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