On Wednesday 26 March 2003 16:13, Brent Fox wrote: > We realized that the original Advanced Server at $800 was too much for > many small businesses to pay. That's why we just released the ES and WS > products at much lower price points. Of course, there are going to be > some small businesses that can't afford to pay even these lower prices. > For them, they can still upgrade RHL yearly for free. I understand that > they'd like for us to support a $40 product for five years, but it's > just not economically feasible for us to do that. If they went down the > "Red Hat route" assuming that we would do everything for free or almost > free, then I think that was a mistaken assumption.
Brent -- I agree completely that 5 years is ridiculous. However, perhaps something greater than 12 months from availability may be more reasonable for the small business solution (15 months?). Too much change (even for these folks) can cause problems and it takes some time to actually do a transition if you have more than a couple of systems. If I look that Red Hat Linux 8.0, the EOL of December 21 2003 is about 15 months from from its availability. From Red Hat past performance, I assume that there will be yet another release sometime about 6 months from now but, again, too much change can be a problem. Since Red Hat will be introducing a lot of new technology more rapidly, there is also the risk that a release could have some major problem only discovered shortly after release and I know that Red Hat puts lots of effort into QA and testing of new releases to minimize the chance of this happening. This is a new direction for Red Hat. I hope that you consider the impact on very small businesses (even if I personally do not have any customers for which this would apply) and consider transition times for new releases. This might be a moot point since the particulars for the release and its EOL will not be described for at least a couple of weeks. -- Gene -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
