The Vyatta business model is essentially very Red Hat-like: we sell subscriptions, professional services, training, etc. Yes, we have real (talented!) staff. Yes, we pay salaries. ;-) The fact is, the Vyatta team comprises veterans from Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, and other leading networking companies, as well as Linux kernel experts, and on and on. This is a talented crew that have previously build many of the products that compete with Vyatta. Our support staff have built and supported large networks and consistently receive high marks for their 'can do' support levels.
And yes, customers definitely pay us for all this. As John confirms, our customers are quite satisfied with our services. In the same way that some people use a free version of Linux such as Fedora, there are many others who are developing business-critical infrastructure and want the services of a supported product to help them. This leads them to choose supported products like RHEL (or SuSE, or Ubuntu LTS, etc.). In the same way, Vyatta customers choose the subscription edition rather than the community edition. The great thing about open source is that you can get the best of both worlds: the support of a commercial offering with the open community and rapid innovation of an open source code base. As for funding, yes, we are venture-funded. If you're interested in Vyatta-the-company, you can find out more about us on the Vyatta web site. We hope you'll look past the dodgy backgrounds of the management team ( ;-) ). Believe me when I say that it's the Vyatta staff that makes this place so great. So, finally, while this is our community mailing list and I don't want to make anybody feel guilty for using the community version of our code, let me respectfully ask for your business. If you're using Vyatta in a commercial setting, please consider purchasing subscriptions. I think you'll be tremendously satisfied with the value you receive. We're not a charity and we earn every sale. Apologies for the rampant commercialism. We now return you to your regular series of technical questions and community discussion. -- Dave > Well I expected that! Are there really that many commercial > subscribers to pay for a full time staff? > Did you guys need to get funding to get started? Venture capital? > > > On Feb 4, 2008 5:47 PM, John Jolet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > From people like me that pay for supported version :) and > they have > > real staff, I've talked to some of them....especially the > tech support > > folks who have consistently gone above and beyond to help me with > > issues....Robyn rocks! > > > > > > Max wrote: > > > This is kind of a weird question, but I'm curious how you > guys make > > > any money? I mean, you have this wonderful product, 100% open > > > source, but how to you guys keep the lights on at the office? > > > Support contracts? Do you guys have a real staff? Employees with > > > salaries? A bulletin board in the break room with all the human > > > resources crap on it? > > > Haha! seriously guys? _______________________________________________ Vyatta-users mailing list Vyatta-users@mailman.vyatta.com http://mailman.vyatta.com/mailman/listinfo/vyatta-users
