Fedora Project: Announcing New Direction

[Havoc Pennington]

Hi,

Not speaking for Red Hat.

On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 17:07, Chuck Wolber wrote:
> Is RedHat really telling me that I have to purchase support that I do not
> need in order to provide my customers with a stable platform (where stable
> == supported with updates and patches for >= 1.5 years)?

Keep in mind that the RHEL price is not only covering support incidents,
it's funding the whole productization of the operating system. Feature
development, integration work, QA, certifications, performance testing,
keeping build environments around for 5 years to do errata, keeping
people around for that, bandwidth to distribute the errata,
documentation, roadmap, trademark defense, everything.

What you are asking for is to get the OS work from Red Hat, then provide
the support yourself, without charging the customer for the support
incidents twice, right? It's certainly a reasonable thing to bring up,
but some way to allow that has to be found that is "win-win" - I'm not
able to speak to the issues, as this is mostly a business problem, not
an engineering one. I could not tell you for example how much of the
RHEL price should be attributed to phone/email support and how much to
the other aspects of OS development, so I have no idea how much a "no
support" edition would cost.

> P.S. I believe this is beginning to diverge from the topic. Where is a
> good place to take this discussion?

It's probably most on-topic on fedora-list (so I set reply-to), but
honestly these lists are developer lists. The people you need to talk to
aren't the engineers but the business side of the company, because the
issues here are business issues.

Havoc