fmf-frequently missed features and some general thoughts...

[Stephen Smoogen]

On Fri, 2003-08-01 at 20:49, Tim Kossack wrote:
> Am Sam, 2003-08-02 um 04.06 schrieb Stephen Smoogen: 
> > On Fri, 2003-08-01 at 19:46, Tim Kossack wrote:
> > > Am Fre, 2003-08-01 um 21.51 schrieb Féliciano Matias:
> > > > Le ven 01/08/2003 à 17:53, Tim Kossack a écrit :

> 
> sorry to be so stubborn, but i would really be interested why red hat
> seems to have given up making money with non-corporate endusers while
> other distros seems to see a market there, ahving first successes?
> 

Lets see Mandrake is still in Bankruptcy and the last letter didnt seem
to indicate it was doing much better. Lindows hasnt shown it makes any
money.. it is funded by a guy who made a lot of money during the stock
boom who has been paying manufacturers to put its os on them.

> > > race before it really started. maybe they have already in abandoning the
> > > classic boxed retailchannel!
> > 
> > the number of people who buy boxed sets through retail are 1/10,000 of
> > the people who run linux. I doubt very much that any Linux vendor has
> > made enough off of box sets in the last years to pay for the bandwidth
> > that the FTP servers use. I think Mandrake made 10x more money off of
> > their online club than they did through retail. Remember that if a box
> > set were to cost 40 Euro, the shipping company sees about 8 Euro of that
> > through the various sales channels, and the cost of manufacturing is
> > about 7 Euros.
> 
> ok, but that doesn't mean that red hat couldn't make money with support
> (and/or one version without the goodies for free, one to download with
> the goodies for some $), or club (mandrake) or store (lindows) etc..
> in order to convince people getting support etc...(see above).
> but obviously red hat seems to have given up making money on endusers,
> and rhl is-as you say-simply a communityproduct for geeks (like you and
> me), providing them in turn with manpower, ideas and bugfixing.
> what a pity-imo, they def. should try making more of it!
> 

If you are sure it is so easy.. why not take the Red Hat distro without
the logos and try it yourself? Set up a current server to emulate RHN
and see how many people you convince to pay for it. 

-- 
Stephen John Smoogen		smoogen at lanl.gov
Los Alamos National Labrador  CCN-5 Sched 5/40  PH: 4-0645 (note new #)
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