Fedora and the System Administrator

[David Holden]

On Wednesday 01 Oct 2003 1:43 am, Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
> > > Holy shit, my boss is gonna can this distro completely!
> >
> > You may want to convince him to join the Fedora Legacy project.  Or,
> > if he wants something supported by Red Hat for a longer period, Red
> > Hat Enterprise Linux.
> >
> > > At least with RHL we had *some* stability....*sigh*
> >
> > Which came at a cost.  Who paid for that?
>
> We did, in a way.
>
> We ran RHL for small servers (such as our static web server) and RHEL for
> serious servers (RHAS 2.1 with Oracle 9i for our database server.)
>
> The *only* reason that my boss went with RHEL was because I was able to
> show him with RHL on small servers that it was stable and powerful.
>
> There is no way that we're gonna be able to pay for RHEL for all of the
> small servers that we maintain.
>
> Another guy at work has been trying to get us to go to a mixture of True64
> and Solaris.  Now that RH is *more* expensive on x86 than Solaris, and my
> boss is an old Solaris/SPARC admin....well, you get the idea.
>
> List price for Solaris 9 Workgroup server is $250 US.
> List price for RHEL ES is $349 US.
>
> Damnit, I love RH and *really* don't like Solaris. *sigh*
>
> I know that RH is trying to stay profitable.  I understand and wish them
> the best.  They've done an *outstanding* job.  I just hope and pray that
> they haven't shot themselves in the foot here.  I know that we will be
> trying to find an alternative before up2date stops working for RH9. :(
>
> Ben
>
>

If redhat can only stay solvent by charging $349 for there stable linux 
(remember thats the "cheap" version isn't AS > $1000) I find it very worrying 
for the competitiveness of Linux generally. In the short term I think they 
will make more money from people who will find it too costly to move to 
another OS but in the longer term I think they will lose a lot of business.

Dave.



-- 
Dr. David Holden. (Systems Developer)
Crystallography Journals Online: <http://journals.iucr.org>

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