Why Would Fedora be Free ? Can it be Trusted?

[Henry Hartley]

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Benjamin J. Weiss [mailto:benjamin at weiss.name] 
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 8:58 AM
>> 
>> > 6. Ostensibly Redhat offered free versions of Redhat Linux 
>> > because they could make a profit on support.  Now Redhat
>> > has built a market and Redhat is no longer free.  What is 
>> > the profit motivation of the Fedora group and persons/orgs
>> > who make software contributions to it?  (By the way, there
>> > is nothing wrong with profit.)
>> 
>> Well, the profit motive for RedHat sponsoring the project is 
>> that they get a test bed and an enthusiastic test community 
>> for software that will make it into RHEL.  For the rest of 
>> the Fedora community, there simply *isn't* a profit motive. 

While many folks work on Fedora simply because they like to, there
are those who *do* have a profit motive, although not exactly in
the way you might expect.  In business, there are myriad ways to
increase profit.  Anyone in business knows that the "cost of doing
business" is a big part of the profit equation.  While making and 
selling more widgets is one way to make more money and charging
more for the same number of widgets is another, cutting production
costs is a third.  For most businesses, computers and technology
have become a significant part of the cost of doing business.

While most companies are not in the technology business per se,
there are few companies now (in the developed world, anyway) that
are not affected by the costs of technology.  Hardware is cheaper
now than ever before, internet connectivity is constantly coming
down in price (although residential broadband in the USA still
costs more than I think it should but that's another rant).  But
software costs seem to be rising.  Does that make sense?  Not to
me.

I don't know what your company does or how big it is or how much
you spend on technology each year.  It might be interesting to
get a breakdown of those costs for your company, including the
time it takes to manage the technology (installing patches,
backing up data, restoring data, cleaning virus infected
computers, supporting users with hardware and software problems, 
etc.) as well as initial hardware and software licensing costs,
costs of software upgrades and service contracts, etc.  Then,
ask yourself if it would save your company money if you could
reduce your initial software costs significantly, your software
upgrade costs to near zero, your hardware costs (because you can
probably get more mileage out of your hardware), and significantly
reduce the cost of maintaining your entire technology
infrastructure (in the long run - it may take a bit up front to
get people who can deal with non-MS technology).  

Finally, suppose you are one of the tech folks at your company
and you've "made the switch" and you are supporting an enterprise
full of open source systems.  A big part of your support team
is going to be this community, and various other communities
gathered around the various pieces you happen to be using.  Now
suppose you're a capable programmer and you see a way that a
piece of the puzzle we call technology could be made better.
You're going to get involved.  You might just suggest a change,
or perhaps you have the skills to actually suggest a way to do
it, or you even become one of the programmers working on the
code.  In any case, you aren't doing it for money.  You are
doing it because it makes the system you use better.  And of
course, it saves your company money which means more profit and
who doesn't want to work for a more profitable business?
Perhaps, just perhaps, you'll even get a bit of that profit.

-- 
Henry Hartley