Slashdot is discussing "FC3: worthwhile or not ?"

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 18:49 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> I must confess I have this niggling feeling
> that Redhat  may not feel it is in their interest
> for Fedora to be too easy to install and use,
> as this might lesses the attraction of their commercial system.
> I hope someone will tell me this is nonsense.
> 

Here you go: it's nonsense. :-)

The attraction of their commercial system is for corporations, who are
the same people primarily and consistently forced to give Microsoft tons
of money. RHEL-WS costs $180/year IIRC, which is WAAAAAAAY more than
nearly anyone will pay for a home system.

But those corporations do pay for it, and they pay primarily to get a
five-year end-of-life commitment and some support. So "reducing the
attraction" of Fedora is a non-issue; the people who really are the
target market for RHEL will, in their large majority, not be interested
in Fedora anyway. Tell an IT manager to reinstall every desktop at least
once a year (assuming you skip every other release, even) and they'll
throw fits. They want the same OS to stay on that box until the box is
obsolete and removed from the user's desktop.

Cheers,

-- 
Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz at simpaticus.com>