Am Mon, 2003-08-11 um 17.53 schrieb Rik van Riel: > On 2 Aug 2003, Tim Kossack wrote: > > Am Sam, 2003-08-02 um 05.54 schrieb Gerald Henriksen: > > > > It can vary. The big problem from Red Hat's perspective though is > > > that they are not open source and Red Hat's postition is that anything > > > included in Red Hat Linux must be open source > > > but certainly not from a business point of view, > > You'd be surprised. Many people like the fact that Red Hat > has the ability to fix bugs in all software it claims is > supported. Big corporations are very happy when their > suppliers can fix the software problems that inevitably > crop up on the really high end servers. thanks for replying-however, you might be surprised that i'm not surprised at all;-). you're talking about the corporate customers, about your (red hats) products dedicated to the corporate market. it's totally clear to me that those users - want very good support, because they rely on 24/7 reliability, so that therefore - non-open-source-software might pose a risk achieving that goal, not to speak of the fact that flash, javaplugins etc. for browsers are certainly not needed for a server-os. but - in case they decide that they are needing those, they have admins to handle the task to install those afterwards! as far as i understood, the "normal" red hat-distribution (which this list is all about) is targeting a different kind of audience, means the non-corporate user, so the demands here are obviously different. instead of achieving ~100% reliability, the home- or enduser is (according to my experience) interested in a maximum of functionality, means he (or she) just wants to use linux as easy (and powerfull) as windows. so all i wanted was or is bringing the people at red hat (or generally at this list) to look at linux (on desktop) from the ordinary user's perspective, who is not familiar to linux' internals, and who is just interested in a ready-to-use alternative to windows (because he's interested to get independent from microsoft, or because he's heard about linux+ openoffice.org being an alternative etc.). therefore, i still think that, in case red hat basically hasn't ruled out targeting the homeuser-market, it needs to provide a product which is (even more) functional and easy-to-use, means it likely has to include non-free drivers and software. in my first post, i pointed out the flaws or hurdles i currently see in red hat 9 (or some other distributions) for those non-tech-savvy-users (compared to lindows), the browsers (and mp3)-plugins just being some of a bunch. unfortunately (maybe also because of my fault), the discussion focused at the plug-ins, and sadly, the rest of the flaws i mentioned didn't even get discussed. i can only say (again) that those points are the ones that were repeatedly brought to my attention from "normal" users of red hat 9, some of those affecting myself, too. > Nothing worse than investing $200,000 in a machine and > then finding out that the hardware/software combination > wasn't supported after all. This is a scenario that has > to be prevented at all cost. s.a.
