I have one Fortune 1000 client who is wrestling with this issue. They are rolling their own Red Hat based distro, and paying the price of
chasing the consumer OS, while looking over their shoulder at the
end-of-life dates for 7.x, 8 and 9. They have 1400 desktops rolled out,
in a potential market of 16,000.
I think Red Hat should drop license fees for their WS product.
It is highly unrealistic for Red Hat to go uncompensated for their efforts. As people in charge of networks and the technology that runs on them it behooves us to make sure they are sufficiently financially compensated so that they can continue to push Linux where we need it to go (i.e. usable by the average corporate employee).
That being said, in my experience, corporate IT groups will only contact the vendor's support group after trying to solve the problem on their own. Also they will usually only call about a particular issue once or twice then they will be familiar with the fix and implement it without assistance.
Besides this there are different levels of urgency involved. If there were something along the lines of a less expensive, email only, with up to 72 hr response time contract option that was cheaper, this might be a comfortable fit for some customers. If things got truly ugly they could purchase an occasional per incident support call.
There must be a sweet spot for the number of installed clients vs. actual support incidents which would allow Red Hat to offer cheaper licensing to those that will purchase many licenses but have relatively few support calls.
So Red Hat could have three support options: 1- Full phone support with full RHN access 2- Email only up to 72hr response time with full RHN access 3- Only full RHN access.
This would allow customers to customize their support to their needs and protects Red Hat from people feeling pigeon-holed.
Of course this suggestion is only valid if the main cost component of an RHEL license is the support.
-- (¬_ Some days you're the windshield >o) //\ Some days you're the bug... /\\ V_/_ _\_V Charles Bronson
