On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 19:12, Tom Mitchell wrote: > Cost of software as a ratio against hardware matters. I recently > assembled a 'worthy' machine for about $300. Red Hat Enterprise > Linux ES Basic Edition with Management Service costs $222.50/year > for 1 system which is a mismatch in my mind. I would call that a mismatch. > There are reals costs to RH and others so I know that they must > charge something. One real cost is bandwidth another is simply > the book keeping to cash a $20.00 check. > > This brave new world demands some inventive solutions where cost > of software/hardware-cost results in a number that can stay at or > below 10%. I agree that there are costs. I'm willing to buy Fedora updates for Fedora or legacy upgrades. Just as I was willing to pay SuSE for every distro they pumped out and Red Hat before them for every version they pumped out. But I absolutely will not be forced to pay $100+ per year for my loan desktop when there are alternatives. Hell, Sun X86 is probably cheaper than that. And there's always FreeBSD, Gentoo, etc. Preston
