Quoting William Hooper <whooperhsd3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > IIRC your $345 also gets you any new versions of RHEL that comes out. Basic economies of scale. $179 and $345 for WS and ES (I assume?) match up well against Microsoft's products, recurring support costs, etc... given their volume. > I would also ask if you really need that many copies of ES or would WS > do for most of it (I mean heck, it has Apache even). That's my attitude. If I just needed a 5-7 year supported "core," ES and WS are perfect as long as the 3rd party Fedora SRPMS will build on it. WS is only $179/year and will do my desktop's nicely. If I need a lot of goodies on a server, especially NFS/SMB clustering, etc..., I'll want to by AS for the broad support. > You also have the choice of finding a third party to provide you > support. I've seen on these lists a couple of places that are > offering to support Valhalla after Red Hat EOLs it. I'm sure you'll see this happen with Fedora "Core" releases as well. You'll pay for it, but _you_ have the option of _when_ you want to "stay back" or "stay current." The GPL doesn't guarantee free of cost. Stallman knows this better than most of us. But the GPL _does_ guarantee you won't be gouged at the same time. Any vendor who attempts to do so will cut its own throat as competitors will offer a way out. -- Bryan J. Smith, E.I. mailto:b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx http://thebs.org ------------------------------------------------------------------ There is no greater ignorance than the popular American environ- mental movement, which focuses on the most useless details. Be it recycling the world's most renewable resource or refusal to use proven CFC insulation on launch vehicles, no lives will be spared in the further pursuit of, ironically, harming the environment.