On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 15:45, Paul Gear wrote: > Here's my explanation of what i'm looking for: > http://paulgear.webhop.net/the_page_formerly_known_as_rhel.html The costs of producing your distribution would cause Red Hat to lose money on every box set produced. The Red Hat Linux box set model was not profitable. Red Hat is a corporate entity, and we are in this to make money. That means that we might not have a product that fits your needs, and yes, that sucks. But we put source code for everything in the distribution out there for you to use under a license that lets you do whatever you want with it. Most corporations would be horrified at the thought of such a thing. Red Hat doesn't have to do a Fedora Core. We could focus all our efforts on RHEL and tell everyone who doesn't want to pay us $$$ to stop bothering us. We are doing a Fedora Core. We're trying to make the developers and the open source community happy. We're trying to give them a chance to make a really good Linux distribution in the spirit and style of Red Hat Linux. And undoubtedly, this is going to piss off a lot of people who were quite happily taking advantage of Red Hat Linux with 3 years of errata without paying a cent. We can't do that anymore. It's too expensive, we'd cease to exist. Fedora Core is the compromise. We spent a long time trying to make the most people happy, we listened to all the complaints (yes, even the most irrational ones), and we came up with the best option we could. If you don't want to pay for RHN, Fedora Core will support multiple types of package repositories. If you do, we'll have that available to you. If you want updates beyond what Red Hat builds for the Fedora project, volunteer to maintain it yourself. If you want to build an RPM that violates 14 patent laws and the Geneva convention, we can't support you or link to you, but we can't stop you either. We've put a lot of skin in the game, not to mention engineering time and money, because we believe that Open Source works. But we can't go under for Open Source. Simply put: Fedora Core is what you make it. I could elaborate on that point endlessly, but the point of it is to give the control back to the community. Red Hat is going to help, we're going to oversee, but we're not going to restrict it. I agree wholeheartedly that we need to do something special for the unique needs of educational institutions, and we're working on something. If your educational institution would like to talk about finding a way to meet your Linux needs through Red Hat, I would be happy to arrange such a discussion. ~spot --- Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> LCA, RHCE Red Hat Sales Engineer || Aurora SPARC Linux Project Leader "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published." -- Aldous Huxley
