On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 12:58, Stephen Smoogen wrote: > Ok I lets just cut to the chase.. what is the price people are willing > to pay and how many machines are you going to have? Then figure out how > many others you would need to sell at that price for RH to become > profitable and grow (going off of SEC filings or whatnot). Okay, I'll take a stab at this, but I'm only one person so I'm not sure my comments will be representative of other universities. Let's say that hypothetically we'd like to have/support 100 machines. We're probably not going to replace them all in one year so the cyclical cost of $180 each time we replace a machine is probably manageable. However, paying $180 (minimum... more if you want support) per machine, per year would come out to $18000 per year. That is simply out of the question. We need some sort of volume discounts to be able to cover the maintenance costs. Let's say for argument's sake that we could handle somewhere in the $2000 - $4000 range for "maintenance" costs each year (ideally that would include support). However, let's say Linux popularity grew and we grow to 200 machines. Should the cost double ($4000 - $8000)? I don't believe so. I could be wrong here, but I don't believe RedHat's cost linearly increase as the number of machines at a site increases. My point is that there should be some sort of volume pricing (at least for maintenance/support costs). For example, $x for 0-100 machines, $y for 100-500, $z for greater than 500. We simply can't afford per seat licensing for a large number of machines.
