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). Scenario #1: Work, private school 4 servers (mostly <1 year old, only 1 is a "real server", the rest are just decent PCs with 2 HDs), expanding to around 7 soon: RHN basic subscription for RHL is quite affordable at US$60/server/year, but i'd like the ability to update all outstanding all servers at once. Paying a higher price to get this feature would be fine, say, US$65-75/server/year. For our Novell servers we just play a flat rate (US$2 in our case) per full-time enrolled student per year for a selected set of products and unlimited servers (although we only have 7 and will be reducing this to 3 or 4 in the future). This sort of licensing is a possibility as well (although cheaper than Novell would be better, say US$1 :-). Scenario #2: Home network I have 3 full-time servers (2 firewalls & a DMZ server), 1 workstation, and various other installs for testing. I prefer to run the same distribution on my desktop and servers. I also don't have the time or need to upgrade all of my machines every 6-9 months, so i would likely not want to run Fedora. In this case a yearly subscription where i could install RHEL on an unlimited number of my personal machines would be ideal. Something around the US$100-200 might be OK (although it might be too high for some people). Scenario #3: Volunteer at a small tertiary college 6 "servers" (all >4 years old, no "real servers", the majority are in the Pentium 100-266 range), 1 on-site support workstation, most support done remotely. For this organisation, even RHN basic subscription is out of the question in terms of cost - there is no IT department, and no IT budget (or what little there is gets spent on hardware). In this case, i would prefer a flat fee as per my home machines, or student-based licensing. In all of the above cases, i'd really like a set of CDs/DVDs delivered to me. They don't have to be pretty, just functional. The main reason for this is that on current bandwidth prices, it would cost me a minimum of AU$168 to download a 3 x 700 Mb CD set. I also think that for any non-profit use (home, education, etc.), it would not be too much to ask that we be able to use RHEL AS rather than the more limited ES or WS. It won't be too long before entry-level servers will come with Itanium or Opteron processors. For scenarios 2 & 3 above, i have no problem with the updates being via mirror sites and being manual to apply (e.g. have to run apt-get on each machine or login to RHN demo with separate accounts). Paying so little, i don't expect to get a big share of Red Hat's bandwidth. Note that my concern in all of these scenarios is the affordability for home & non-profit organisations. If it was for work, i'd just make the boss shell out for RHEL ES or WS. -- Paul http://paulgear.webhop.net A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right. Q: Why should i start my reply below the quoted text?
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