Fedora Users — Poll: Customized Fedora

I had the need to build custom installs of Fedora. So, I have developed a series of python scripts that greatly reduce headache of building and maintaining a custom distribution. Obviously I just use Anaconda and it's utilities to produce the distribution. But, to me, even with lots of scripts to automate tasks such as package dependency resolution and comp file generation the real problem is assembling the packages from around the Internet and starting from pre-built solutions.

I was curious if anyone would like a service that could easily produce custom Linux distros. I did some searching and there seems to be a defunct company that offered for $250 + $/hr to produce a custom Linux distro, I think that was a bit too high a price. I was thinking of a webservice that would allow the user to choose packages from various repositories around the Internet to build a distro-spec. This distro spec would be public to all who wanted to start from that point and customize their own distro. To build the distro a GUI client would be downloaded and installed that downloads the distro spec and assembles the packages on the local HD, customizes images, allow for custom packages, etc...

I was thinking that this could be a subscription based service $10-$15/year which allows a user to download and create as many distro specs as wanted (probably some limitation like, user can only have 5 distro specs in development at any one time, A user would publish the distro to the world to free up space). The pricing is just to cover the costs of hosting and bandwidth (big bandwidth hog). My estimates are for a break even at 25 users/month @ $10/year or 17 @$15. Anything, above that gets pumped into development which will all be open-source anyway. I am not thinking this is a million dollar idea because of the small market, I would like to get some consulting out of this so I can quit my real job :)


The features that I could build into the service in about 6 months are:

*.) Website to host system
1.) Full RPM package library to choose packages from
2.) Distro spec rating system
3.) Pre packaged distro specs such as:
   email server distro:
   windows file server distro
   CMS distro
   Gaming system distro
   ...
4.) expand to other distros like Mandrake, Suse and Debian
5.) Include support for apt packages

If I choose to do this project it will be Fedora based in the beginning so that is why I am posting here. I just wanted to get some feedback on the idea, I could have this service test launched by end of April since I already have most of the pieces developed for myself.

So what does everyone think?