On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, Michael Schwendt wrote: > On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 18:46:19 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers wrote: > > > This should also be appealing to Red Hat, since having a wide set of extra > > tools and packages that also work for RHEL will only help in selling Red > > Hat in a lot of environments. > > I doubt that extra packages alone increase Red Hat's sales. True, there > are some customers, who appreciate some prebuilt extra packages (I've seen > the messages on taroon-list, too). But increased customer demand would > cause Red Hat to become active and support extra software themselves, > e.g. anti-virus solutions. There's a difference between 100 companies wanting the same thing, and 100 companies each wanting a different thing. The second group is as important for sales as the first group. Whether you include it in your distro or not, having a set of 1500 extra packages extending the distro of your choice and having a community around a distro are important factors if you take a long-term decision. Whether they are prebuilt are not is not really important. The fact that they have been tested and improved by others, is what is of most value. This is something unique to RHEL and I'm convinced it is a selling point for companies making a decision. Actually I know it is an important factor as I'm using the same argument for advicing RHEL on a daily basis. There are not many differentiators: bugzilla, Open Source commitment, RHEL community and extra packages are my biggest motivators in favor of Red Hat. Each of these I can back up with examples and anecdotes. > > Ok, I thought it was a compliment if I said fedora.us is maturing, but if > > you say it isn't, I'm not going to argue with you. :) > > If you did, I would scratch my head and then shake it in disbelief. ;) Hehe :) -- dag wieers, dag@xxxxxxxxxx, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
