The Reasons I hate Open Source Software and Love MS. 3157

Mike Cox wrote (in part):

I bought the cheaper versions of Red Hat Linux; i.e., not the professional versions that contained web servers, etc., that I did not need anyway.

IIRC, they came with a free subscription to RHN for a while, but then they required $60-year to continue the subscription. For me, that seemed worthwhile. When they discontinued that, they may have offered a refund (I no longer recall), but they also gave a 2-years for the price of one offer for any version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux you wanted (or maybe only RHEL3). That is actually a pretty nice deal.

And unless I am mistaken, they handed over almost all their stuff to the Fedora project and maybe even supply the servers for that project. It is likely that some of their paid employees also contribute to the Fedora effort. They did not have to do that.

So if you dislike Red Hat's business methods, there are other distributions available. Apparently enough people appreciate the Red Hat business model or they would be going out of business. It does take money to house and maintain a staff, house and maintain a battery of servers, etc., to run a business like that, and the revenue of $40-box or $179-professional-box (either of which can be used multiple times, and raising support costs each time it is installed) is just not enough to do that.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 09:30:00 up 50 days, 17:47, 3 users, load average: 4.14, 4.26, 4.63