Re: OT: SCO Extortion

Richard Welty <rwelty(at)averillpark(dot)net> said:

> On Sun, 25 Jan 2004 17:36:33 +0700 Chris Travers <chris(at)travelamericas(dot)com>
wrote:
>
> > So, Red Hat is charging per seat but it is for the services, not the
> > software per se.
>
> and the support is really pretty expensive, the cost of filling those seats in
> the call center with tolerably well trained staff is pretty significant.
>
> so basically, what they've done is directly tied a revenue stream to
> the associated expenses. it makes a lot of business sense.
>
> we do want businesses that try to support open source to stay in
> business, i should think.

Yes but the philosophy behind RHEL support is precariously close to that of
the gatesist shrink wrap model. It is about getting paid for nothing (or to
buy the right to use an IP which is the cumulative skill of the phone staff?).
Per incident charges with hourly rates past a time limit would make more
sense. A support provider could hedge their overhead against variations in
call volume by negotiating flat rate contracts with large users, based on
faster response times and discounted hourly rates.

The RHEL strategy pushes the limits of the intented flexibility built into GPL
for distribution and added value costs, especially in the way it extorts the
user into the all or nothing deal. Does this mean that if you use White Box
on one server you void the whole contract?

The whole RHEL concept is doomed to failure anyway. The main thing that Red
Hat has had going for it was support from the closed source vendors. As those
applications are replaced with opensource alternatives and as more closed
source applications vendors support running their applications on other
distributions, Red Hat's value will erode. It already has somewhat. There
was once a time that many of the oss projects would release redhat binary rpms
for the last few RH versions on or near the first day of a new source release.
Not any more.

Best regards,

Jim Wilson