Re: RHL 9 - concerns

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Matt Wilson's post should help clarify:
>  https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/phoebe-list/2003-March/004919.html
> 
> Havoc
> 
> 
> 

My personal take on what Havoc is saying is that it looks like it's time 
that your company, which is obviously doing serious work on RedHat, make 
an investment in "Enterprise" or "Advanced" server versions. I think 
that's the overall message, in fact, to myself included.

On a more personal note, I started doing some consulting work on the 
side a few months ago. My "value proposition," as we all understand, was 
reliability and performance. Sure, a little more cost to hire a unix guy 
rather than a windows guy, but you don't have to spend another several 
hundred dollars on a Microsoft OS (just $60/yr for updates), and it's 
stable and worry-free. Now my advantage in my taget market just took a 
hit. Now I have to either get my clients to upgrade every year (at 
least) -- which is going to sound like job security to the small 
companies I'm aiming for -- or I get them to spring for another OS 
license that's even *MORE* than Microsoft's, even for just ES, not even 
AS. Again, we in this mailing list would rather admin the Linux box 
rather than the Microsoft box, but it becomes a tougher sell. Not 
impossible; just tougher.

In my mind, there's quite a gap between the $800 and 3-year-lifecycle 
product and the $100 and 1-year-lifecycle product, but I can appreciate 
the need for the disparity. I wish I could say that it doesn't really 
matter to me, but it does. What do I tell my church? I'm covered up, the 
other guy that knows Linux is covered up, but here we are needing to 
upgrade. (And I don't trust upgrading. To me, that just means reinstall 
and reconfigure.) Do I tell my pastor that we need to spring for another 
$800 to keep things running smoothly? We're a big church, but not so big 
as $800 goes unnoticed.

(Maybe if I didn't waste time thinking out loud on this list, I'd have 
the time to do all the things I need to really be doing...)

Debian may be an alternative, but I just tried it on a spare box I had, 
and I wasn't impressed. I simply don't understand what all the fuss is 
about there, and this is probably the wrong place to air *that* out to 
get an objective response... ;-)

dk





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