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On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Reilly Burke wrote:
> What's really annoying is that Linux developers are being paid (yes, we're
> paying them big-time - they're not working for free)
Some of us are, some of us aren't. That goes equally for paying and /being
paid/. The only people to whom I owe anything to are my clients, and I don't
recognise any names here. ;-)
And I'd be surprised if there's much profit in a typical boxed set; of a
typical boxed set selling for ~30GBP, I'd expect the following approximate
breakdown:
20-50% : retailer
20% : distributor
20% : packaging, printing, manuals etc.
that leaves somewhere between 40-10% (i.e. 3-12GBP) for the distro vendor
(i.e. RH, Mandrake, SuSE etc.) Out of that, they need to pay developer
salaries, marketing, tech support salaries...
I'm sure this was a factor in RH choosing to drop their retail product. I'm
pretty convinced that the only profit-making activities for the distro
vendors are support of OEMs who are using their distro in their products and
"enterprise" levels of support and consultancy.
On the other hand, if you're paying for RHEL or something similar, then you
have a legitimate right to complain if the product isn't meeting their
claims.
> to create this stuff, and it's really buggy and sloppy.
I can't remember the last time I used a piece of software that wasn't buggy
(and I've used some software that requires ~100KGBP licenses) to a lesser or
greater degree. At least with Linux, I can figure out /why/ it's going
wrong, and I've got the source code to fix it pretty easily.
Best Regards,
Alex.
--
Alex Butcher Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950 <http://www.assursys.com/>