[lug] Fedora *MEETS* KRUD comments wanted

[Rob Nagler]

Nate Duehr writes:
> I do not trust RedHat anymore.  They have the appearance of no longer 
> having my best interests at heart, as a non-paying user of their system 
> -- even though they never really owed it to me in the first place.  I 
> can't blame them, but I also can't trust them anymore.  They're no 
> longer a "helpful partner", they're someone who just caused a very 
> difficult decision about what to run in the future and demanded a big 
> check to not have to make that decision.

This reminds me of how some people invest.  There are people who buy
DRPs (look it up :-) and there are people who don't.  In investing,
you are making a decision every day.  If you leave it to "someone
else", you are ostriching.  DRPs are ostriching.  So are mutual funds
and ESPPs.

Why should RedHat provide something for free when you can get it
elsewhere?  Why would anybody do this unless they had a way of paying
for the cost of "free"?   Why would you pay when you can get it for
free?  Because it's not "free".

You don't work for your employer for free.  Although these days some
IT folks are happy to work for free.  If your employer wants to use
the free folks, he could.  But interestingly, he doesn't.

I trust RedHat more now that they are moving to a utility model.  I
just wish they would kill the entire concept of "releases" so that I
simply pay them to keep my computer current, forever.  Stuff I care
about, e.g. which Apache version, I'll update myself.  The rest will
be updated completely on demand, including the kernel.  Perhaps that's
their new model (I'm a bit slow on reading up on WS, etc.), and then
it would be a pure utility model.  Remember when the NA utilities
standardized on 110v?  You didn't pay explicitly for the upgrade; it
was built into the cost of running the utility.  The same should be
true for software.

Rob