Re: gEDA-user: More footprint stuff

[Daniel Nilsson <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 01:01:47PM -0500, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> 
> > > Anyway, when a company wants to run a copy of RHEL, they are likely to
> > > also want the support & quality assurance that comes with the real
> > > McCoy; they are accordingly willing to pay.  And the advantage of
> > > GPL'ed software in this case is the openness, transparency, and
> > > (usually) stability of Linux.  Also, with Linux there is no vendor
> > > lock-in and mandatory upgrade treadmill.  Those qualitites are also
> > > worth paying for, if you are a serious company.
> > 
> > That pretty much sums up RH's business model ;-)
> 
> Indeed.   And I think it's a good model, too.  On one hand, you don't
> screw your customers for profit (like M$ does), and on the other hand,
> you have enough revenue that you can fund and support continued
> development of Linux. [1]
> 
> What I don't understand is why somebody would spend all the time and
> effort to strip out RH logos from RHEL just to distribute it into a
> marketplace where there are already thousands of free Linuces
> already.  Somebody with that much time and energy would be better
> utilized for improving gEDA and other F/OSS EDA apps!

Well there is another angle... Assume you want to deploy 50 machines
running Synopsys VCS for example, you have now spent a lot of money on
VCS licenses from Synopsys and they might only support you if you run a
specific Linux distribution. That happens to be RHEL AS in some cases
that I'm aware of.

You will now have spent quite a bit of money on copies of RHEL for all
these machines, just to be on the platform "supported" by your tool
vendor. In this case a free copy of RHEL might come in handy for some
of those machines since it will look exactly like the supported
version of RHEL. You could now just buy one copy of RHEL and have 49
machines running an identical "free" copy of RHEL.

-- 
Daniel Nilsson