[ale] Fedora and RHN?

[Chris Ricker]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:

> > No. The core of RH's business is companies who buy RH because it's what
> > ISVs support. No offense, but you really don't make a dent one way or the
> > other in RH's bottom line....
> 
> And why do those ISVs support RH?  Because it is the most popular 
> distribution.  And that is because all the hobbiests adopted it.
> 
> The question is whether that dynamic still drives the market, or have we 
> passed the point that the hobbiest has any influence.  I think the market is 
> young enough that there is still an influence.  A second order influence now, 
> but still a powerful one over the long term.
> 
> I will certainly admit that I have no hard data to back this up--just 
> anecdotal and personal evidence.

You're right about why ISVs chose RH originally, but now they choose it 
because it's what they've done in the past, and because it's what the others 
choose. It's gotten too late for hobbiests to change ISVs at this point. If 
it weren't, Debian would have commercial products available for it ;-)

I did a lot of work with RH's business customers (ie, the people who pay) in
the training / consulting space until this week (I'm changing jobs!). Most
are not hobbiests, and haven't been for about 3 years now, and in spite of
that RH's steadily grown in the business markets. The hobbiests tend to run
other, more bleeding-edge distros, and that's been true for a few years. The
people who have been converting to the enterprise RH offerings these days
are running RH because management told them to switch from Solaris to Red
Hat on the database servers to save money.

later,
chris