[KLUG Members] RHN now $5/month -- imagine how much GPL development could be funded?

[Bryan J. Smith]

Listening to their customers, /. is reporting that RedHat has introduced
a new "Basic Service" option to their RedHat Network (RHN).  This is
$5/month, $60/year.  Now I feel there is no excuse for RedHat users such
as myself not to help fund RedHat.

IN PRAISE OF 100% GPL-FOCUSED REDHAT

RedHat, despite what you might think of their distro or business-side
tactics, funds probably the greatest number of 100% GPL software
developers (since VA no longer does).  I cannot stress enough the
importance of this fact.  Every distro enjoys the fruits of RedHat
employee labor, and not just Gnome developments either.

IMAGINE THE NUMBER OF DEVELOPERS THAT COULD BE HIRED

For every 2,000 people who sign up for the service, that's $120K/year
for RedHat.  Figuring half of that goes to upgrades to their network
infrastructure to support the additional downloads, that leaves $60K to
fund another developer on-staff.  If all 2 million RedHat sysadmins (my
estimate is 2M, which equals ~20M installs, ~10 installs/per sysadmin on
average) coughed up $60/year, that's $120M/year for RedHat.  That could
equate to adding $60M for developers, or about a thousand employees!

PERSONAL NOTE

I've been a total RedHat leech here.  Although I have worked for various
companies who have paid for Cygnus tools (Cygnus is a division of
RedHat), I've pretty much only bought the boxed sets on every .2 release
(and I haven't bought 7.2 yet).  I've been running RedHat on this system
(through various hardware upgrades) since 4.2, only re-installing once
to move to XFS (RedHat 7.0.92 + XFS 1.0 betas was a "clean" install).

I've installed RedHat on close to 500 systems now, and I'm sure well
over half of those are still in use.  So that amounts to about $0.10 per
system I've installed.  Definately not enough IMHO.  I want to change
this.

-- Bryan

-- 
Bryan J. Smith, Engineer        mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc.     http://www.linux-wlan.org
SmithConcepts, Inc.          http://www.SmithConcepts.com
---------------------------------------------------------
1999 IRS Data:  The top 1% of income earners pay over 36%
of the taxes, but have less than 20% of the total income.