Slashdot Mirror
Ximian Adds Subscription
Nat Friedman of Ximian points out that the introduction of the subscription service doesn't mean a reduction in the availability of free downloads, from Ximian and the 40 associated mirror sites. "We've actually grown the pipe by 500% over the past 4 to 6 months," he says. "We also have a mirror coordinator." He cites ever-increasing numbers of Red Carpet sessions as the reason for introducing a subscription; November alone saw three quarters of a million sessions.
That number seems likely to increase, in part because of Ximian partnerships with companies like HP, now shipping a preview release of Ximian Gnome on HP-UX, but also because the Red Carpet software update system no longer requires Ximan Gnome; Friedman passed along this link to distribution-specific static binaries which work with other distributions as well.
Despite new servers and more bandwidth, Friedman asserts that some users downloading software for free will inevitably hit servers at times "when they're getting 8k downloads and they'd rather be getting 50k, and that's really who the subscription is for."
I can fault them if they want me to give 'em 9.95$ per month. I wouldn't flinch if they asked for 9.95$ per year, but per month! Fuck that.
:wq
I could see paying for the service if it supported updating KDE as well....but usually installing the gnome ximian packages does some things I dont like to KDE:
1) KDE's menu loses various programs like gimp, gphoto, etc.... (because the RPMS are now labeled *-ximian.*
2) It breaks KDE-pim rpm, basically you cant run KpilotDaemon anymore
3) I forget what else, but there are more.
anyways, thats just my 2 cents about the service.
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
$9.95 a month is too expensive. Hell, I can buy hosting for $9.95 a month! I wouldn't mind supporting them and getting the benefit of higher bandwidth, but a fair market price as far as I'm concerned would be about $9.95 a quarter.
apt-get wins it over for me. Everything else is just eye-candy. And now expensive eye-candy.
It's nice that even in this increasingly commercialised Open Source world, that there's still a few idealists left.
How will they deal with people who don't want to pay $8/month but still think critical bugs should be fixed? Hmm.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I agree, it would be nice to see them make money, and this is really in the spirit of give the product away, charge for services. But the reporting is done with such a double standard.
If MS was to institute this sort of plan, the response would not be "can't fault a company for trying to make money". Granted, they already make enough money as it is, but if you're going to be critical of MS for considering subscription-ware, you ought to be critical of Ximian.
Of course, the updates are still free, but the automatic service costs. Of course, with MS this fact would be completely overlooked and the flaming would commence.
All that said, I think it is very valid to charge for this. For home users, this is only a mild inconvenience, manually updating is both fast enough and mostly trivial. If you are more adventuresome, you can rig an auto-update setup with scripts and cron. Where this really shines is for large deployments (companies) that could afford the subscriptions anyway.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Even if you buy every release of Red Hat Linux, it won't cost you $120 per year. And that's an entire operating system (with GNOME included!), not just a pretty GUI.
Remember, folks, it's still legal to mirror this stuff. It's all GPL.
--Patrick, who will continue paying $0 per year for software
In addition to the basic updating service freely available to Red Carpet Users, updating is also delivered through two premium subscription services:
Red Carpet Express provides users with priority high-bandwidth access to Ximian applications and leading third-party software for faster installations and updates.
Red Carpet CorporateConnect provides centralized Red Carpet updating to corporations and workgroups, including special features which allow system administrators to distribute their own in-house applications to their users - quickly and securely - through the Red Carpet interface.
So, it seems that there's still a 'normal' version, for use with 'normal' programs, using 'normal' server and a commercial one, with high-bandwith servers and some commercial soft.
No problems, just use the one you prefer depending, pay if you want/can and use the free version otherwise.
Of course, let's hope that there will still be free updates available.
#include "coucou.h"
Paying per quarter or year makes much more sense. It's a strange feeling to pay for something monthly that you wouldn't use at least once a month (at least I hope they don't make one release per month). I could see 4 upgrades a year, so pay every quarter. But if I can dial up to the entire internet for $19.95/mo (granted 56K), why pay $9.95/mo just to upgrade a small portion of my software?
I agree with their strategy of charging, no problem there. In fact they should charge for their services. But they need to come up with a better pay model. Maybe charge more monthly for corporate upgrades, less for home users.
Developers: We can use your help.
Upon re-reading what I wrote above, I realize I said something misleading.
With Ximian you don't pay for updates. You only pay for the fastest-available access to them. Updates are still free.
With RedHat Network, you pay if you want to avoid having to manage your entitlements via a web page if you have multiple systems. You get the same bandwidth priority either way.
I like Transgaming's product, winex, but I do have a problem with the subscription service. You would expect to be able to download a new version every month if you are paying a monthly fee. But you don't get that at all. They have only had one update since I signed on in October, and paid for three months. Ximian better have an update per month(at least) or it would not be worth it at all.
Can't fault a company for trying to make some money - hope it works.
/. wishes them luck
Actually, this parallels the story on Monday "VPN Clients Not Allowed On Residential Service"
EXCEPT then it was unacceptable for a cable company to charge extra for a business account
Again, my criticism then was not of people dailing in from home to remote a server, my criticism was of people saying
"YEAH, I use it all day long telecommuting for business but I don't want to be charged a business rate. My business can't afford THAT! They have no right to differentiate me based on my use or time of use"
Now Ximian differentiates their service levels and
*ironic wistle as I walk away shaking head*
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
As for myself, my time is actually worth something so I'm more than happy to spend 10 bucks a month on a useful service that gets my updates to me faster.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
While the content is all free, all you are paying for is faster/less conjested download. For example, in FP's case, you can spend the money on a 'personal server' that lets you download instantly, or wait in line for one of the FP mirrors to queue up.
In Gamespot's case, they provide the large downloads only if you pay them, but since these are mirrors of what's available on the gamemaker's site, they still offer the links to those.
Is this unreasonable? For the gaming sites, maybe, since there are probably some fanatic people that take a day off, click reload often until a demo is out so they can be the first to grab it and play it. For something like Ximian, I would rather see them divide the service into two parts: a 'critical' updates which should only be limited to security bugs that would be open and fast to all, and then the split servers for all other programs, ones for payed customers and ones for free downloads. Typically when you hear of a new bug, you want your patch ASAP, and this is not because your fanatic but because it's necessary; while probably waiting a short amount of time for the patch to come down the free-server side isn't a problem, security patches should be 'instantly' available regardless.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Linux needs an automatic updater like Red Carpet. Why? First, because of WindowsUpdate. It's quick, easy, and on the mark when updating the OS and MS's addons. You've bought the OS, sure, but the updates are free. At $9.95/month, now you have a free OS that ends up costing you the same as the full version of XP Home after just over a year and a half.
Second, because updating Linux without a tool like that is just impossible for the average user. People here often complain about the inaccessibility of MS updates to bug fixes and security holes, but at least they're in one place, on one site (even if you have to dig to see them), and usually end up on WindowsUpdate. How to the Linux Elite expect an average user to keep up with every possible package, dependency, bug fix, security hole and update? Linux's greatest strength, openness and diversity, is also it's greatest weakness. There is no central repository to keep your system running smoothly...except tools like Red Carpet.
What about for corporate situations? I'm telling you, Debian scares me, but a local apt-get cache for my users is looking more and more attractive every day.
Is this the new trend for Linux? "Yes, our OS is free (as in beer *and* speech!), but in the long run, it'll cost you more than Windows if you want to actually keep it updated." I dunno...that doesn't sound appealing to me, and it doesn't sound like it fits within the creedo that has been trumpeted for the last 10 years.
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
Your entire argument seems to rest on the fact that you believe bandwidth is free.
:) You may not pay by the byte, but Ximian does, as does almost every other company and individual running a server.
BANDWIDTH IS EXPENSIVE.
Okay? Hope that clears everything up
By allowing people to download stuff for free(although relatively slowly), they're still basically giving you money from their pockets.
So please, until you start providing servers with a 100Mbit connection to a good backbone, and provide all the bandwidth fees(thousands of dollars per month), then please don't bitch.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
This latest move is a noble attempt at trying to make some money, but I'd rather see companies like Redhat get an easy to use automatic software updater that keeps every package on my system up to date, and give me the "express treatment" when I enter a UPC code from the boxed version of the software I bought at a retail store. I think this would be a much better solution since it doesn't mean me paying every month, and Redhat is still making money off of retail sales, in addition to racking up more brick and mortar sales numbers.
$45 per U Colocation Special
$10/month for Ximian.
Hmm.
That's absurd. Imagine paying $10/month for each of GNOME, the kernel, your office suite, etc etc.
As another poster mentioned, that's $10 ($30, $40..) more than MS is asking for per month for automatic updates.
I'd actually think about paying $10/month for fast auto updates for the entirety of my distribution...it'd be nice to go to *one* site, make three clicks, wait for the download, and have my entire system up to date with the latest patches. Even better if it were done automatically.
But paying $10/month for one [albeit large] component of my system just invites others to charge for other components.
So much for avoiding the MS license if that happens, right?
I think you've hit on a key point here. The $9.95/month seems to attempt to cover bandwidth costs paid by Ximian.
Perhaps some sort of distributed mirroring system needs to be implemented for smaller companies that don't have $billions$ coming in every year to spend on bandwidth.
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
RHN is not free. You get a free year (afair) with your copy of Red Hat, but if you want additional machines to use the service, or you want to use the service thereafter, it's $19.95/month
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
Yes, for a company RCE sure is dirt cheap. But as a home user, my RCE subscription would be about 1/3 of my entire internet bill, and that's a bit steep, IMO.
Jason.
Added to which, whats to stop aggresive mirroring from getting software out to free sites within hours of it being available to Ximian subscribers??? I just don't see the benefit.
Anyone think this might be bad news for RedHat?
How can consumers be sure they're not just throttling what they used to give away for free and that what they're charging is fair?
What does it matter? They could charge $50 a month if they wanted. The question is quite simply: Do you feel it is worth it? If not, then don't pay it. If so, then pay it. Then Ximian will make marketing decisions based on the number of people that subscribe.
That's how capitalism works. You get to decide pricing indirectly, not directly!
"And like that
I am sick and damned tired of people bitching about modest fees from previously free open-source sites. I mean, really. ESPECIALLY when they still offer a free alternative.
We're all smart people. If there's one thing we should have learned about the dot-bomb era, it's that organizations (businesses, companies, hacker efforts, the red cross...) NEED MONEY TO STAY ALIVE. That's just how it is, people.
We have lots of control over organizations, simply by choosing who to support with our $. (Guess what? Ximian might be a good opportunity to further the cause.)
All of you people that are out there bitching about paying some small fee for good access, what don't you get about this? What is so hard to understand about needing $$$ to support the effort?
Money is a basic requirement for effectively bringing anything to the masses, be it charity, goodwill, and even open-source software.
Everyone bitching on here, take a step back and look at the big picture. You need to do your part. FYI, your part is NOT bitching about what amounts to a sustenance model for something you care about.
If you love and care about important stuff like this, suck it up, and spring for the 33 fucking cents/day it might cost you.
I, for one, have already signed up to pay the paltry $9.95/month to support something that I care about and love, which I don't want to go away.
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Seriously, what is with this? Whenever people talk about Evolution or Red Carpet I get this feeling that I have some secret that nobody else knows about. I know debian is harder to get installed than other distros but *come on*.... it is a one time cost. You would think it was next to impossible the way people avoid it.
Every couple of weeks I pop open KPackage and use the debian servers to and shop around for upgrades. If I ever find myself needing software I don't have... I go to KPackage.
I don't understand. Why does Ximian need to charge money for bandwidth and Debian not? Are their operating costs a lot higher? I think it must be because Debian is not-for-profit so people must feel more responsability to make donations. I just don't feel philanthropy towards a for-profit business.
Just some thoughts.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Please go check http://news.gnome.org/, people -- the free servers continue to exist. Only access to new, faster, bigger bandwidth servers are charged.
Presumably this could even make the free servers faster for users who choose not to subscribe, since the existing servers may be somewhat offloaded.
In any case, the same service exists in Debian -- and it covers the whole operating system, not only Gnome.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Mandrake Update works fine (as of version 8.1) and automatically updates you with security and bug fixes whether you paid for Mandrake's product or just downloaded it from a mirror.
I have a feeling that Ximian is on the way out the door...
Redhat apparently has some sort of tool (up2date or something) which performs a similar task.
red-carpet was pretty cool, but IIRC the Ximian gnome didn't get along too well with Debian (Mainly dependency naming issues IIRC) so I wiped it off my desktop and installed the standard gnome branch. I really can't tell the difference, either. And getting Ximian off my desktop was a much more miserable experience than it had to be, though this was more Debian's packaging system's fault than anything else. The dependencies cascaded and X and all the X programs ended up getting uninstalled too.
If I were in a corporate situation and getting paid for keeping a Linux network healthy, I'd set everyone up with Debian, have their apts pointing to a machine inside the company and either set them on a cron job or hack out some method of kicking off a apt update on a remote signal. Then I'd thoroughly test new packages before releasing them to the live apt server.
Time will tell if this subscription model works for Ximian. I suspect that in its current form, it will not.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Like others, I wonder if the $9.95/month price is too high just for better download times. However, we should remember the basic theory of economic price discrimination (which is a morally neutral term in economics, by the way, unlike other forms of discrimination.)
The point of price discrimination is to divide your consumers into groups based on their willingness to pay. Let's say that the profit-maximizing price -- if only one price is offered -- is p0. Then if a firm offers two levels of service at p1 and p2 (with p2 the higher price), it is likely that optimal p1 is less than p0 and optimal p2 is greater than p0. The reason is that the higher-priced service is aimed at a particular group of service-sensitive/price-insensitive consumers, not at the "average" consumer.
Now, take p0 as the Microsoft price -- we would expect Ximian's p1 to be less that the MS price and it is: zero. Correspondingly, we might expect that p2 could be even higher than the MS price, as it arguably is. It seems to me that most consumers would prefer the Ximian solution -- at least you have a zero-price choice.
Of course, while this argument is in favor of a relatively "high" price for the premium service, the firm still has to worry that even the service-sensitive folks will "defect" to the low-price service. Unless they make the free service really bad, I still wonder if $9.95/month isn't too high. Perhaps they should go for a $10/quarter "Premium" service and a $10/month "Elite" that has further support benefits.
What's worse, these ONLY support RPMs. There's nothing for SLP's, DEB's, perl modules, etc. Further, they generally only support one architecture (i386). Binaries for the 486, 586, 686, Athlon, etc, just don't seem to exist on these servers.
What is needed, IMHO, is a caching gateway for developers. A developer simply registers a directory, and forgets about it. (File-And-Forget). Every N hours, the gateway scans all registered directories, updates a database of who has the most recent version of what, and drops from its cache any out-of-date versions.
On receiving a request, the gateway would check it's cache for a copy. If it has one, it send the file. If it doesn't, it locates what server does have a copy, grabs it, caches it, then forwards it.
Dependency checking would be simplified, because this kind of server would have a record of damn near every RPM, DEB, SLP, perl module, etc, out there. If the dependency couldn't be met directly, it can always use something like Alien to covert a different package format to the one needed to meet the dependency.
Such a system would also be much cheaper to run, as you don't need a gigantic machine. Remember, you're not storing all the binaries on the computer, only the ones likely to be needed. You also don't need to administrate such a machine, to keep it up-to-date, as it updates itself, with the help of the developers themselves.
All you'd need is a decent network connection. Geant would do nicely. Failing that, someone could practically run something like this out of their home, especially if you allowed a peer-to-peer arrangement of gateways, so that no one connection is saturated.
IMHO, this would utterly negate the need for any kind of commercial update tool, and provide a universal updating system for most Linux platforms.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A month? For updates to Gnome and other products I need to purchase? I just can't see how $120/yr is a good value (ok $99.95 if I buy it a year at a time). Of course Redhat wants $240/yr per machine. Yes, I know bandwidth is expensive, etc, etc and Ximian needs to make money. I'm all for that. But the pricing seems a bit off. Hell - for $120 or $240 a year I can buy windows and still get updates to it (teh few there are ;) ) for free.
I'm not saying everything has to be free. But come on! For example - I've got 3 desktops (me and kids) and a laptop. All run Redhat. Do I have to buy subscriptions for each (I do with RedHat) That's $400/yr just to auto update my packages? I hate dependency problems as much as the next guy but that's nuts.
I agree with the poster - I'll be doing my upgrades overnight and send Ximian what I feel is fair value for the desktop and the service.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
service for over a year now. It saves me time and
keeps my software (including OS) up to date.
Although the main reason I paid is not for faster downloads, I paid because I want them to keep up the good work. Continue to develop useful software and release it as GPL. The faster downloads is just a bonus.
I don't really see how Ximian is going to make it. At the end of the day they are really just another Eazel - a company with a neat product that you can obtain for free. There simply is not a compelling reason to give Ximian money.
The best advice I could give them at this point is to develop some truly useful and unique linux apps and sell them. People will pay for something they cannot get elsewhere if it truly enhances the utility of their system.
For example, I would pay for a Real JukeBox type system that united all of the functions of the various linux music programs in one nice package.
We'd like to clarify a few of the facts around our new Red Carpet Express service.
:-)
Since we launched the Red Carpet service this past April, it has become immensely popular. In fact, usage of Red Carpet has grown over 500% since the service's inception, and we've had to scale our public server's network pipe accordingly. Today, hundreds of thousands of people use Red Carpet on a regular basis to keep their systems up to date. Almost since the day we launched it, we've had a number of users ask us to provide a subscription service to Red Carpet that would offer a higher level of bandwidth. That's what Red Carpet Express is.
Red Carpet Express is not a sign that we're backing away from our free Red Carpet service. As our userbase has grown, it has become harder for us to increase our available bandwidth -- and consequently our monthly colo bill -- to provide everyone with the fastest connection possible. And so, for the users who absolutely must have high speed all the time, there is Express. Red Carpet Express is made up of a new, dedicated network of machines located at major hubs, and doesn't cut into our free service at all. In fact, over the last few months, we have increased bandwidth to our free Red Carpet service dramatically as the userbase has grown.
Red Carpet Express is not a sign that we're backing away from our mirror network. We have a dedicated mirror coordinator who works with our over 40 mirror sites to make sure they have the latest content as quickly as possible. This isn't going to change with the launch of Red Carpet Express. In fact, I'd like to encourage those users of our free service to consider looking for a mirror site closer to them.
Anyway, we hope people give Express a shot. It's the perfect stocking stuffer!
The Gnutella network exists and would be an excellent haven for free content. So long as it is clear that you are expected to share whatever you download, this is basically free bandwidth for ximian, although it is still slow.
:) my idea and develop a free software distribution vehicle (apt-get? redcarpet? something new?) which is agnostic as to its transport mode but explicitly encourages the use of peer-to-peer networking for file transfers and only uses centralized servers for version listing updates. The legality of transferring files between users rather than from central distribution points is a huge advantage of free software- currently we're only capitalizing on it by downloading iso images or copying cdroms. We can do much much better.
This also solves the legitimacy problem that peer-to-peer systems often have. If the files are legal to redistribute as all GPL'd code is, then pow! - we have a clear non-infringing use for a network like this. Sorry Jack Valenti, networks are for kids.
It's a win-win. What's really needed is a list of projects that need to be shared from people's idle gnutella collections, so that the sharing can happen with a modicum of intelligence- or perhaps even just an announcement on the download page asking users to pledge to share the files they download (or some portion of them) on peer to peer networks like the gnutella network in order to guarantee their widespread distribution, and a place to enter their email address so they can be notified when a newer version has been released so they can start sharing the newer one. You probably can't offer a discount for this or anything since
If bandwidth is their only problem, I think this is a solvable problem so long as the content they are distributing truly is free.
Please, someone with more time and experience, steal (or hire me to implement
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Ximian sez
"Red Carpet(TM) Express is a timesaving subscription service that provides end users with priority, high bandwidth Internet downloads and updates of Ximian(TM) and third party software hosted by Ximian."
I really, really hope this doesn't mean Ximian RPM releases will be delayed in the public servers. Narrower bandwidth, I don't mind much.
Red Carpet Express is not a sign that we're backing away from our mirror network.
So who are you actually appealing to? Red Carpet on its own in any form is only going to appeal to a fraction of users - those who perform their own major upgrades between distro versions. Now take this audience and reduce to only those who depserately need the highest bandwidth....so who exactly is this?
As it stands, it is incredibly easy to spoof your model - just sign up for one account and use it to distribute to free mirrors. The free sites would potetnially only be a half hour behind the paid update.
Check out these two projects:
Everything Over Freenet(EOF) http://eof.sourceforge.net/ - they have a version of apt-get running over Freenet already.
World Free Web
http://wfw.sourceforge.net/
Can your IM do this?
I am maintaining free software package with several dependencies (most from RedHat and Ximian GNOME distributions). Many users complain about not being able to install it. Publishing it as channel as Ximian would be perfect. Unfortunately Ximian does not allow 3rd parties to create and maintain software channels using thier technology.
Now then they started to charge money it is just matter of time until somebody will write free open source service analogous to Ximain which will allow developers to publish their own channels via WWW interface. Bandwidth would be moderate, because such server only needs to distribute XML files with pointers to packages on other sites.
I know debian is harder to get installed than other distros but *come on*.... it is a one time cost.
. 2/ redhat/RPMS.extra/
/etc/apt/sources.list
The Debian developers who wrote APT created it to be independent of packaging systems, and its been out on Connectiva and mandrake (and optional on Red hat) for ages.
Red Hat users:
Download the APT package from:
http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt/redhat-extra-7
and put the following in your
rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-7.2-i386/redhat os
rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-updates-7.2/redhat os
rpm http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-extra-7.2/redhat extra
rpm ftp://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/apt redhat-freshrpms-7.2/redhat
freshrpms
rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-7.2-i386/redhat os
rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-updates-7.2/redhat os
rpm-src http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/apt redhat-extra-7.2/redhat extra
Problem solved.
* Standard (i.e, RPM) packages.
* No difficult install.
* Current stable releases.
* Auto hardware detection, and other modern OS features
* APT
More mirrors would be great, and Debian's larger list of packages, better packaging policies and greater amount of mirrors help, but personally I think the other Red Hat features more than make up for this.