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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."
$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.
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!
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.
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.)
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
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.
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!