Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat To Drop Boxed Retail Distribution
An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat, the leading American distributor of Linux, is abandoning the retail channel, the company is expected to announce Monday, says this story in Linux and Main. Non-Red Hat developers will be given a greater role in deciding what's in upcoming Red Hat distributions, too."
...given that RedHat made most money from their support contract. I've been using Linux for 10 years, have tried a lot of distros, but never shelled out money for a boxed set, and especially these days, with broadband internet access and CD burners everywhere, I'd assume most people just download the ISO images anyway. I don't think RedHat ever made money with the boxed sets, and most people won't be affected by this move either.
Nothing to see here, move on.
1. Mandrake: 46.02%
2. Red Hat: 21.33%
3. SuSE: 18.67%
4. Debian: 5.33%
5. Corel: 2.66%
6. Caldera: 2.66%
Others: 3.33%
Linux World Magazine
June 2003
"Red Hat clearly aren't making money in the retail channel and it makes no sense for them to be there"
You "may" be right, perhaps instead of being stocked at CompUSA, they need to go the Suse route.
"ask any number of helpful people in any number of Linux forums"
I have never used direct support from Red Hat, but when I was new to Linux, some of my most basic question were met with impatience and arrogance, or haven't you tried "this" yet, when I had no idea how to do, "this". It was only after tinkering a bit on my own and asking an somewhat intelligent question were the board or irc channels helpful, paid tech support on the other hand, will hold your, er.. hand, for the most basic questions
Solid!
When took one of RH's training classes a few years ago the instructor was telling us that less then 10% of RH's income is from the distro and they would drop it if they could. It was only a marketing tool for them. That most of RH's income is from support, training, and custom development.
Then look at RH's support model they are like Sun they don't want to deal with the lower tier customers, they only want to deal with the large corporations. Guess you could say Red Hat is turning into a traditional Unix company.
If you noticed, RedHat does not target the home user. They aim for buisness because that's where the money is. Mandrake aim the end user.
The headline is inaccurate. The information that will be released on Monday is regarding the development direction of Red Hat Linux. Further information on the retail product line will be forthcoming closer to the product launch plan this fall.
Havoc Pennington
Red Hat, Inc.
Before I had DSL, it was a mail-order show to get a new distro. Well; big deal. It takes time for boxed sets to reach the stores, it takes time for silver ISOs to be shipped out. Point is, even if all distro makers were to abandon the cardboard box, companies like CheapBytes (only plugging since I've dealt w/ them numerous times in the past) will be happy to step in and take the money being left on the table.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
debian netinstall ~40mb iso, once its installed, ctrl c out of the package selection
All of the documentation (and then some) that comes printed with the boxed version of RH is available for free online. Granted, it's not the same as a paper manual but since you mentioned quality, they're really excellent.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/
Disclaimer: I work for RedHat, but the first thing that turned me on to RH as a distribution was the documentation.
Are you kidding? I'm in Mexico right now and there aren't any "on the shelf" copies of RedHat anywhere near here, so I'm downloading RedHat9 as I write this via my 256k DSL. It's going to take about 7 hours per CD. I would definitely pay $50 (or whatever) if I could walk down to the local store and pick up a boxed set even if I know I can download it for free.
The point isn't that it's not available in Mexico. The point is that if they're going to abandon the boxed set that means people in the U.S. are going to be in the same situation I'm in now. And it sucks. Downloading 2GB of ISOs is a big deterrent for someone that is kind of thinking about switching OSs. Even having to figure out what to do with the ISOs is going to be a challenge for many of them.
I agree with someone else in this thread--it's probably not a good idea. Having your product out on the shelf gets you known and in front of consumers. They may not buy today, but they may buy (or download) in the future. Having RedHat disappear from the shelves could very easily mean, "Oh, where's RedHat? I guess it folded. Oh well" to the average consuemr that might just be starting to hear something about Linux and/or RedHat.
Yes, they run you as root by default and they've got other problems, but Lindows actually seems to want to be on Compusa shelves, and is more likely to be useful to Compusa's customers.
Redhat was just there because they thought they had to be, not because it was making them any money. Linux won't die from the Compusa shelves if Mr. Robertson moves fast.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Most people I know who use Linux *did* start with CD's and many of them were CD's that I burned. So the real issue is that if someone wants to redistribute the RedHat disks, they can.
The only thing that bothers me is that I think that RedHat needs to court small hobbyists as well as large enterprises. This is how they keep thir name recognition. I am wondering how long before they abandon their standard distributions all together. That IMO would be a very bad thing... I am NOT going to buy RedHat Enterprise Desktop just in order to study to pass the RHCE....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Red Hat to change development model, abandon shrinkwrap
The company's next major release, codenamed "Cambridge," will not be provided in boxed, retail form, according to company communications with employees and developers, which have been made available to Linux and Main.
Additionally, Red Hat plans extensive changes in its development and distribution model. The changes will begin with development lists being made public, and will be followed by return of package maintanence to the developers themselves. Currently, packages are "handed over" to Red Hat developers, who then tune them for inclusion in a particular version. Under the new system, developers will maintain control of the packages.
The company hopes that the changes help to overcome the long lead time needed to produce boxed sets. With a six-month release cycle, and with the rapid pace of Linux development, many packages shipped on CD are obsolete before they ever reach retail shelves.
cpeterso
XP Home doesn't include IIS, and although it isn't a particularly good webserver, there are some applications that need it. Possibly, there are ways to install IIS on XP Home, but that seems to be quite complicated, and maybe Microsoft would consider that illegal. Therefore, I once wanted to update from XP home, which was pre-installed on my notebook (together with RedHat), to XP Pro, but then it turned out that the XP Pro update version is only for users of Windows 98, ME, NT and 2000, but not XP Home. I would have had to buy a full XP Pro. I found that so crazy that I decided never to buy any Microsoft product again.
Can order CDs from cheapbytes most of the distros they have are less then $6.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.