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."

Comments

Re:oh yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:This is not a good move IMO

[UndercoverBrotha]

"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

Was going to happen sooner of later

[ToasterTester]

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.

Re:This is not a good move IMO

[letxa2000]

I can't think of a better way to annoy a customer than to sell them something that they later find they could have downloaded or legally copied for free.

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.

Re:Not accurate

[Havoc Pennington]

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.

Hey guess what

[autopr0n]

Can order CDs from cheapbytes most of the distros they have are less then $6.