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Red Hat To Drop Boxed Retail Distribution

Posted by timothy on from the treasured-collectables dept.

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."

2 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is not a good move IMO by UndercoverBrotha · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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!
  2. Was going to happen sooner of later by ToasterTester · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.