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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."
Red Hat was probably hemorrhaging cash in the consumer retail arena... so rather than continue to fight a loosing battle, they're regrouping and doing what works for them.
It's a novel conect in the IT economy.... focus on what actually makes your company money, and dump what you loose money on. Red Hat isn't a Microsoft... they don't have the capital to piss away to maintain market share. They *need* to focus on what makes money.
a few comments.
1. anyone that doesn't have access to a distro of linux is entirely unlikely to buy one off the shelf. More likely they know an über-geek already that got them into Linux or they bought it at Barnes and Noble with a huge book with 5 different flavors, what have you.
2. This strikes me as being a genius idea. Putting those boxes on the shelves is in no way cheap. Do you ever see Red Hat flying off the shelves? Only when its time to replace the box with the next version.
3. Red Hat makes their money in providing service and support contracts to big companies. Not the little guy.
This is a money thing. removing the shelf space issue is good business sense. It might tick you off but it will make investors happy.
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Red Hat is provider for Linux OS for the Enterprises. They want to concentrate more on the RH 2.1 Advance Server, and not waste too much time on the retailing the distribution.
Moveover since the developers will be actually the one doing the packaging as well, Red Hat's job will become in including those packages in their ES/AS/WS distributions. Making the developer list open to all, will in-turn help them making their ES/AS/WS services better.
They want to be a service oriented company, rather than a product oriented. And this is the only Open Source Model that will survive.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Most people who use and enjoy Linux and want to keep it going do, in fact, "shell out money" for a box set. I put my money where my mouth is; I buy every x.1 Mandrake release and am a Mandrake club member. I also just purchased the definitive guide, even though I think it's a little overpriced, the shipping is too high, the discount for being a club member isn't very much, and the entire book is available to club members (like myself) as a .pdf.
If you particularly like a certain distro and use it for day-to-day use, I suggest you do the same if you want it to survive. Or if it's something like Gentoo, give them the amount it would cost if they had a boxset once a year or so, which would be about $60.
Chris
Every time I buy a boxed set at CompUSA, I see people watching and I know they're wondering about using it. Certainly, they're seeing that people DO buy this "Linux thing" they've been hearing about. At work, people grab the box...or the manuals and comment on how neat it all looks. They claim to be surprised at how much you get in the package, thinking that only MS can do stuff like that. When vendors come in, I purposely leave the materials laying around and I always get a question or two about where our "commitment" is to Linux, usually followed by a resigned sigh as they realize that they'll have to adapt or lose. Red Hat is seriously underestimating the power of that box, and Linux will suffer because of this.