On Sat, 2005-06-04 at 08:40 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
They genuinely thought that this was the only way; people who are in the know have stated that there are still warehouses full of boxed sets of Red Hat Linux 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x. With RHEL they sell fewer boxes, but sell more product, driving the cost down and making it possible for them to employ some of the best open source hackers around, like Ulrich Drepper, Alan Cox, Jacob Jelinek, Tom Lane, and many others.
It's all about economies of scale. The less you sell compared to your competitor, the higher price you have to sell to match your competitor.
I also want to point out that the 18-month release cycle for a product is heavily preferred by CompUSA and other retailers. They have a lot of old stock of 6-month release cycle products that got returned to Red Hat.
Novell is seeing the same thing happen with 6-month SuSE Linux Professional v. their new 18-month Novell Linux Desktop. So like Red Hat stopped selling Red Hat Linux 9 in the stores and switched to Red Hat Professional Workstation (RHEL WS), now Red Hat Desktop (also RHEL WS), I seriously doubt we'll see a SuSE Linux product in a retail box come version 10.