How many Fedora users are there?

How many Fedora users are there?

Posted Oct 13, 2006 14:08 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: How many Fedora users are there? by ajross
Parent article: How many Fedora users are there?

I no longer work for Red Hat... I left 5 years ago to do other things for a while. I also only use RHEL at work since I do not have a reason to pay for it for home use (there I use Fedora, Centos, and rpath)

I was only trying to point out that back during the time I worked there (1997-2001) and before I worked there.. Red Hat had an image problem with a certain set of people who labeled Red Hat as "money-grubbing" in one way or another.

The fact was that the boxed sets were always a money loss. If we took the maximum number of boxed sets we had ever sold, we found that to cover the cost of developers, ftpsite, etc. we needed to charge a minimum price-point of USd ~75.00. Add on just installation support we needed to sell them at USD 85.00. [The reason for this is that for a listed price of 75.00, the company only sees about 35.00. The rest is selling through channel costs and dealing with returns by channel, etc.]

The only profits we made were for specific support projects, and they were not enough of them to really keep us going.

When we priced box sets at 60.00 for RHL7, we saw that the majority of the original Red Hat buyers saw that was too much for them and sales of that product were too low. The only way to make money on selling boxed sets was to not have more than 2-4 developers and 1-2 support staff (and hope the quality of the product didnt suffer *ha*).

Does this mean I am trying to convince you not to dislike Red Hat? No. I am just trying to explain things from my point of view.

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