Red Hat intros 12 month only support on 'consumer' OSes (Register)

Posted Jan 28, 2003 10:38 UTC (Tue) by mgh (guest, #5696)
Parent article: Red Hat intros 12 month only support on 'consumer' OSes (Register)

I think that Redhat is making a wise decision to a point, but I believe that they would find that they could sell support for older releases once they passed their original use by date. So they provide access to subscribers who pay for updates for 12 months at rate 1 and 24 months at rate 2 etc etc.

Contrary to what most people believe a lot of corporates view free as risky and they they'd prefer to pay and if you offered them two contract staff, one at 105% of "typical rate" and another at 45% of "typical rate" they would take the expensive one - why? less risk.

When a company is faced with a testing and migration project or pay $$$ to maintain status quo - they will pay the $$$ because it is less risk.

Redhat - don't cut the support, just start charging for it after 12 months. Fair enough, you want free stay with the crowd, you want more stability and longer term use from our products? we're happy to oblige.

Red Hat intros 12 month only support on 'consumer' OSes (Register)

Posted Feb 3, 2003 10:50 UTC (Mon) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

I think there is definitely an opportunity here for a business to offer support for old Red Hat distributions, after the 12 month window is up.

Companies would subscribe to receive security updates to (say) 6.2, and you'd have a few techies monitoring Bugtraq/LWN/whatever, and backporting patches into 6.2. Publish the patches only. Build binary RPMs and deliver them to your subscribers through an apt-rpm/RHN-type mechanism.

Rich.