The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

Posted Apr 2, 2003 17:17 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7 by rjamestaylor
Parent article: The end for Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7

First, I am betting that the numbers of 6.2 machines is less than 10% of the install base (if they follow what 5.2 numbers where this time in the life-cycle).

Second, very very very few of those people are paying Red Hat to spend engineering time on 6.2 or 7. Not enough to cover the cost of an engineer.

So it is basic economics at work. Not enough people pay, no one gets updates because to do the updates would not break at least even or the mythical 10%.

The costs involved would be:
Keeping a build machine active/working with 6.2
Keeping 4 QA machines active/working with 6.2
[subtract these 5 machines from room available for 7.1/7.2/7.3/8.0/9/2.1
etc machines.]

Keeping an engineer and 1-2 QA people concentrating on 6.2 versus newer stuff. The reason you keep them on legacy.. is that you quickly forget all the quirks of the old system that were either fixed, dropped, or re-invented in a later version.

There are the additional overhead costs for this.. and Red Hat is seeing most of the people download the code for free... so its all negative revenue.

So people using Linux are going to learn the hard lesson of Free Software. The initial costs are much lower, but if you want maintenance.. you will have to pay for it because the companies are not getting the 80% premiums that closed source software companies get to do the maintenance for free.

By the way, there are private consultant companies like owlriver.com that you can always pay for maintenance of 6.2 later on.. but you aren't going to get it for free.