[WBEL-devel] Long- Thoughts on WB maintenance (was Re: How to get the RHEL Errata?)

[Jamey Fletcher]

Imre Solti wrote:

> Nice to see that the thread I started with an innocent technical 
> question (How to get the RHEL Errata) has such a long life. :-)

> A few comments to Sebastian's email.

> 1) RH is a company with business interests.

This is true, however, RedHat is not *quite* like most publicly traded 
companies, in that many or most of the investors are aware of the 
long-term nature of this investment, and are not quite as focused on the 
what-did-you-do-for-me-THIS-quarter.

> 2) If RH the company will start bleeding serious money because of the 
> popularity of WBEL (or other similar projects) then RH will do 
> everything within the letters of the GPL (and not necessarily the 
> spirits) to make WBEL's life harder. They should because they have 
> shareholders and the management will be responsible to them.

What is more likely is that RedHat, seeing a burgeoning market, will 
look for, and find, a way to make a profit off of the middle-level 
market they're currently ignoring.

Gentoo is for the geeks who want their computer to run as fast as 
possible, and are willing to wait as long as necessary for it to compile.

Fedora is for the geeks who want it running *now*, and don't want to pay 
*anything* for it, and don't mind messing around with it to try to

RHEL is for the big company that needs repairs as fast as possible.

White Box reaches a middle layer - the operations that need something 
reasonably stable, with security updates, but either doesn't need 
hand-holding, or can't afford it.

Debian is for the political activists.

What RedHat needs to do is what many have suggested here - a package 
with no support, just access to the updates & security patches...  Even 
just the security patches would be sufficient for most.

> 3) The biggest potential problem with WBEL is that it depends on RH's 
> good intentions or the GPL's protection whichever is stronger here to 
> "provide" some sort of access to the errata's source code and this code 
> should be easy enough to compile and generate binaries for WBEL.

> IMHO, one way to ensure that RH will tolerate us is not to become "too" 
> successful. If only those people and organizations will use WBEL that 
> otherwise would never subscribe more than one box to official RHEL-RHN 
> and would just "cheat" and install unofficial copies of RHEL and move 
> binaries to these boxes by violating the RH EULA then I think WB - RH 
> relationship will be OK. I am talking about individuals (SOHO), small to 
> medium size businesses and potentially Universities. If "real" big 
> business would start to use WBEL instead of subscribing hundreds of 
> boxes to RHEL then RH will start tinkering with their errata to make 
> existence of WBEL harder or impossible.

That's not really likely.  Anything they do to make our life harder, 
necessarily makes even *more* trouble for them.  They won't do it.  The 
only people who will be installing WBEL will be the people they've 
already abandoned.  They know they're not losing anyone they haven't 
already lost.

In a way, WBEL is just another branch parallel to Fedora.  Neither is 
taking money from their actual RHEL product.  It *might* cannibalize 
some of their sales of Professional Workstation - however, they're not 
exactly pushing *that* product.

> Intentionally staying small means that organizational structure remains 
> somewhat fuzzy, no money involved (other than occasional donations) and 
> most importantly it means that WBEL remains a download only and no CD 
> distro. So, although the generating and selling (even for a nominal fee 
> only) CDs idea (saw in an other thread) is understandable from the point 
> of convenience of users, it might not be the best interest of WBEL on 
> the lung run.

At this point, *no* distro is really "big".  WBEL is not likely to ever 
reach the millions of sites installed, although it would be really neat 
if it happened.  What would happen first is that RedHat *would* see the 
possibility of serious money, and move to fill the gap.

In addition, as WBEL is GPL, there's nothing we can do to prevent 
CheapBytes from grabbing the ISOs from BitTorrent, or one of the FTP 
sites, and filling the CD gap.  And if there's enough of an installed 
base, they *WILL* do it.  Capitalism in action.

> Only a few thoughts. I think only time can tell how the RH - WB 
> relationship will work out.

I think the relationship will basically be one of RedHat evaluating the 
market demand, and deciding what to do.  In the mean time, they really 
won't do much - they have something that seems to be working for them, 
according to the reports on Slashdot today.

We're evaluating whether to go for the front-page mention on Slashdot, 
or perhaps just repeated mentions (always on topic!) in the comments, 
which should spread the load out.

Today's mention on Slashdot in the comments doesn't seem to have killed 
us - after all, I've been sitting on it for nearly 9 hours now, 
chatting, surfing, and in general watching the fun.