[WBEL-devel] Long- Thoughts on WB maintenance

[Charles Lacour]

>>>Imre Solti said:
>A few comments to Sebastian's email.
>1) RH is a company with business interests.
>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.
>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.

I´m going to come to Red Hat´s defense here.

They have been publishing their version of Linux for 8 years or more, and 
every one of their contributions has been GPL´d. 

You raise the point of what they might do if they ¨start bleeding serious 
money¨. That can´t really happen -- The only thing that might happen is that 
a log of people might use WBEL, and that would simply tell Red Hat that a 
no/low cost ¨update only¨ version of RHEL is what a lot of people want.

My company has no issue at all with paying $350 a year for an RHN-only ES 
license (that being all we need) for our servers. Where it has an issue (and 
it´s me as much as anybody who is concerned about it) is what to do for cases 
like:
* unimportant boxes (X-stations for the operators to monitor stuff)
* ad-hoc boxes (things where we find out we need it and need to have it in 
place and working in an hour (This actually happened in real life, as a 
matter of fact))
* desktop installations.

$350 per box is very workable for 30-40 servers for the entire company. $350 
per box (per year!) for 2000 desktops is WAY too expensive.

We´re not going to pay that $350 no matter what. Maybe we won´t switch to 
Linux on the desktop, maybe we´ll go with some other version, maybe we´ll go 
with WBEL. Regardless, Red Hat´s not out any money, because we were never 
going to make that purchase to begin with.

I think Red Hat got a little greedy ($350 for RHN only is pretty steep), but 
the main thing they did is say that "we want out" of the low-cost, low-income 
part of the market. (RHN-only accounts, and no-support-at-all installations, 
basically.)

>From everything I've read in the EULA, and the COPYING files, Red Hat doesn't 
want to be in the situation where somebody installed the RHEL, didn't buy 
support for it, and is now expecting Red Hat to help them out, because "It 
says right there, this is Red Hat Linux. Don't you back up your own 
product?!?" (From the strenuousness of their attitude on this subject, I 
suspect this has happened to them several times.)

They understand the GPL, and almost everything they have ever produced has 
been GPL'd, so I think it very unlikely they're going to have serious issues 
with somebody who does what John is doing with Whitebox Linux.

I was speaking with one of their sales reps about the changes. I don't think 
he entirely gets the open-source concept, but Red Hat's management obviously 
does, and they're the same ones that have been in charge for several years. 
He mentioned that they didn't have the engineering staff to handle both EL 
and the standard RH Linux, and that was a large part of why they dropped it.

I think they decided to concentrate on the high-margin stuff, where they could 
easily justify hiring another engineer any time they needed one, because each 
engineer was costing them $75,000 (to pick a number out of thin air), but 
bringing in $400,000 in revenue. 

If they're dealing with lots of "little people", the ones to whom $350 a year 
is a big deal, they're spending $75,000 for maybe $80,000 worth of revenue. 
(And maybe less than $75,000, which means the more they "expand", the faster 
they go broke.)

My point with all this is that WBEL (and any similar product) is not a threat 
to them. It's a portion of the market they decided they wanted to get out of. 
If WBEL is wildly successful, and Red Hat sees an opportunity there, all they 
have to do is start allowing people to install it wherever they want (but 
still having to pay to get support), and WBEL is out of "business".

It's my opinion that that is exactly what they SHOULD have done. Have a more 
reasonable cost for RHN, no cost at all if you are willing to do all the work 
of figuring out what to upgrade when, and then the higher-priced stuff for 
those who really need the higher-level support.

What I'm really worried about is that people will go to something like SUSE 
for the low-end stuff, and then decide that sense they're running SUSE on the 
low-end, they should go ahead and run it on the high-end, too.

Two or three years down the road, Red Hat could be seeing their enterprise 
business going away, simply because they can't cover the full range of 
people's needs.

Whitebox Linux would actually HELP that, because then companies could say to 
themselves "it's really the same thing -- what my people know on their 
desktops will work just the same on the server", and they'll happily keep 
using WBEL for free on desktops, and similar "unimportant" boxes, and buying 
RHEL for their important machines.

 
>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.

I covered most of my reasons why I think this is incorrect above.

If you're arguing what I think you are -- that we should deliberately do a 
poor job so that WBEL won't get used "too much" -- I disagree strongly.

Simply by re-entering the portion of the market they've currently abandoned 
(the "put it anywhere for free but you get no support" part) Red Hat can make 
WBEL pointless at any time. I guarantee my boss would rather run Red Hat than 
Whitebox any day of the week, and would prefer it strongly enough that he'd 
be willing to pay money for it. (Although if it's going to be for 2000 
desktops, the price per box has got to come WAY down from what they're asking 
now.)

John (and everybody else who's contributing) is doing this precisely because 
Red Hat doesn't want to. Most of us would be much happier if this had never 
been necessary, and if the existence of WBEL rubs Red Hat's nose in the fact 
that they screwed up in this area, wonderful.

The idea that Red Hat is going to get protective of "their" code is extremely 
unlikely. They've demonstrated time and time again that they understand 
open-source, the GPL, etc.

It's probably not possible for them to put out a version of Linux that 
couldn't be "whiteboxed". Even if it were possible, it would be suicide, 
because the open source community would shun them for violating the rules. 
Since the open-source community does 85-90% of the work in a Red Hat 
distribution, Red Hat would incur hugely increased costs if they tried it.