On Sunday, April 02, 2006 @ 4:38 PM, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Sun, 2006-04-02 at 16:14 -0500, Greg Wallace wrote:
Though the packaging is also valuable, right? SuSE, Red Hat, etc. tie everything together in their distro. There's value in that above and beyond the value of the individual open source components therein, right?
Depends on what you mean by packaging. If you mean the work done to package up the software into rpms, then yes, certainly. There is a lot of work done to incorporate patches, to see to it that things work together nicely. There is also a security team who perform audits on critical software, and they have been known to locate security problems which were unpatched in the upstream project
It's a lot of work and obviously this is a value-add compared to downloading the individual tar.gz packages from the projects
But if you're talking about the CDs as opposed to downloadable iso images, or downloading the rpms from our web site (or a mirror) individually, then the value-add is more a matter of taste. It's nice to have the DVD around, especially when you want to install on someone else's machine
I think the topic of discussion was between buying the software as opposed to downloading the rpms/ISO images for free. Then the main value add is the support you get when you buy it
Anders: I was talking about the former, and I think that's the key to why it is worth paying for the boxed set. You're making a contribution to the effort that's being made in that area. If you are unhappy with a distro, send your money to another distro. On the other hand, if the distro makes some or all of their product available for free via download, and what's offered suits your needs, then that's fine too. Greg Wallace