On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 05:19:32PM +1000, Pidgorny, Slav (GEUS) wrote:
At any rate, your theory about sufficiency of single-image support in the enterprise is absurd.
you seem to have missed his point entirely. he wasn't saying that RH support is bad, or that you can pay for support on just a single machine and indirectly get support for all your machines, just duplicate the problem on that. he was saying that the fact you can't do that - that RH want you to pay for ALL of the machines you have RHEL installed on - is proof that you're paying for a license, not just for the support.
I don't think there's much need to convince - this is self-evident: Red hat, IBM, Oracle and hundreds of other companies created a lot of capital (and resulting wealth) on Linux, ad helped many others, including (horrors!) Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse who advised on and underwrote Red Hat's IPO. All that is essentially capitalist.
your argument is that because a parasite wasp's larvae fattened themselves on a spider, the spider is essentially a wasp. the big flaw with your assertion is that a spider is not a wasp, it's a spider. and free software is not at all capitalist, it is inherently socialist. you couldn't find a better example of socialism in action - it's ALL about the people owning the means of production (the software). capitalists can use and even exploit free software but even with all of the valuable and worthwhile contributions that some of them (IBM and RH and Oracle and others, but not Goldman Sachs and their ilk) have made, they're still not essential to the process of developing and distributing free software. socialist free software worked well enough before it became fashionable for large capitalist companies to join in, and it would still work well even if they all decided to quit. the one thing that IS essential is the communitarian spirit of giving and sharing - and that's socialism. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>