Asay and Tiemann, mano a mano

“Fundamentally, Tiemann is right on the money: a simplistic
“supply and demand” view of how prices are set in a
market place completely ignores the value that Red Hat offers to
its customers. “Subscription” versus “box
price” is not simply a semantic difference – indeed,
that’s essentially labelling their customers as brand tarts
unwilling to risk CentOS / Scientific Linux, and reduces the
business decision to a simple money figure. That’s not how
business works; the difference between “cheapest” and
“best value” is huge.

“Asay also bizarrely labels Red Hat a “distant second to
Canonical” in the purity stakes. This is Canonical with the
proprietary server management, proprietary file sharing,
proprietary application store, etc.? I don’t even vaguely
understand the argument here: either Matt is badly misinformed, or
is just being very selective – the only thing I can think that Red
Hat withholds is permission for others to use its trade marks.
Which Canonical also does.”

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