[Beowulf] Redmond is at it, again

[Joe Landman]

On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 11:13, Roger L. Smith wrote:

> Part of this reluctance is because I'm sure if I have problems with my
> commercial compilers or other commercial software that I run, they're not
> going to want to give me support if I'm running some distro that they've
> never heard of.
> 
> I'm willing to spend a little money to get the software, but not the rates
> that they're demanding.

This actually begs an immediate and important question.  I had a
discussion about this offline with RGB a while ago, but I think it might
be generally relevant.

What (if anything) are you (the end user) willing to pay for cluster os,
and applications?  If you are spending $100kUSD on the hardware, what
should be the cost of any/all software (OS, apps, support, ...).

I ask this for a number of reasons, not the least of which is attempting
to figure out what pricing model (if any) makes sense for our offerings
and services.  I am reluctant to charge acquisition fees for open source
software, though others happily do so (after rebranding it), and talk
about "their" applications.  I am not so reluctant to charge for support
(it costs money to pay the developers to fix the problems, and we are
not at a point where we can be quite a philanthropic as MSFT).

I have some ideas, but I would rather hear thoughts from the group on
this.  What model would you be satisfied with?  

Joe



-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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