Red Hat Exchange Is Dead 88
darthcamaro writes "In 2007, Red Hat launched the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) — an appstore, if you will, of open source partner applications sold from a Red Hat website. Sounds like a good idea, right? While an appstore works well for Apple, turns out that an appstore for open source (from a Linux vendor) isn't such a good idea. 'When we came out with RHX we were hoping for more ambitious adoption but we've learned that selling third-party applications via a marketplace is challenging,' Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of corporate development said. 'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'"
The ideal would be to merge Freshmeat with Yum (Score:2, Interesting)
Would that work?
A Linux 'app store' is like a church of atheism (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Maybe... (Score:3, Interesting)
No one has ever offered a store on phones before,
Or, more generally, even just a teeny-tiny bit of opening up a platform that has been nearly universally 'closed' proved to be very popular.
Just think how much more popular it would be with users if it was fully opened up.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I think it really has to do with expectations. I have a friend who sells an app in the Android app store, and also provides it for free on his website--- both source and binary versions. Plenty of people still buy it from the app store, because that's what they're used to doing.
As compared with? (Score:4, Interesting)
I never used RHX, so this is a serious question: What did this give people that, for example, Synaptic Package Manager or even the Ubuntu Software Center doesn't?
Re:Au contraire... (Score:3, Interesting)
"It really mystifies me how a corporation can understand the concept of open source, but can't understand that in such a market distributors have 0 value."
True. But integrators can rise a high value (Red Hat should know this: they basically make a living out of being integrators).
"Open source software can't be sold as a product unto itself."
False. Open source software *licenses* can't be sold. But software? Of course software can be sold as a product by itself. In fact, it is in the closed source camp where you are unable to sell software since once you sell it it's yours no more so you are force to sell licenses instead. The company that hires me is such an example: we develop open source for a living and we certainly sell it to the customers that ask for it: "-What do you need?" "-Whatever"; then we develop, install, support the "whatever" our client needs and present a bill for the work done. Pretty simple.
"I get the impression that they still think they are selling software."
I get the impression that they still think they are selling software *licenses*.
Re:Maybe it's cuz (Score:1, Interesting)
There is the CentOS rebuild of RHEL. Sadly, the CentOS is actually better than RHEL: it includes OpenOffice by default, it doesn't split its repositories up into weird "Cluster" and "Virtualization" repositories but keeps it all together, and the "centosplus" repository has kernels that activate NTFS access and the "extras" repository has good GeoIP and other tools. I'm willing to buy RHEL licenses to pay for their kernel and packaging work, but I prefer to run CentOS.