Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

Firstly, Paint.Net is an awesome program. Thank you.

I don't have a problem with the author wanting to charge for it as it is his software afterall, but I really wish more software vendors would follow Redhat's model of charging for the stable and supported version of their software, and giving away the bleeding edge 'Fedora' version for free.

As a techie, I love getting my hands on the new and most innovative stuff; I'm okay with breakage.

As an IT manager, I just want the stuff to work and be stable, with well planned upgrades.

I'm not sure where software authors got the idea that charging for their newest and buggiest features was a good idea. When I'm buying software, I am buying robustness and stability. I just want it work.

View on HN

If redhat charges for stability, then won't they make the free stuff as little tested as possible.

I won't pay for redhat style software at all. It's based on locking people with fud.

RHEL is a subscription for their support, if you don't need it then run CentOS - it is as rock solid if not more.

If it's Rock solid, what support do I need? Besides if they are selling support, they are not selling the software as a product. Paint.net is a product and not some support subscription.

here you go: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-d...

Paint.NET via Windows Store has one major advantage: automatic updates. Besides it's still is a free software and it's not a subscription - as far I understood it's just one time payment. I wouldn't mind paying for that if I used Windows.

The bigger issue is 30% MS tax:

> And you can still send a donation if that’s your preferred way of providing financial support. This is actually more effective because Microsoft does take a 30% cut of every transaction that goes through their Store.

The release cadence for Fedora is much higher. It uses newer everything than the Redhat releases. Fedora is buggier.

>> I won't pay for redhat style software at all.

Will you pay for software? Or do you write and build all of your software yourself? If I ran my business on Centos, I would consider buying Redhat subscriptions once I got to a certain scale. Depending on your business, you might need to have vendor warrantied and supported software for compliance with your insurance and industry regulations, for example.

Open source and free software is all fine and well when you are tinkering with in your bedroom, or at a small startup, or indeed when doing proof of concept or small projects, but when your operations start to scale up and you are looking at resource allocation and want to make the best use of your own resources, having support contracts often makes loads of sense.

A friend of mine work in the Aerospace industry and they where running to some weird bugs with their Java application when they upgraded their Redhat servers. It ended up being some weird kernel thing and Redhat sorted it within a few days. It sure beat them hiring their own kernel dev.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com