

Open-source server appliance is "free" - Corrado
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4471547300.html

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Corrado
I think you guys are missing the point. The appliance is free and yours to
keep forever. You can even keep using the software on it for as long as you
want. The support contract gives you much more than that though. Sure, if you
have the time & experience to set up and maintain a system like this its not a
good deal. But I'd bet that you would spend far more than $3,000 in time,
energy and opportunity cost to keep it running.

With us you also get disaster recovery, software updates, & paid support and
in my experience that really makes the boss sit up and take notice. The one
friction point I always had when trying to "sell" an idea internally was they
needed someone to blame if/when things went south. I started KangarooBox to
get FOSS out into the world and to let people know that you don't have to pay
overinflated prices for crappy software.

If you can set up Redmine on your server and your boss doesn't mind paying you
to do it, great! I will be the first one in line to congratulate you and push
you forward. If not, then we can help.

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swombat
Spam... it's not free, it's loaned if you take on a $3k support contact. This
is just a poorly disguised advert for an over-expensive piece of kit.

Flagged this article.

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pmorici
I don't think it's spam. You get to keep the device if you take out the
contract. That said. I wouldn't buy this thing I'd just go get an actual wrap
board.

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gojomo
Does the fact that the submitter is the CEO/founder of the named company
change your opinion on its spaminess?

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pmorici
No, I'd venture a guess that a good portion of the articles that get submitted
to this site are from the author / owner / whatever.

The issue here is the 4 up votes that put this on the front page instead of
letting it float to the bottom of the 'New' section.

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dnewcome
Interesting idea, freebie hardware with paid support. Similar to MySql
arrangement but for hardware. It's the actual terms that just don't seem
attractive. $3k support contract on what is practically an embedded device? I
could see paying some money for support on a cluster of these to do something
interesting, like distributed data acquisition nodes maybe? But not to the
tune of 3,000 per node.

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silentbicycle
Yeah, it's "free" with a $3k support contract. Yikes!

Based on those stats (wait, only one ethernet port?), you would probably be
better off with something like a Soekris board (<http://www.soekris.com/>,
esp. a 4801 <http://www.soekris.com/net4801.htm>). They run OpenBSD quite
well...

