You could acknowledge the bandwidth limits and I think people are smart enough to realize that even 3000 paying customers can't all try to download 7 CDs worth of software at once. So, I'm willing to bet that even paying customers would be willing to participate in a lottery system whereby those 3000+ people are allowed on the servers at a reasonable rate. Depending on the number of people that actually sign up and the number of people the site can reasonably sustain simultaneously, you divide up the load. You do something like give people 72 hour windows in which to access the site and download the iso's. These windows would be maybe in a 2-week period prior to the release in stores, and your time slot would be determined by a lottery system. If SuSE told me I could download SuSE 8.1 Pro sometime betwen October 14-28, and that my actual window would be determined randomly in order to balance the load, then I would be willing to pay (a reduced) price for this privilege, probably something like $40. I don't know what the bandwidth and management of such a system would cost, but I would think the profit margins would be better than on physical packages of CDs and manuals. Something to think about. In my example, I'm also imagining that the release date in stores would be Oct 29 or later, so that one incentive to sign up for this "Insiders" program would be to be the first on the block with the latest SuSE distro. I'm not sure why this would even be necessary though, as I bet there are enough SuSE nuts out there who would host mirrors for free and you could balance the load by just distributing it REALLY widely. Maybe not... Yours, Brian. I proudly use SuSE Gnu/Linux 8.0 Professional. Kernel version 2.4.18-4GB Current Linux uptime: 9 days 19 hours 07 minutes. Christopher Mahmood wrote:
It sounds good but what happens when we have 3000 people pay, just as a guess, $40 dollars for "priority access"? Of course, all 3000 of those people better be able to download in a reasonable amount of time that day. Afterall, this is the service they paid for and should get. At 4.5 GB per user times three thousand...that's 13TB in 24 hours roughly. The last anonymous ftp record I've heard of was Walnut Creek in 1999: 1.39TB in 24 hours with a gigabit connection. I'd be surprised if this hasn't been broken but you get the idea.