On Wednesday 06 April 2005 12:29, Mark Crean wrote:
Fergus Wilde wrote: [snip]
Not illegal, but a bit cheap if you come from a hard currency country and have a job, I'd say. Red Hat's recent good financial results are said in the press to be a result of their subscription-based updates, so they have steady revenue. I'd like to see Novell continue to put SuSE out with free updates and one-off purchases. I also don't want to see the consumer / home product hived off like Fedora. Now I know I'm comparing apples and oranges to a degree in this, but it seems to me to be important that Novell do shift enough units and thus stay interested in keeping SuSE what it is.
[snip]
Well, quite a lot of people may well be a little reluctant to pay up for SuSe 9.3 if this early review is to be believed. It says that multimedia functionality has been crippled to the point that if you want to play mp3s and the like, except through realplayer, you will have to install not only recompiled apps like amarok but also recompile kde-multimedia and other deep-level stuff. Sounds a complete nightmare, not least because recompling fundamental things will make updating that much more complicated. Hope it's not true, or that packman comes to the rescue. Otherwise, this could make SuSE very hard for some of us. See
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=3851
:)
Fish
Bleh, yes, that sounds frustrating. But perhaps a reason for not upgrading rather than trying to do so in a cut-price way. Since SuSE folks clearly know how to arrange multimedia, we can only assume it's perceived or real threat of some kind of legal action, which again depends largely from US legislation and legal precedent. Sitting in the UK, one can only urge US readers to push against this kind of corporate bullying by the film & music industries. I hate realplayer, I have to say ... -- Fergus Wilde Chetham's Library Long Millgate Manchester M3 1SB Tel: +44 161 834 7961 Fax: +44 161 839 5797 http://www.chethams.org.uk