I don't think anyone wants SuSE to stand still. But many home-users are what made SuSE great. (I introduced SuSE in my company because it's the distro of my choice). Including reiserfs and other stuff is great. Offering a seperate version of SuSE with vmware license is also great, provided offcourse that we can still choose the vmware-less version. But splitting the distro up into two parts and almost dubbling the price, also for home-power-users is , I think a very bad move for an Open Source company, selling an GPL based OS. The last thing I would want is for any Linux company to begin acting like M$... ----------------------------------------------------------- Once again you seem not to understand what the goal was. People on the list suddenly had this HUGE interest in VMware as soon as Michael said, "Professional comes with VMware license". There is also many users on here who buy every single release of SuSE. Add 1 and 1 together and get 2. SuSE users may want a bundled deal. SuSE users still want every SuSE release and stay up to date. They also want VMware. Combine the two and you have what I described as SuSE Expert. Hence, this is why SuSE may want to look into this. Maybe this is a potential product scheme. Is it complicating things? Yes, but I am sure IBM has way more complicated contracts =) And yes you have to keep track but maybe it is worth it. You certainely will raise a lot of eye brows and gain users. I said twice that details have to be worked out to make this financially probable. Maybe the 100 dollar target is way off. Then you made a comment that VMware can just easily sell their licenses themselves. Oh if business was so easy. If that were true we wouldn't have a thread of 200 emails about how SuSE creates now two versions. Apparently software doesn't sell itself so easy. Also I may like to point out that Microsoft didn't get to where they are by selling Windows on the shelves all by itself. They bundled it with everything they could possibly bundle it with. When I explained the SuSE Expert version and put the price target to 100 dollars and said there was a SuSE+VMware deal I meant that SuSE bundles their product and then channels some of the profits back to VMware. Of course they can't sell a VMware license and not pay VMware. I am pretty certain this will sell more licenses of VMware than VMware could possibly ever sell by themselves for the price of 299. America is the land of bundles it seems. You can't walk a block without seeing some bundled deal. McDonalds and Britney Spears, George Foreman and grills, get a hub and two nics, SuSE and VMware, Linux und Musik (remember that one? =), .... And people buy this bundled stuff. Time seems to have proven that. I think the essential question is: Do you want SuSE to remain forever where they are, selling a single Linux product, or go out there enthusiastically and make some serious business with people offering all kinds of product ranges? If it was me I would want to evolve into some strong business machine. I guess I have another fact to prove my theory. SuSE now comes with Reiserfs. There seems to be no money involved?! But people seem to love the opportunity to use this file system and I bet simply by including it it is an advantage point to keep a SuSE user a SuSE user and not have him go to some other distro. hence there is money involved. Every single reason which keep a user a SuSe user means money for SuSE. VMware may be such a reason. Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with VMware in any way and have never used VMware. mk ______________________________________________________ Get Your FREE FlashMail Address now at http://www.flashmail.com It's Free, Easy, & Fun !!! -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq