Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2974 mails)

[Cliff Sarginson <cliff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 02:09:36PM -0500, joe wrote:
> I wonder how many of these "must be free"  are using solely linux for

In the Linux/GNU context "free" does not mean without 
cost (for the 'nth time !).

I buy SuSE linux, since they do not allow their CD's to be
copied and sold. I use SuSE because it is reasonably
complete and it's setup is more or less sane. I don't buy it
for it's so-called 60/90 day support, since for all practical
purposes that is worthless in my experience. Until 7.0 I regarded
it's price as reasonable, considering that it came with a
fairly good book. With 7.0 marketing bullshit has taken
over with this professional/personal differentiation. I
will probably not buy anymore distributions now that SuSE
is playing Microsoft games with the software distributions.
If my needs outstrip 7.0 then I will probably begin to
use Debian.

I paid someone to burn CD's for me for Slackware, Debian and
Redhat. I once made a mistake of buying a Redhat distribution -
it was a waste of money. I also paid the same person to supply
some Free/Open/Net BSD disks.

So I do spend money...

Cliff

p.s With regard to your wondering:

I work and socialise with Solaris, HPUX, Linux, FreebSD, AIX.
The last time I used Windows was a few weeks ago on a neighbour;s
computer, her version of '98 had just decided not to run Word 97
anymore, so I re-installed MS Office for her.