On Wednesday 02 May 2007 02:00:42 am M Harris wrote:
The reason I would purchase SLED, SLES is to receive world class tiered support, printed documentation, voice support, indemnification, etc.
You are kidding yourself with the support story. This just doesn't bring enough cash. I don't see people buy support if the product runs well. Novell would starve. It's a vicious circle that I don't know an escape for. Oracle support is making nice cash, but does Oracle run well? Oh, my... Printed documentation and xROMware mean a logistics effort that cancels almost all profit that can be made selling that. Software IT companies try to make money online these days, without moving boxes. I am curious as to Ubuntu LTS sales, that actually bring money in. Ubuntu was and is always in the red. It's just some dude that happens to like this toy and spends money on it. It's not so bad for Linux actually, but it just doesn't feel sustainable. I am also curious about the number of core, heavy stuff developers that Ubuntu pays salaries to? Do they have any kernel people, glibc people on payroll, like Novell does? Wouldn't think so. However, Mr. Mark Shuttleworth is a KDE patron, so that's something. But I don't know how much this means in cold hard cash. Would be interesting. What is Novell supposed to do? Adopt a dot com billionaire willing to spend the dough? Yet, the "community" is suckered like a stupid bitch on Ubuntu ware. Novell did a number of great deeds with SUSE, like making the ISOs download-able, paying developers for the heavy stuff I mentioned above and so on. Novell practically _makes_ Gnome, and a lot of KDE too. Does Novell make this known to the community? Not so much. Do the Ubuntu crowd know about the contributions that Novell makes? Doubtly (they are all bent on the MS deal that has wiped away in a second all the rest of the good stuff). With all this worthy material to work with, the Novell marketing manages to not make good use of it. Gee, I wonder how much do those Microsoft marketing people cost? :-) Ubuntu is a packaging distro. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org