On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 11:34, James Ogley wrote:
That's where these companies make their money. Do you really think that selling boxed copies of SUSE Professional pays the salaries of however many people SUSE employ these days? No, it's the sales of SLES, especially on the Big Iron systems, it's Professional Services to (yes, you guessed it) Enterprises.
What the consumer level of distribution does is it drives forward development, the Enterprise level of distribution doesn't get updated as often, in the name of stability, but the development work needs to be done somewhere. It builds mind share. It does make some money, but nothing like the Enterprise stuff.
This is the common thinking, but how do any of us really know it's true? In all the banter I've had on both this list and the Red Hat lists, I've never seen any Linux company come out and declare what portion of their income was from boxed sets versus support contracts versus their "enterprise" distros. Not that I'm saying that you're not correct, but it's always intrigued me specifically about SuSE because they never offered ISO's for free download. By far, the most convenient method of trying SuSE is to buy a boxed set. So, I just wonder how much money they make from that. dk