On 21-Sep-05, Daniel Bertolo wrote:
Am Mi 21.09.2005 11:50 schrieb IntegraGen <suse-ml@integragen.com>:
one important thing : suse is released more or less every 6 months if i buy a commercial dvd player soft, i don't want to pay for it every 6 month, i prefer to buy a rpm once once and install it on my new system when i reinstall it.
You are right no that one. I think, selling a DVD player seperately would satisfy everyone:
- SUSE does not include commercial products (except for free ones: Adobe Reader etc). - The price for the boxed version does not increase. - My license works with the next version of SUSE Linux, too.
What Novell would have to do:
- Compile a binary RPM from the OEM version of either LinDVD or PowerDVD for every release. - Sell it online
Sell serial numbers online. And - serial numbers work until next major release (or one more) - older versions will still be compiled and provided for some time on newer boxes This is similar to the VMWare model. But older versions should still be provided for newer Linux releases for some time (maybe a few years). The problems are: - The additional maintenance for the older versions comes at a price (although it should be less than for VMWare, since a DVD player is much less dependend on hard- and software-changes). - As with other software products, the customer cannot choose as freely when he wants to upgrade and pay the price for upgrading the DVD Player software as well. If you need to upgrade your system for some other reason (e.g. you want/need some new software that does not run on your old system, or you need/want a critical bugfix that is not available for your version of Linux), at some point you have to pay the price to upgrade the DVD Player software as well. So this model does not scale to more than one or maybe two widely used software packages. You have to think of it as "added cost for a new computer system". Regards, -- Olaf Dabrunz (od/odabrunz), SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Nürnberg