Hello everyone, I was tired last night, so I didn't really express the fullness of my rant, so I will go into a bit more detail... BUT FIRST: I should also note that the "why SuSE is having finacial problems" part of the rant never made it into the message, but I forgot to remove that from the subject until after I sent the message. I am sorry about that. ANYWAY: The point is, SuSE has good justification to charge $60 bucks retail for SuSE Pro (that's what it goes for on average). You are basically paying for a bunch of great books and software. However, it's absolutely insane for them to charge $50 bucks plus S&H for the upgrade then. Now, to those who still disagree with my rant here, let me give an example. Apple is releasing a minor upgrade to OS X, but I hear it actually makes many improvements to the system. This is probably about the same amount of change the average user notices between SuSE releases. They want $20 for it if you are an existing customer. Where am I going with this? While some think Apple should just give away the upgrade, at least Apple sees that existing OS X users should receive a substantial discount on OS X.1. It's also worth noting that Apple probably spent way more in development of the improvements in OS X.1 than SuSE did in improvements between SuSE 7.2 and 7.3 (after all, probably 90%-95% of the stuff in SuSE Pro was developed without SuSE providing financial support to the developer). The key thing is, upgrades are suppose to be substantially cheaper for existing customers. With the way SuSE does upgrades, after S&H, why would I pay the same price as I would for SuSE Pro, only I don't get $40 worth of manuals. Does that make sense to anybody here? Yes, I understand that SuSE needs to make money. However, on the other hand, from release to release there is often little change in the system. I'm not arguing that SuSE should drop the price of the Professional version to $11 bucks. I'm arguing that if I upgrade from SuSE 7.2 to SuSE 7.3, I shouldn't pay the same amount (or virtually the same amount) as if I had just bought SuSE Pro for the first time. See what I mean? Now, on to my point about ISO's. SuSE says they can't offer ISO's because that would cut down too much on sales. How come Mandrake can? How come RedHat can? How come even the black sheep of Linux - Caldera - can, but SuSE can't? How are their losses by offering ISO's so much more than anybody elses? How would *I* resolve this? 1.) SuSE provides their retail boxes to stores at substantially lower (wholesale) price. They should drop the price of the Professional Upgrade to around (or slightly lower than) than the wholesale price of normal Professional version. That way SuSE would still make way more profit on the Upgrade version than on the normal version, and still give their users quite a deal. Lets say the wholesale price of SuSE Professional is $30. If they sell a SuSE Pro Upgrade for $30 directly to the consumer, they make just as much as they would from the retail box that sold for $60! Actually, more correctly, they would make more from the upgrade box in the above scenario, since it cost less to produce than the full version which would be sold at wholesale for the same price. 2.) If that is not acceptable, they should at least make the Upgrade available to the reseller channel, incase any stores *want* to carry it. That way at least it wouldn't cost the same as the full version. 3.) SuSE should provide at least a one or two CD version as a downloadable ISO version. Just like every other major distribution company. -Tim -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy R. Butler Universal Networks tbutler@uninetsolutions.com ICQ #12495932 AIM: Uninettm Free/Open Source Web Tools: http://www.uninetsolutions.com Christian Portal and Search Tool: http://www.faithtree.com ============== "Christian Web Services Since 1996" ==============