Joaquin, On Wednesday 29 December 2004 10:59, Joaquin Menchaca wrote:
Scott Leighton wrote:
On Tuesday 28 December 2004 8:41 pm, Steven Pasternak wrote:
When is the release of SuSE 9.2 Personal going to happen? Also, what about the 9.2 Personal free download .iso's? -Steven
There won't be a Personal version of 9.2, only the Professional version.
Scott
That's not good. I am professionally evaluating SuSE Linux for recomendations to clients. I have to verify the quality of the solution before recomendation, and I don't want to actually buy something that is only used for testing. As it stands, if SuSE is NOT available for NON-COMMERCIAL usages, then I will not be able to evaluate it.
Huh? That makes no sense at all. SuSE is perfectly available for NON-COMMERCIAL usages, whatever exactly those are. One of the major concepts in Open Source software is that vendors and distributors cannot restrict the ways in which the open-source software is used, including redistribution. SusE Personal is (was) a stripped-down form of their distribution. It did not come under a separate license and, in fact, could, in principle, be upgraded via on-line repositories supplied by SuSE to include all the software that is bundled with the so-called Professional distribution. It was meant to lower the barriers to entry and bring new users along to the more complete releases. The Personal distribution was dropped because it was turning out to be more trouble than it was worth.
Even mainstream commercial companies like Oracle and Sun Microsystems have their products accessible for non-commercial uses. And as for Microsoft, there stuff is so accessible (as it's everywhere), and with MSDN or Partner CD kits, it's easy to try a bunch of stuff. Even Novell long ago had an ill-fated developer program, though a lot of their software wasn't available through it at the time.
Chill out. Buy the SuSE Professional distribution and perform your evaluations. If your needs can wait a month or so, you can retrieve everything from SuSE's servers (or from one of the many mirrors maintained throughout the world). Then you can do your evaluating without spending a dime.
joaquin
Randall Schulz