On Wednesday 29 December 2004 10:59 am, 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.
I think you misunderstand the packaging. First of all, if you are professionally evaluating SuSE for clients, you really should be looking at the Professional package anyways, the Personal was way too stripped down to be good for evaluating IMHO. Second of all, the packageing (personal vs professional) has absolutely nothing to do with Commercial vs non-commercial use. Both packages are largely GPL (not sure about some of the SuSE added stuff). Lastly, SuSE's decision to drop the personal in 9.2 was a simple business decision. Probably a good one too. Way too many people were freaked out and disappointed with personal when they realized all the stuff that it did not include.
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.
Don't know what we mean with your commercial vs non-commercial comments. Special deals for 'non-commercial' use isn't an entitlement, it's simply a marketing option that companies can choose to use but they certainly aren't required to. I think you are on a wrong track here, either simply buy the professional package ($90 and well worth it just for the manuals and media), or download the eval version on Novell's site, or wait a month or so for the ISO's to show up on Novell's site and you can do it entirely for free. Scott -- POPFile, the OpenSource EMail Classifier http://popfile.sourceforge.net/ Linux 2.6.8-24.10-default x86_64