On Tuesday 28 August 2001 8:22 pm, Daniel Woodard wrote:
Also, the price jumped. Personal was one price, and pro was another. Pro was expensive enough so that now I skip versions. I went from 6.4 to 7.2. Before that I had 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4. I was also in a store buying 6.4 and I noticed another shopper gazing at Red Hat, and he bought SuSE when I was through with him. I'm in the store less now.
Expensive? Pro (update) £30.00UK for 7CDs and a DVD plus 3 manuals and 60 days installation support. I don't think so!
What about the middle market- not quite enterprise? I see lot's of businesses that use Windows/Exchange, but with the proper consulting, could be reliably using a Linux set-up. There, though, you're relying on the consultant to at least charge each client for one copy of SuSE per site install, even though thr consultant could buy one copy of SuSE and use it all year long for many many clients.
Perhaps that's why Caldera are moving toward 'per seat' licensing.
Also, everything has leveled- demand for high-speed, demand for hardware, etc. The phat/easy growth is over, and the Linux model is somewhat flawed because, like Napster, it fosters a "well, everything is free" mentality, when obviously, it costs somebody money to develop and produce releases.
Wrong! Linux/Open Source is not about free (i.e. I don't have to pay for this) software. As Glyn Moody puts it, "it's about what we can achieve when we suspend, even for a moment, the pursuit of personal advantage". The free software moment (GNU, Linux, sendmail, Apache, XFree86, et al) started the information revolution; not Microsoft or other organisations who adopted a closed source model has achieved anything close. M