This is the common thinking, but how do any of us really know it's true? In all the banter I've had on both this list and the Red Hat lists, I've never seen any Linux company come out and declare what portion of their income was from boxed sets versus support contracts versus their "enterprise" distros. Not that I'm saying that you're not correct, but it's always intrigued me specifically about SuSE because they never offered ISO's for free download. By far, the most convenient method of trying SuSE is to buy a boxed set. So, I just wonder how much money they make from that.
I don't have any specific figures to hand, but I know that when I worked at SUSE the focus for the boxed distribution was mind share, and that professional services were coming on stream in the UK as a revenue stream, and that that had been the case in Germany for some time before. Since then, the SLES range has come out, a copy of SLES costs a lot (in the case of the S/390 version, a helluvalot) and I know that SUSE have shifted a not insignificant number of units of it. And all of them come with support contracts as well. -- James Ogley, Webmaster, Rubber Turnip james@rubberturnip.org.uk http://www.rubberturnip.org.uk Jabber: riggwelter@myjabber.net Using Free Software since 1994, running GNU/Linux (SuSE 9.0). GNOME updates for SuSE: http://www.usr-local-bin.org