I think most of us are already buying the product. Most of us are not d/l'ing freebie versions. Certainly not those of us who are using it commercially. If the price becomes something in the order of Windows, then I suspect that Linux (except for servers) will disappear. --dm At 20:47 08/28/2001 +0000, Martin Webster wrote:
On Tuesday 28 August 2001 6:44 pm, Steven Hatfield wrote:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/28/1422230mode=thread http://www.suse.com/us/suse/news/PressReleases/hohndel.html
It appears that SuSE is in trouble. Anyone from SuSE care to comment?
It's true that SuSE has been downsizing over the past 12 months or so. But this is essentially a 10% reduction in administrative staff; I don't see Dyroff's departure is necessarily anything to do with their restructuring programme though.
SuSE is arguably the World's most popular distribution today. However, SuSE has been more successful in the retail sector and is very popular as a workstation solution. For SuSE to maintain its success they need to make inroads in the corporate sector, i.e. enterprise computing. No doubt there will be new developments in the service area in the near future. That's why I'm not that surprised to see their finance director taking the helm.
In general, I think that the Linux/Open Source community is going to see some change in the next twelve months (particularly with Apple MacOS X for the PPC). How long can companies continue providing free (i.e. no charge) software vis-a-vis free (i.e. at liberty) Linux distributions? I think the time has come for us to buy our favorite distro (or rather the media, handbook, and support that comes with it) to help secure its future.
M