On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 11:50:36AM -0800, Michael Hasenstein wrote:
Christopher Mahmood wrote:
And it's not going to help that you're pissed off about me for whatever unkown reason. COnsulting was just two people. Testing - what testing? No hw-testing or suse linux 7.1 testing took place here. Oh well, a little - but 80% of that by ME (SL7.1 beta tests). There's no documentation developed in this office whatsoever. I don't know what you're trying to do here.
I think this is called "customer feedback". You will get rational, irrational, logical, illogical reactions to Suse's great PR coup... who stitched you up for this task .. lol. I will tell you what I think. A lot of people like Linux because it is fresh, interesting, and they feel part of it's development. They feel in some way that they own it in a way you can never own a Microsoft product. It is hard to get cuddly with Windows 98 or NT. That is because nothing will eve get done about it. It will always be like a child that starts crying for no reason, and you can do nothing to stop it except feed it candy (i.e. reboot, re-install or if in doubt re-format the hard disk). Linux for a personal user is very personal, it can be weaned, cajoled, nurtured in equal measure and it is changing under the users eyes, not in some vault in Redmond. On the other hand, Linux is making a corporate impact. it is not very clear where that will lead. Suse/Redhat want in there, where the real money is. These two things, personal users/corporate users are in a sort of conflict..or apparently so...but consider the Linux system I am using this on, with an Apache server running, a decent email system, no blue-screens etc. etc. is to all intents and purposes the same system that a big corporate user might install, to do much the same things ! And at the same software cost. This cohesion is the strength of Open O/S's. But Suse would be well advised to not shut the door on one set, the relatively low-profit set, and only concentrate on the other, supposedly high-profit set. Remember there are a number of Linux distributions, including Debian, which can do the job as well, if not better. And on the server side Linux has a *very* long way to go before it can compete in terms of performance and stability with FreeBSDi for example. Suse needs to remember, piss people off enough and they will choose *and* recommend something else. Unix itself was not sprung on the world as a big-deal O/S, it gained ground through use in Universities, and individuals who learnt about it. This newsgroup is a sort of University .. Linux needs these kinds of "graduates". Many people on this list are not hobbyists (nothing critical meant by that term btw), they are people working in the IT industry with quite possibly a lot of direct or indirect influence over the technical environment they work in. Suse, be aware of your customers. It is not the end of the world that you have got rid of some of your staff, it isn't very pleasant news either. But what a lot of people have done today is to ask questions about what it means. They take it very personally. Whether they are all right or all wrong is not the point. They are concerned. End of this topic, at least for me. Cliff