Robert Cunningham wrote:

I have been following this thread for a while and have but one thing to say. As a "professional" I have bought every version of SuSE since 7.0 out of my own pocket , mainly because I wish to support all the good work I think they are doing. At "work " I have to contend with about 50 M$ boxes even though we are a university . M$ has never given us a free evaluation copy of any of there OS's , servers or office products. Do you recommend their products ? Here in the US you can claim it as a work expense on your taxes, and it won't cost you anything. So why all the whining because it takes a little effort to download? BoB C

Hi Robert. This is very excellent feedback. Thanks. Funny thing you mention the expense thing. :-) I went out and purchased it just 30 mins. ago as I want to really get into it. And yes, I do think it can be a tax write off. As for Microsoft, they do have some products that are evals., like SQL Server 2000 and Windows 2003. The later in fact has never expired, despite being over 150 days. :-) Through my work, they have MSDN, and I can use almost ANY Microsoft product. Though this is a tad expensive, last I checked, Microsoft did have discounts for students for MSDN. There's also a business partner, where businesses (or people) can pay a reasonable price and get a whole scoop of software (literally thousands of dollars off the retail). I'm not saying Microsoft is any blessing. They purposefully gimp their products, so that they can sell much higher priced products, e.g. Exchange 16GB limitation or Win2k/XP 10 user max. connection. This is why I think Linux in general, especially with SAMBA 3.0, is a serious alternative to Windows for Windows oriented solutions. Microsoft is still quite comfortable (arrogant?) with their pricing scheme. Combined with the product activation non-sense, I am really highly motivated find alternatives where Linux can plug into a system, instead of a typical Windows solution that finanicial companies are so apt to purchase. Though, this is a personal endeavor, in the mean time I have to support what company's have invested in already. -- joaquin