On Tuesday 26 November 2002 09:18 pm, you wrote:

...

So far, RedHat has enjoyed a monopoly due to inertia or lack of awareness on the side of campus residents. The stock installation on machines sold within campus is also Red Hat - for the primary reason that Red Hat's ISO images are available freely [anyone listening?]. It shall hopefully change now.

So these machines are sold, presumably at a price which covers cost?

Presumably. The hundred of machines sold should cover the cost of downloading the three/five ISOs from ftp.redhat.com and then burning them on to CD-ROMs. Each CDROM costing 50 US cents. And installation being a one-time job. About one-cent a machine would be the cost of CDs, and 3 hrs would be the install/configure time needed.

And you want SuSE to provide free software in ISO form?

If SuSE wants to penetrate in a place where high network bandwidth is not available and where 300 USD is the salary a more-than-average software engineer makes.

And their incentive for doing this would be WHAT?

I wonder why RedHat does it? Debian? Others? Is SuSE surviving due to not making downloadable ISOs available?

You work for free I suppose?

I more than many times cover the cost of my employment for my employer. May be investing in making the ISOs available would get SuSE more noticed in people who are going to industry tomorrow. SuSE looks like a better distro to me, so others might also carry that impression. To industry. Where corporates shall pay up - where cost is not a concern between RedHat and SuSE, but the other things that shall make a diff. Neither SuSE nor RedHat are making gcc/ls/make/wget themselves, so the cost of making this software's ISOs available at the site would surely not be a corporate burden on SuSE - given the ftp tree contains the whole distro already.

How do you expect SuSE to survive as a company and be able to provide support for the distribrution and give 3000 free ISOs to one training institute?

This discussion, in order to stay rational, shall have to discard misinterpretations and deliberate jumps to conclusions. Who needs 3000 ISOs in material if the .iso images are downloadable from the website? Students shall afford the cost to themselves if they wanted. The institute can mirror your whole site for the LAN. Institute shall pay for the packs that it buys after it is recommended. Libraries shall share the manuals. SuSE can survive very well as a company by ousting every other distro by its sheer substance and style - but is it even visible to those potential customers? Rohit -- (+91-22-5692) 2101 D2, floor-3, Chand : SE : TLSI : 9821394599@bplmobile.com ********************************************************* Disclaimer This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message and are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. ********************************************************* Visit us at http://www.mahindrabt.com