On Fri, 12 Oct 2001, Bruce Marshall wrote:
On Friday 12 October 2001 11:58 am, THOMAS ADAM wrote:
Hello, everyone.
I have noticed a disturbing trend in recent weeks of
people begging for free
copies of our favourite distro. Is this beginning to
wear a little thin for
No...not really. The professional version of SuSE 7.3 was released at £50.....by the time that goes down to a reasonable price to buy...the next version is more or less ready to be released.
And as SuSE/Linux is GNU/GPL anyway...I say COPY COPY COPY away...
--Thomas Adam
And when SuSE goes out of business? You'll just move on to the next distro I assume.
Hmm, so lets think about this: SuSE sells it's professional edition for US$79.95. How many developer hours does that pay for? (Never mind CEO, Marketing, etc.) Like newspapers, broadcast television and colleges/universities, this is not where SuSE makes its money. (I recall the Treasurer of the Small But Lively Midwestern Liberal Arts College that I used to work for jumping up and down with glee when he finally got tuition to pay for a full 1/3 of the semester's operating budget!) SuSE makes its money through things like its firewall, its support contracts, its technical services consulting, and apparently by being a part of IBM's R&D division. It's not from distributing Linux, especially to private, individual users such as myself. If it was, that FTP site would be locked down tight. right? I think it's appropriate to spiff SuSE with a little cash now and again, but I don't think that SuSE is going to go out of business just because I miss paying for a release or two. Later, --Gregory -- "But Nat Wyeth lived in Cambridge, and in Cambridge the world has always seemed simpler, more high-minded and more amenable to reason that it proves to be when one goes out to mingle with the children of darkness." --Bernard DeVoto, "Across the Wide Missouri"