* Haralambos Geortgilakis (haralambos@ihug.co.nz) [020217 13:31]: ->The Distro's of Tux making the most $$$$ are the same distros that issue ->non-crippled iso'z! Untrue. Mandrake and Redhat have coffers of money that have been supplied by going public and raising capitol by issuing stock. SuSE is still private so they raise capitol by getting investors such as IBM, Intel and Compaq to name a few. Sun will most likely invest in them as well because SuSE has the most complete Ultrasparc and Sparc distribution out there today. Never confuse private investments with going broke or not succeeding. And PLEASE do not bring up the Oakland office as an example of them failing. No one that didn't work for SuSE really knows what that deal was about. I *do* and I can say that the failure with the Oakland office had *NOTHING* to do with whether or not they issued .iso's. I believe Corel distributed fully functional iso's as did Progeny and Stormix and many other truely failed distributions. In case you didn't know it SuSE works on very, very high profile deals with IBM such as the install of an S/390 mainframe at the NASQ and Telia.net. They are doing quite well. Just because they have a new CEO and CTO doesn't mean they are failing. You really don't know what happened in these cases..nor does the public media. ->Now, would all the puritans pay attention to this fact & one Logical ->consequence from it? I'm not sure what this means?! The puritan Linux geeks think everything should be free or at such a low cost as to drive everything back to a hippie commune type way of doing things. Let me tell anyone who cares to listen. Big Business *doesn't* respond well to this type of thing. It's only since Linux has gone sort of corp. that they are buying into it. Corp's pay tons of money for useless crap which they think will give peace of mind. For Linux to stay in developement..true inventive development it needs Corporations to back it and Goverenments as well. Do you really think that a Peace, Love and Linux really sways Governments..hell no. It's just a cut marketing ploy. They want speed, security and peace of mind that they are not wasting their time and also that they are not leaving themselves open to attack by using crapware. Why do you think the U.S. Government has been moving away from Microsoft accept for the desktop over the last few years. ->SuSE is pursuing a business strategy that is failing them = *reality ->cheque* Reality is how people percieve it to be..and it's not always the way it seems. If one doesn't have all the facts reality can look an aweful lot like the hope that Steve Ballmer will ever have real hair again. *grin* Cheers! -----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====----- Ben Rosenberg mailto:ben@whack.org -----=====-----=====-----=====-----=====----- "I've never been quarantined. But the more I look around the more I think it might not be a bad thing." -JC