Allen wrote:
On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 10:13:35AM -0500, mb1-knetdome wrote:
i'm not here to rub this in anybody's face, God knows i've been sweatin' over this and even lost some sleep. in the end however, after a direct telephone converstation with a suse.de rep, i was told that he doesn't believe my torrent is illegal, just unfortunate since he's afraid it will cost suse sales. i can see two sides to that argument -- is it loss of sales because i'm giving it away to so many or an increase in sales because those that get familiar with suse are more likely to buy it later? we could probably debate that for the rest of our lives and never come to an agreement -- but the issue at hand is whether or not it's illegal and the opinion that matters, suse's, tells me it's not.
How about you do what I do? Just buy like 5 copies of SUSE, and give THOSE away. You don't make them lose sales this way, and if I can afford it being a broke ass college student who works a total of two days a week max making almost no money, then anyone flipping burgers should be able to handle it. I have payments to make on billsand I have money going out on other things but I make time to buy SUSE. I have 7 copies here of SUSE, all legal.
<STUFF DELETED> I suppose you meant purchased rather than legal. I think many would see a bulk purchase like that as costly for them, however, it's a drop in the ocean and Linux companies don't make much in selling their distros, they make it in follow-up services where just about all computer companies make their money these days, except for the one headed by a CEO who has Kermit the frog's voice and they use extortion to $ell their permanently broken $tuff. Don't forget that recently SuSE had been contemplating going community just like RedHat with Fedora, perhaps for the same reason. I support SuSE, Mandriva (Mandrake as was) and Codeweavers by purchasing their products, hoping that it may just encourage them financially to keep producing. The distros also know that the widest availability of their products will pay dividends as people can get them for free, get to like them, spread the word and introduce them at their places of work, the return is business revenues that far outstrip private purchases. In some shops with IBM mainframes, guys who knew nothing about Linux have downloaded and installed SuSE on Zseries as their first taste of Linux, recalling one guy who came up to me with a kernel patch and asked what to do with it as he needed the functionality and there I sat at an NT box patching and building a kernel on a Zseries running SuSE with KDE, just like sitting at my PC. We had the RAF placing an order for a hardware upgrade because they needed some more oomph to expand the Linux work their were doing on the mainframe, puzzled, our salesperson asked by email what the RAF was doing with Linux and on a mainframe at that, I puffed up my chest, smiled and emailed her and all the other recipients the details and the SuSE URL so they could visit and see for themselves just what the RAF were doing with Linux on our mainframe. I'd encourage anyone to get to a local Novell Linux conference, the food is good and you come away with a sense that these guys are not only very serious and knowledgeable, but they have a terrific business sense, product portfolio and a strategy to match, it's a day you'll enjoy and remember, even the fact that their software tools on CD won't install (on 9.1 Pro at least) won't dampen the overall impact. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Keen licensed Private Pilot Retired IBM Mainframes and Sun Servers Tech Support Specialist Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux for all Computing Tasks