On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 10:59:25AM -0500, David Krider wrote: > > I find it so acceptable that I'm going to buy it today. (I'm going to > try to get my company to buy it, but I will if I have to.) I have said > this before, but I think Red Hat ought to be doing the same thing. It's > an easy way to be reimbursed for the work of integrating their product. > Obviously, the GPL makes some conditions on them, and they offer the > ability to download the whole distro, but at about 7 or 8 GB (including > source), that's pretty inconvenient. To me, it's an easy decision to > spend $40 (basic) or $60 (pro w/o manuals) or $80 (pro) for the boxed > sets, even just to try. I am considering it, but I have until the end of the year to have an upgrade/ migration path. I am going to give RH a chance to perhaps revise their plan. I think that it is not their intention to alienate all us small and semi-able users, leaving us to big support fees or annual and thinly supported upgrades. Perhaps they overlooked the middle ground. Perhaps it's a calculated loss. I don't know at this point, but I'm going to hold by breath for a little while before I start the painful migration to another distro. > > I've never used SuSe, so maybe it's as good or better than RHL, but > > I'm comfortable with RHL and I'd like to stick with it... > > I have. Ages ago, I bought 6.2. It was too... German for my taste. (Even > now, the mailing list page at SuSE's site has a header that reads > "mailinglisten.") (And not that I have anything against German; I took 3 > years. It's just that I don't want to see any German docs.) I just tried > 8.1, and I have to say it was a major disappointment. The install was > really borked on my dual-Athlon SCSI system. Even after I managed to get > it installed, I had to give it some strange kernel parameter so that it > would boot. But they did offer packages to install the latest X, KDE, > and Gnome 2 on 8.1... But I blew up my machine. (I'm sure it was PEBCAK.) "PEBCAK"? That's a new one on me. What's it mean? > Red Hat -- from whom I've never bought a boxed set over > 5 years -- should take note that I am willing to spend $80 of my money > to *try* SuSE -- even in the face of disappointing experiences with them > -- because I want a stable consumer Linux distro with two years of updates. And I think this is something that they are learning now. I have bought boxed sets for most of the RHL systems I've put on, but many haven't (which was their choice, I'm not criticizing). As such, it may be hard for RHL to guage what the market will bear happily. After all, if I'm selling all Widgits I can make for $50 and everyone is happily buying them, I really wouldn't know that 95% of them would be just fine paying $75 for them and the other 5% will be happy to get a lesser one at $35... Maybe this discussion will give them more feedback than they have previously had and they will yet adopt a SuSe like approach (drop the ISO from the FTP site, allow FTP install or buy the CDs). Perhaps they could also offer subscription to a special redhat-watch-list that you only get put onto when you buy a boxed set. Maybe have the $40 set that comes on CD and only the $80 comes with the updates-list subscription and RHLx (the free one) might become more like rawhide. Maybe $80 for one with subscription and then $40 for each machine the set is used on -- using the honor system for the additional machines. I'd do that. Heck, that's why I have bought some boxed sets that I never ended up using: to give RH some revenue. It's quite possible that RH found themselves in a budget situation where they had to decide to support with less quality or raise pricing. ...and given the two, they didn't want to sacrifice quality so they had to go for more $$ somehow. Everyone can form their own opinion, but for myself I will not ascribe to maliciousness that which can be attributed to a poor decision. I don't know, I'm not marketing person. I'm glad I don't have to decide what to offer, that would be worse than deciding which distro to run, IMO. -Michael -- A billion seconds ago Harry Truman was president. A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ. A billion hours ago man had not yet walked on earth. A billion dollars ago was late yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Treasury.
