[CS-FSLUG] Sydney Morning Herald: Cuba to Dump Windows for Linux

[David Aikema]

On 5/20/05, Don Parris <evangelinux at thefreelyproject.org> wrote:
> A lot of the guys on the SUSE lists buy the boxed edition *just* to support
> the programmers.  And when people start asking about the gratis download
> sites, the guys usually suggest buying the boxed set.  Many people recognize
> the value of libre software, and are willing to help support the
> programmers.  

Why buy a boxed set?  Basically you get to wait longer, pay more
(packaging/shipping), have more waste generated (environmental
stewardship), and often the only extra you get over the download
version is perhaps a few printed booklets which, if you're like me,
you'll probably never end up looking at.

The combination of the above is basically why I decided to opt for a
MandrakeClub membership instead of buying a boxed set.  Why I didn't
renew my membership: only bittorrent access to the distro with
really-really poor seeding (it took me a couple of days to download my
last Mandrake release), and I'm actually now using Fedora.

> An awful lot of people are merely cheapskates.

And this is the same reason that communism has been shown a failure...
people are far from perfect.

> However, sharing a copy won't hurt a thing.

If this person freely shares with everyone, I would expect to sell
significantly less copies of my book.  Any purchases would be entirely
dependent on the purchaser's goodwill... essentially a donation rather
than a purchase.

> another book.  No incentive, no reason to continue.  I'm willing to give you
> some incentive for your continued development.

You may be, but, as you admitted earlier, a lot of people are cheapskates.

> I said previously that a
> number of people are cheapskates.  I'm seeing how true that is with 2.0.
> PitP 1.0 has been downloaded 10x more than 2.0 has been purchased this
> month.

Perhaps PitP 1.0 was enough to saturate the market for this sort of
book?  Alternatively, (I have no idea what you're charging) perhaps
people aren't willing to pay the requested amount for this book, but
would be willing to pay a smaller amount.

If something is freely available I'm a lot more likely to download it,
even if it's only of mild interest, and file it away for later reading
(and I may never end up getting around to doing that).  Or I might
download it and just read the first few pages, and then discard it.  
A preview that may be available for a pay-for version might indeed
fulfill this purpose.

> need to address the problems involved.  I do not think the current mode of
> thinking will get us there without sacrificing too much freedom.

I happen to share your misgivings about much of the direction that
intellectual property law is taking.

> > > Mandriva,
> >
> > Mandriva seems to surviving, although at least some of this must be
> > attributed to the club that they're running.  There aren't really that
> > many benefits to a standard membership though, and I'm not sure how
> > well the community would support multiple clubs of this sort.
> >
> 
> I used Mandrake 8.0, which is about when they started the Mandrake club.  I
> did not buy into it because of my budget.  I really liked their program
> where you pay, say $200, and get two upgrades on top of the initial distro
> purchase.  I don't know how profitable that is.  They also went through
> bankruptcy court, if I'm not mistaken.  It's been a touch road.

>From what I understand, their restructuring was successful and they're
now making money.  I think that they claimed that the reason that they
had to enter into bankruptcy protection was that the CEO they had
brought in had thrown them into too many different markets (I think
that they were working on some e-education software or something).

> Novell's stock apparently soared fairly high, and has dropped off a bit
> over the last year. However, it is climbing slowly.  Not sure what kind of
> indicator that is.  SUSE's pricing is very reasonable.  I've passed along a
> copy to someone locally.  He and his roommate have decided to get their own
> boxed set in the future.  Of course, that's if they don't move over to
> Mepis. ;)  If they stick with SUSE, they'll buy the boxed set.  While Novell
> didn't make any money off them, they could.  And precisely because they
> allowed the redistribution.

Well, if they downloaded a whole pile of security updates for the
product off SuSE-operated servers, it could be that SuSE in fact lost
money as a result of them.

David