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

[Fred A. Miller]

On Friday 20 May 2005 9:35 pm, David Aikema wrote:
> On 5/20/05, Fred A. Miller <fmiller at lightlink.com> wrote:
> > SUSE's manuals are actually pretty good. I buy the "Upgrade" release
> > which is cheaper and has the "main" manual.
>
> It could be that SuSE's manuals are fairly good.  What I recall from
> the days when I purchased boxed sets was that the manuals were little
> more than a 'click-this-option-to-take-you-to-the-next-installer-screen'
> sort of thing, but things may well be a whole lot better now.

'Big improvement over the years.

> That said, do the manuals justify the entire purchase price, as for
> what you pay for a distribution release would probably buy you a
> pretty good book or two on the subject in question?  The remaining
> ($(purchase price) - $(what I would pay for the manual)) still seems
> to me to be little more than a donation to the group in question.

Considering the price of DVD +R DL media, I don't think so. Besides, their 
staff has to eat like everyone else.

> > > > 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.
> >
> > 'Last I looked, the figures don't show that.
>
> What I meant was on an individual customer basis... customer A gets a
> copy and then proceeds to use SuSE's bandwidth (which costs them
> money).

Yep......it does.

> As a whole SuSE may be profitable, but for a some percentage of their
> customers they may be loosing some money (a fairly small amount...
> unless there's a whole lot of security patches/updates).

I'm sure there's some loss - there always is. 

Fred

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