OFB Community Mailing Lists

[David Aikema]

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.

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.

> > > 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).

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).

David