OFB Community Mailing Lists

[David Aikema]

On 5/20/05, Fred A. Miller <fmiller at lightlink.com> wrote:
> On Friday 20 May 2005 9:35 pm, David Aikema wrote:
> > On 5/20/05, Fred A. Miller <fmiller at lightlink.com> wrote:
> > 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.

Good to hear.  What have they added in to improve the manuals?

> > 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.

Would you be required to use dual-layer media, which I think is
significantly more expensive than plain old DVD+R (the DVD+R discs can
be had around here for perhaps $0.40 each)?  There are also other
options including doing a network based installation (although I
suppose that probably isn't something that home users are too likely
to do), or perhaps preloading the SuSE ISOs on a spare partition if
they intend to keep a dual-boot system (Mandrake allowed you to use
this method of installation at one time).

I agree that their staff has to eat like any others, but given that I
can (most likely) find someone willing to give me a copy of the
software, the business model stills seems to rely on somewhat of a
donation model.

> > 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.

I suppose that the average company in any industry probably has a
subset of customers which it is currently loosing money on.

David