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huh? pay to get Linux?
I have always been paying to get Linux, and with 2-3 releases a year it's been costing me about $140 per/year per/distro to stay current -and I'm happy to do it because I like funding alternatives - my name might also wind up on the KDE donations list sometime next year.
I wouldn't believe any of the doom & gloom about Linux going dead on the desktop anytime soon -there are far more corporate desktop clients and office workstations than there are servers, and Linux is well suited to thin client applications -taken together, these 10s/1000s/millions of desktop stations represent quite a chunk of change. Smart Linux vendors will keep their options open on both ends.
Mandrake and SuSE were already doing a better job than Redhat at bringing user friendliness to the desktop experience, and with Lindows style spoon feeding also coming into play, I think redhat is making a smart business decision. After all, it must be difficult and expensive for Redhat to provide technical support and update service for hundreds of thousands of newbie and novice desktop users. People who are quite often only trying Linux to see what all the fuss is about and will likely dump your product within a week anyway. Now they can concentrate on more serious business.
Funny thing is that I keep on using this install of SuSE 8.1 on my box in the den, even though I have SuSE 8.2 and 9 ... why? Because it all works quite well for me, Internet, printing, DVD playback, CD burning, photo editing, a few games... my whole family uses this box ...and it just keeps going strong. The point is that I now have a lot of great software that runs my hardware in a way that it does what I need it to do, and that reliably so. I know people who still use Windows 95, and many who love 98SE and will probably use it for a few more years -that being the case, there's probably enough free Linux already out there to last the next decade or so.
No Linux vendor is under any obligation to provide a free download.
Last edited by CMonster; 11-24-2003 at 02:01 AM.
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