Except the situation you're positing never existed. Support for SuSE (or Turbolinux or Red Hat) was _never_ free. People seem to keep confusing the cost of the distribution with the cost of the support, and they are very much separate items. The cost of support is actually less expensive now than it was before (if I remember my conversations with Jens correctly).
The only _real_ difference between now and before is that you don't have a choice of support or not if you want to use SuSE's Linux/390, and there's no way to "test drive" the distribution before deciding to buy or not. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Phil Payne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, January 21, 2002 5:59 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: reasons why management don't want linux > The distribution itself is not particularly expensive. The bundled support > that SuSE requires to purchase the software is $11,000 (US) per engine for > the 31-bit and $14,000 per engine for 64-bit systems. The problem is - for those making strategic decisions - is not the $11k today but the fact that what was effectively free yesterday and costs $11k today might well cost $22k tomorrow. A _LOT_ of people out there like IBM and its products but just want to get the Software Division monkey off their backs. Operating system migrations cost money - there has to be a reason for the investment. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.com +44 7785 302 803 +49 173 6242039
