-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Stefan van der Eijk wrote: > > Besides, you can download the thing, for free!
But you were just complaining about the prices ;-). > The only reason somebody > would buy the boxed set is to support Mandrakesoft Which could arguably be done better by joining the Club. > , or they: > - don't have the bandwidth; > - don't know somebody that has the bandwidth; > - don't know somebody that has the CD's already. > > For the consumer OS, I think RedHat has got a brilliant model in place. > They give the OS away for free (like mdk also does), but you'll need to > pay for easy updates. Or be nagged ever 30 or 60 days by a questionaire. > > Problem is, with urpmi (and the apps on top of it), you're giving away > the possibility to charge for easy updates. Technically perfect, not so > brilliant from a business point of view. > Sure, but remember, since Mandrake doesn't have the IPO money RH has, and hasn't got certification schemes in place and deals with hardware vendors and commercial software companies certifying on their software, Mandrake can't really compete in the same market as RH at the moment, so it ends up competing with Debian, and you can't compete with Debian without something like urpmi. The real question though, is what do people want that they are willing to pay for. Since we have me, we don't need much that isn't in main+contrib (since I can package the rest), and I guess quite a few poeple on this list do not need hand-holding, the question needs to be posed to potential clients. This exercise needs to look at the competition: 1)RH, certification of hardware, software, skills, and lots of IPO money left for marketing etc, and some products people may pay for (AS, their content management system etc). 2)SuSE, good support for Oracle, wide implementation network (resellers etc) who will want to sell you SuSE products, and since they make even their FTP version rely on proprietary software (apparently their OO.o user-install script needs a jre), you are blackmailed into buying (but people think it's worth the price). They also have customisations (Firewall, email server). 3)Windows, which has all of the above, plus incredible ease-of-use (compare setting up OpenLDAP with samba to setting up AD, I can do one with my toes, the other one I need to do quite a bit of typing for ...). Of course, price and stability are issues. With Both RH and SuSE having high-priced, long-term-supported "Workstation" distros, we really need to look at how to compete ... IMHO, ProSuite offers nothing more on a server than main+contrib. A do-it-all with excellent configuration tools, which compete almost with the Windows (2000 Server) tools would be worth paying for, but the current wizards are not the kind of thing you would use to administer an enterprise network .... I should probably send an email to the address listed at http://www.mandrakepartner.com (yet another mandrake site which seems to be unrelated to any of the others ...) and find out what the story is ... IMHO, I think Mandrakesoft could leverage the community to provide an unparalleled support network (note I have on at least one occasion been asked to help with a samba support question from mandrakeexpert.com, and the user had a problem which we solved by about 3 or 4 email exchanges in a short time), sharing profits or charing a referral fee etc. Regards, Buchan - -- |--------------Another happy Mandrake Club member--------------| Buchan Milne Mechanical Engineer, Network Manager Cellphone * Work +27 82 472 2231 * +27 21 8828820x202 Stellenbosch Automotive Engineering http://www.cae.co.za GPG Key http://ranger.dnsalias.com/bgmilne.asc 1024D/60D204A7 2919 E232 5610 A038 87B1 72D6 AC92 BA50 60D2 04A7 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE+5hFQrJK6UGDSBKcRAuBHAJ9qmuD+5ETnMlAqI2XN9XYwh0krFgCgjvDV t62iOCBLpu03yCiXZux6ut0= =/hhm -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ****************************************************************** Please click on http://www.cae.co.za/disclaimer.htm to read our e-mail disclaimer or send an e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a copy. ******************************************************************
