You are 100% correct in almost all beta testers cases....
Cheers
Jason
Udo Rader wrote:
On Thu, 26 Dec 2002 22:55:27 +0000, David Walser wrote:
Mandrake may say, yeah but we need help NOW. Ok, I
agree, create the
lower tiers to the club today (and tell the Linux
press and media
outlets ASAP) and I will join today. Me along with
several other users I
have helped convert to Mandrake here in New Zealand
(and hopefully
millions of users the world over). Mandrake doesn't
need handouts, it
needs to refine its business model. The availability
of ISO downloads
before boxed set arrival not only reduces potential
sales (and possibly
club membership sales) but it also is a double edged
sword that ensures
your mirrors get hosed driving up the bandwidth
costs for Mandrake and
the mirror owners.
ISO availability when the product is finalized pays
back all the people who gave their time to beta test.
Take that away you'll lose the beta testers, and the
quality of the product will decline. There's no easy
solution.
I actually don't think that holding back the ISOs will discourage any beta
testers at all. As far as I understand it, the concept of cooker is that
people constantly update their distro to the most recent version of the
packages.
This effectively means that as a beta tester I don't even have to download
the ISOs at all, because cooker is always more up2date than any ISO can be
...
And I personally doubt that "normal" users would rather download all the
packages and then make the ISOs using MakeCD.
So these are my 2� on this ...
May Mandrake life long and prosperous ;-))
udo
