On Fri, Feb 01, 2002 at 12:00:50PM +0100, Joachim Schroeder wrote: > Hi everybody, > > I would like to let you know the following: > > In the past SuSE granted to enterprise customers access to the latest SuSE > Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) versions. SuSE extends this successful > marketing program and is therefore pleased to announce the availability of > beta versions, trial versions and evaluation versions of SuSE Linux > Enterprise > Server for S/390 and zSeries. SuSE acknowledges the constructive feedback > from > this mailing list. Thank you very much.
[3 options: beta, trial-free-for-60-days, eval-$500-for-six-months-with-support] Thanks! As far as I can tell, this gives everybody something to work with. Certainly $500 is more than reasonable for 6 months of support which will also let the prospective customer decide whether SuSE can support his installation. Judging from the wording, you can do whatever you want with the beta--redistribute it, run production systems on it (not that I am advocating this as a wise course of action!), eat it, or whatever. From a consultant's point of view, this means that I'll get the beta, put it down under VM, and then have familiarity with something close to the actual product, although I'm aware that the beta is not guaranteed to contain the same versions of even the Open Source software as the trial and production versions. An excellent set of options, in my opinion. Particularly if the beta will let me run Online Update to get patches that *do* bring its Open Source components up to the current patchlevel; I of course do not yet know whether it will. Adam
