On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 12:45:07PM -0600, Stephen Frazier wrote: > > Rich Smrcina wrote: > >On Wednesday 26 March 2003 10:11 am, you wrote: > > > >>(This argument has been around before; I've checked the licenses, Suse > >>don't make it available for free download, but there's nothing to stop > >>anyone else redistributing it so long as they don't take money). > > > >Then SuSE doesn't get compensated for their hard work, they stop making > >money and stop making a distribution. Who wins? > >
I'm interested in SuSE to "win" if it serves my purpose. Do you implicitly assume there are no alternatives? You actually do. Because there is no alternative to SuSE Linux AG for providing SLES (tm). And you seem to depend on SLES, right? > > SUSE wins. Two other atvantages: * A minro one: takes some load off their servers. * A major one: the distro is not worth much without the patches. What you download from that server is nice for testing, but it is still not enough for production, because it lacks, say, the latest sendmail patch. So if you try to install this server in a production environment, it will either break, or will be broken-into. And remember that the license of SuSE basically forbids everybody else to compit with SuSE in providing patches. So you basically have to have a support contract with SuSE. -- Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+ http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+
