Richard, On Monday 10 October 2005 17:02, Richard J. A. wrote: > Why even buy it if you can get it as an eval version
'Cause there's no such thing as a free lunch. If end users don't support the production of high-quality releases such as SuSE, the for-profit companies that are now housing those efforts will conclude (correctly, from their perspective) that it is not a business they should be in and will retreat from this activity. Then where will we be? Face it, SuSE's distribution is the best, and the people at the core of the effort to produce that distribution do it as their day job and they must be paid. It's up to us to produce the revenue stream that will support their work. It's the cathedral and the bazaar. Open source software requires the contribution of the masses of programmers, designers, graphic artists, content providers, Web designers, etc. all of whom provide the grist for the mill. But at the center we need dedicated professionals to keep a distribution coherent and reliable. A free-for-all will never cut it. An operating system (writ large: kernel, libraries, servers, utilities, applications, etc.) is much too large and complex to be made to work through the efforts of volunteers alone. > Richard By the way, it's a sign of how good the distribution is that we're arguing about the name and not dealing with problems in the essence of the thing. Even the overloaded servers are what an old boss of mine would have called a "success problem." Randall Schulz - Paid purchaser of most SuSE Linux releases since 7.x --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
