Andrew Wafaa wrote: > 1.What does the user get for their $50/£50? > > The user gets 12 months support and updates.
Is it just support, or is it disks etc? (Ie is it web download or real box?) What does this mean in practise? Should people basically buy into $50/yr for support? After all, if I buy an MS OS then I'll get support and updates after one year. (I'm just playing devil's advocate; if I don't ask my customers will!) How does "licensing" work? Eg what happens if one CD set is used to install two PCs - will the second not work, or just not get support? (I've never bought a licence for "free" software before; where I've paid anything its been for subscriptions or donations.) > 3.£100 is cheap for a non-OEM MS OS, isn't it? > > Just a ball park figure that I made up - I have a funny feeling it may be > higher, what a surprise taht would be. > I just checked: street prices for XP Retail (Home) are around £130+VAT, XP Pro £220+VAT. That's around three times the OEM pricing. > Until this happens there won't be a true comparison, regardless of which camp > does the review. It would be interesting to see what the exact price > difference is for a standard desktop that you would roll out to a client. > Yes, it would! We would probably sell the Linux box with a OOo included and an optional upgrade to MSOffice (via Wine). As long as people see the fact they've saved money by getting OOo they'll forgive the differences; its only when people have swapped a "free" MS Office (ie pirated) for OOo that they usually complain about compatability issues. That said, to be fair we'd need to include OOo as an option on Windows too, so its not quite as clear cut. Even if we itemised out all the extras, most of them have free alternatives on Windows too; they're just not included as standard. So the difference in capability between a base install of (say) SLED vs Vista may show huge differences, but the cost difference to get to similar functionality could well be minimal unless you insist on using MS products across the board. -- Mark Rogers More Solutions Ltd :: 0845 45 89 555 _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
