> How about a longer explanation on the list? I'm _SURE_ that _MANY_
> inquiring minds would like to know.
You'll have noticed from debian-announce that we have reported sales of
about 2200 Official 2-CD Sets over the last 8 weeks. Of those CDs, about
half were sold by one technical bookstore chain in Germany at DM 19.8,
about US$10.78 the other half were sold by Linux Systems Labs and
Cheap*Bytes at $4 plus shipping (probably $5, but you can get many CDs
shipped at that price if you go in with friends) and optional Debian
donation. There may be significant numbers of sales from other companies
who are not reporting to me, and I don't get exact numbers from the mail
order people.
This leads me to think that Debian sells in retail stores as well as as
mail order. The problem is that not many retail stores carry us yet.
The most widely distributed Debian incarnation in U.S. retail stores at
the moment seems to be the Walnut Creek Linux box set, at US$100 to
$130, which contains Debian 1.2.8 . Obviously we'd like to be available
at a more current version and a much better price point (after all,
Debian doesn't need to make money, we just want to get software to
users) and without the other Linux distributions in the same box -
Walnut Creek packages Slackware and Red Hat in the same box with
Debian, and of course there's a book on Slackware in the box.
One way we are approaching this is to sell into bookstores. In the
U.S., bookstores have a policy of returning all product that does not
sell to the distributor, often too late for the distributor to resell
it elsewhere. The "pipeline" from the manufacturer to the bookstore is
at least a month in duration, which is about how often we issue
revisions. Thus, we were almost guaranteeing that we would obsolete our
own software before it reached store shelves. There is a significant
risk involved if the distributor packages a CD with a book, because
they will get the (cheap) CD back along with the (much more expensive)
book, and often the book will be too dog-eared to sell again, and the
distributor will lose lots of money and not want to distribute Debian
any longer.
So, we want to make it clear that our CD, even if it is a revision or two
behind, is still _current_ product in that you can easily hit our FTP site
and update it to the latest and greatest. We are separating the release
number from the revision number to emphasize this fact.
Thanks
Bruce
--
Can you get your operating system fixed when you need it?
Linux - the supportable operating system. http://www.debian.org/support.html
Bruce Perens K6BP [EMAIL PROTECTED] 510-215-3502
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