On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 10:55:52AM -0500, Kris Van Hees wrote: >So, as long as a distributor is > offering some form of service that goes along with the distribution, they can > charge for that. And if they bundle other packages with the GPL stuff, and > those are their own development, they of course can charge for those as well.
While I think SuSE is about to price itself right out of the market, I can also see some merit in their position. They can sell x86 Linux at $50, because they expect to sell $BIGNUM of copies--there are *lots* of x86 users. The total market for S/390 Linux is a great deal smaller, and therefore SuSE must amortize its costs over many fewer users. And I even understand their logic to a certain extent: yes, they have you over a barrel if they are the only vendor that, for example, Oracle will guarantee its stuff works with. On the other hand, if you're *sure* you're going to be forking $$$ over to Oracle for their license, SuSE suddenly seems much more reasonable by comparison. (I'm not really picking on Oracle especially; any ISV selling an expensive enterprise product would do as well). However, if you're doing a roll-your-own infrastructure based on, say, PostgreSQL, Postfix, OpenLDAP, Apache, and Imap2000, then the SuSE cost *does* overshadow anything else you're doing--in which case, maybe you just need to be looking at another distro. Of course, the other distros are in the same bind as SuSE. If they choose to lose money on their S/390 ports and cover that loss with revenues from their x86 business, well, it will increase their S/390 market share and probably--but by no means certainly--lead to increased service revenue down the road. I'm sure the folks at SuSE, Red Hat, and Turbolinux have already thought all of this through. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. Adam
