Advocate for supporting Open Source distro's. (re: Mandrake goes Bankrupt)

[Rastar]

This now cements the need for us (Linux Users) to donate a little cash now and again to purchasing a "Retail Boxed"
set of <insert distro name here>.

Apparently, Mandrake suffers from the same plight as most other distro's and that is you can FTP the .iso's and never
spend any real money towards the companies overhead.

Before RH8.0 came out I asked the question as to why pay. I purchased 8.0 and while it really did not provide me
anything that I could not have downloaded, apparently it allowed them to stay in business another week or so.

I am now going to purchase at least one copy of every "Major" revision of Redhat and or whatever other distro I try out.
What I mean by major is RH8.0 not RH8.0.1.3.X.X you get the picture.


I would encourage those who have the funds available what twice a year for major upgrades to do so as well.

After all M$ requires us to pay around $80.00 us for every new version so what is 40?

Just my pitch to keep us alive.
Ras

Ask anyone here that I've shipped stuff to how I asked them to pay.

price + shipping + whatever they could spare = donation to Gentoo.

My family has a membership to the MDK club, and the biggest boxed set we could get of MDK8.2.

Personally MDK' begging is getting on my nerves, I paid and now they are saying "if only 20.000 of our club members would upgrade their membership"... well what about the fucking freeloaders??

Get a better fucking business plan, instead of putting the ISO on the website and releasing the boxed sets weeks even months laters...

Boxed set first, no ISOs only ftp installs - like SuSE.

[Rastar]

Your right Boxed sets first..... Of course they could do something like putting in code that disables "beta" versions after say 100 days.

This of course would cause such a stink in the world that it may push some back to M$ (not a good thing).

Begging for money is a bad thing. Unless you position yourself in front of Home Depot (making almost 75k a year). At any rate, they should all develop some sort of pay for service scheme (not a lot of money) RH does this already for faster server access and no bump rules. Although 60 after buying the software now equals 100 USD so that is a bit steep.

Anyway, I think folks should think about at the minimum purchasing boxed sets now and again and purchase them from the distro's website versus online since I dont believe they make much back from retailer sales.

Ras

[cga]

[quote author=Lovechild link=board=7;threadid=6172;start=0#58514 date=1043347277]
Personally MDK' begging is getting on my nerves, I paid and now they are saying "if only 20.000 of our club members would upgrade their membership"... well what about the fucking freeloaders??

Get a better fucking business plan, instead of putting the ISO on the website and releasing the boxed sets weeks even months laters...

Boxed set first, no ISOs only ftp installs - like SuSE.
[/quote]

Mandrake's problem did come from their business side- they made some very bad choices and rushed an IPO out before they should have done so.

RedHat has been very sucessful as a business because of their server side product support and training. Their free DL distros are not their main product. SuSE has the right idea as well- selling corporate desktop systems and servers and even sells of their distro.

Mandrake really is more about the distro than about anything else, and they need to understand that and look into ending the free ISOs if they want to be in business much longer. Or they should consider disolving the company and turning Mandrake into another Debian type non-profit distro.

The and the short of it is that if you are in business you have to make money.

My beef is mostly with the fact that they ask already loyal members of the club to spend even more money to keep their company afloat, instead of telling the world.

--
Here's the problem, once upon a time some CEOs made some bad decisions and right now the money is tight, so please consider buying instead of downloading.

If you don't do this we will have to retract the downloadable ISOs as the GPL license only requires us to provide sourcecode which of cource will be downloadable from our FTP site.

That's the price you pay for an ideal such as free software, we run a business and as such we are expected to turn a profit and currently the low penetration of Linux on the desktop, which is our target audience, doesn't allow us to do so.
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