[PLUG] Rat off a Sinking Ship?

[Kyle Hayes]

On Thursday January 23, 2003 19:11, David Mandel wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Jan 2003, Paul wrote:
> > > Agreed. SuSE is excellent.
> >
> > Ya, but no ISOs since 7.3 -- what's up with that!?!?
>
> SuSE is an excellent distribution.
> In fact, I run SuSE on my personal workstation - at home - at work -
> everywhere.  For this use, I greatly prefer it to every other distro
> I have used.

This has been my experience as well,  but then I haven't had the time to 
get my Gentoo partion in shape and move the data over...

However, my experience with 8.1 hasn't been so good.  For reasons unclear 
to me Mozilla insists on printing everything in A4 size.  Given that I 
don't have any A4 paper around, this makes it a little frustrating.  Other 
things print fine in Letter size.

> However, I don't use SuSE as a base for building my own distros
> in part because I don't fully understand their licenses.

I would second this. I'd never make my own distro off of SuSE.  

> SuSE includes yast and yast2 which are nice admin tools, but they
> are not Open Source.  SuSE owns these and seems to use them to
> restrict redistribution of their complete distribution.

It happens that there's a lot of history here.   The following was 
explained to me by one of the former SuSE Germany employees I once met.

SuSE was one of the very first companies founded to try to make money with 
Linux, somehow.  I think it was founded in 1992.  Shortly after founding, 
another German company got SuSE's floppy images (no CDROMs then) and made 
their own distro.  From what I'm told the first version was SuSE's 
floppies with the names changed.  The next few revs weren't much better.  
Apparently, it got so bad that SuSE was in danger of going out of business 
(marketing has never been their strong point).

So, I think SuSE's had a once-burned-twice-shy attitude toward this for a 
long time.  They had the CDs out there primarily to counter-act any spin 
from Red Hat, but gave it up.  Note that Red Hat's high end server 
packages are also not available for download as ISOs and contain non-free 
software.

Yast source is available (on the web site too I believe), but it is not GPL 
nor does it meet Debian's free software guidelines.

> Thus, SuSE has decided not to put ISOs of their distro on the web
> and I don't think anyone else could legally put SuSE ISOs on the web
> without removing a few programs (like yast).

I think you can, but you cannot charge for them I believe.  I'd have to 
read the license again.  The Yast stuff walks near to open source, but it 
definitely is not open source (or free in the speech sense).

> Actually, this kind of goes back to the question of "how do you
> make money on OpenSource Software".  Programmers all have to face
> this problem.  And so do distribution makers.  SuSE's solution
> has been to hold back little utilities like yast.

Given that Mandrake is a very popular disto and they are in bankruptcy 
while SuSE is probably only marginally more popular and they have a much, 
much larger company (which isn't entirely solvent either), SuSE might have 
the right idea.  SuSE claims to have more developers than Red Hat.  I'm 
not sure of the truth of that, but I suspect they are at least close in 
size.

All the arguments about making money on Linux seem to assume that you have 
to make money selling the thing.  A lot of companies make money on Linux 
by using it to sell their other products.  HP just announced that they 
sold $2B worth of goods and services due to Linux last year.  Not bad.  
Somehow this just doesn't catch the eye of the press or most people.   I 
think that is where the real money is in Linux and why the uptake is 
large, but quiet.

Linux "revenue" comes from two major sources right now:

1) savings over buying other OSes and use of cheaper hardware.

2) used to sell other products. "We'll sell you this nice high-end computer 
system and throw in the OS for free!"

Neither of those look as spectacular as Microsoft until you start adding up 
how much money this must represent.    But, a lot is in savings, which 
means the whole pie is shrinking.

When a market gets commoditized, it can shrink, sometimes dramatically.

Best,
Kyle