[Debian-uk] Re: Expo aftermath

[Philip Hands]

At 26 Oct 2002 13:33:46 +0100,
Roger Leigh wrote:
> > He actually knows enough about the YaST license situation to know that
> > the SuSE position is flawed and still be able to argue in favour of
> > it.  I get the impression that he does it as an intellectual exercise.
> 
> In what way is it flawed?
> 
> I can't see that there's much wrong from a licensing standpoint, since
> aggregation of free with non-free software is allowed, and there's
> nothing illegal with their method of distribution.  Or is the flaw
> more subtle than this?

Yes, I'm of the opinion that it's flawed from a business model
standpoint.  Ok, so they're trying to stop the Red Hat becomes
Mandrake, Definite, foo, etc. scenario, but I think you'd have
difficulty proving that Mandrake's existence has done either Red Hat or
SuSE any harm, so I'm not sure why they care.

On the other hand, their current stance means that folks like John
Winters, cannot sell unboxed duplicates of SuSE, with the end result
that people who want to dip their toe in the water buy another disro,
which if the person in question is the first person to try Linux in a
decent sized corporate might well eventually mean that SuSE miss out
on a decent sized support contract.

They would argue that it means that if some large hardware vendor
wants to shove out a CD with their stuff on it, they get to charge
said vendor a wedge of cash for the privilege, which while true, only
actually works in the short term, because eventually (as demonstrated
by some conversations at the show) people wake up to the fact that if
they chose Debian, say, they don't have to pay anyone, with the net
result that a few thousand CDs go out with something other than SuSE
on them, and a significant percentage of the recipients will just
stick with whatever they get, and be more lost support contracts in
future.

What their current policy boils down to is trading in goodwill for
short term gain, with the medium/long term result that they will
eventually give people a enough reason to go elsewhere, and those
people won't come back, and won't go to them for support either.

Feel free to quote me on this in a couple of years time when SuSE are
on the ropes (although I said something similar about SCO and Caldera
years ago, and somehow they are still hanging on by the fingertips, so
it may take longer than that)

My advice to them would be to realise what it is that they make money
out of (which is offering support in one form or another, rather than
licensing software), and sell that.  The more "rip-off" SuSE copies
there are out there, the larger their potential audience.

So, in the large vendor example above, let them distribute the CDs,
but also offer them a support contract to address any problems they
have tailoring SuSE to their needs, and consultancy to do the
tailoring.  You probably won't make quite as much as you would with
the license approach, but you'll keep the customer, and you'll get
some of their customers coming to you to, so in the long term it's a
big win.

I think that covers why I think it's a flawed policy --- feel free to
argue the opposite view.

Cheers,