[Debian-uk] Re: Expo aftermath

[Russell Coker]

On Sun, 27 Oct 2002 11:58, Philip Hands wrote:
> 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.

I think that from a business perspective developing an entire distribution 
does not make sense.  Does a customer really care whether someone builds an 
entire distribution themselves or whether they do what Lindows does?

I think that the best way of making money from the distribution business is 
taking a free distribution (of which I think Debian is the best, but you 
could use something else), doing some extra testing etc, adding some 
user-friendly stuff, and adding some commercial software.  Then anyone who 
tries out Debian and wants to use it at their company will be forced to use 
the Debian + commercial distro.

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