How Many SUSE Subscriptions Can You Get For $240M? 121
itwbennett writes "According to an SD Times article, Microsoft is almost through passing out the infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise Linux that it purchased for $240 million as part of its investment in Novell. According to the article, Microsoft says that 'a total of 475 customers have used an unspecified number of coupons.' Blogger Brian Proffitt calculates that 'if indeed just 475 customers have received these coupons, then Microsoft has essentially subsidized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) deployments to an average tune of US$505,263.16 per customer.'"
Microsoft hounds (Score:5, Funny)
Now the important question : am I trollish, insighful, funny or CowboyNeal ?
Re:Microsoft hounds (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, It's funny how often those 4 coincide...
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The Microsoft shills will mod you "flamebait" for your funny comment, Mr. Neal!
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People have "moral qualms" against marketing? Do you? really? What the heck is wrong with marketing? I suppose you dont like lots of things then. Are you going to level your criticisms at all companies that engage in marketing? How about the company you work for? Do they do marketing?
Next, you mention "stupidity". Thats a great word to throw around.... can you be a bit more specific? Its easy to call someting stupid. Its harder to say why.... come on, spend a little time on it.
Re:Microsoft hounds (Score:5, Insightful)
> People have "moral qualms" against marketing?
Yes. Little things like lying and fraud bother some people.
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Calm down, dude! Your spelling and shit is getting all fucked up in ways that make no sense...
Try to keep up (Score:1)
"Nobody said marketing=lying"
Right. Nobody typed the exact equation "marketing=lying". But that's exactly what was implied.
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"Nobody said marketing=lying"
Right. Nobody typed the exact equation "marketing=lying". But that's exactly what was implied.
Not really, by the original poster at least. What was "implied" by the quotation marks around "marketing" is that the practice described is not marketing. Later posters straight out said that marketing is lying and fraud. so no, no one really implied that marketing is the equivalent of lying.
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"Not really, by the original poster at least."
I never said the original poster said it. You said "nobody".
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Make that "He said".
Re:Microsoft hounds (Score:5, Insightful)
You're being very antagonistic (fine, some of what the other poster(s) have written are BS).
But let me help explain why there is a huge anti-marketing sentiment amongst a large subset of the readers of slashdot.
1. Slashdot readers tend to be very analytical. We like to get all the facts and make a decision based on those facts. Marketing often obscures the facts by which we could make informed decisions.
2. A lot of us work in product development (typically software, but not always). We see marketing staff pulling in 2-3 times what we make (or more) while not actually producing anything of value (according to how we ascribe value). We see marketing staff get promoted while seeing them goof off most of the day. Some of it may be sour grapes, some of it may be jealousy, some of it may just be a lack of respect for people who don't seem to work hard -- but in any case, it's hard for the typical slashdotter to accord respect to someone who produces nothing.
3. Some of us have been burnt, professionally, by marketing people. Deliverables are marketed that have no hope of being implemented, etc.
4. Most slashdotters feel that their work stands for itself. Most people in marketing self-promote; this runs contrary to the values of most nerds. It's frustrating to see a marketing person take the credit (and the accolades) when a lot of hard work was done by the development teams.
Maybe you just need to accept the fact that some people hate the idea of marketing. Getting bent out of shape about it isn't going to do you any good.
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"1. Slashdot readers tend to be very analytical. We like to get all the facts and make a decision based on those facts. Marketing often obscures the facts by which we could make informed decisions."
If one considered Slashdot readers to be a separate group from Slashdot posters, what you say may be true. Oops, you said "we".
Re:Microsoft hounds (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, as long as the facts agree with their preconceptions, anyway.
From all I've seen over the years, /. readers are as likely to ignore inconvenient facts as any other demographic out there.
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How do I mod this (-1, Wish to Ignore)?
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Slashdot's chief weapon is ignorance! Ignorance and cynicism. Cynicism and ignorance. Our two weapons are cynicism and ignorance. And arrogance. Our three weapons are cynicism, ignorance, and arrogance. And an overweening sense of entitlement. Our four...no. Amongst our weaponry are such elements as cynicism, ignorance...I'll come in again.
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Yeah, people here have preconceptions and opinions, but compared to a lot of other places, real or virtua
Re:Microsoft hounds (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who has worked in marketing, technology, and product development... I'd say you summed up the situation pretty well. On a forum for marketing pros, you could reverse most of your points and get a decent picture of how marketing folks view programmers and product devs.
I think the key problem is noted in your #2: "We see marketing staff pulling in 2-3 times what we make (or more) while not actually producing anything of value (according to how we ascribe value)." Everybody has different opinions of value. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Which came first, the product, or the demand for the product? A marketer is supposed to deliver demand for a product; a good marketer will do it on a phenomenal level, and possibly even without resorting to deceptive tactics. But, without the product, there is nothing for the marketer to do. They need each other.
Should marketers make 2x or 3x the pay? Depends. A senior, proven marketer should make 3x more than a middling developer. But a senior, proven engineer should have some kind of parity. Also, marketing is inherently riskier: if you fail to produce demand and therefore sales, you're likely to lose the account, if not your job. But engineers, in my experience, tend to be more insulated from sales ebbs. (emphasis on "tend")
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Without marketing, I could buy a pair of Nike sneakers for $9.
Marketing? Kill Yourself! (Score:1)
Bill Hicks was more concise.
--
It's a ride.
Re:Microsoft hounds (Score:4, Funny)
Are they lyers and fradusters?
Hey, did you see that Jim Carrey movie "Lyer, Lyer"? I think it's about some guy who makes soap.
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Mostly people will defraud themselves, there's no reason why "rich, famous and sexy person uses product X" should imply "product X will make me rich, famous and sexy". Customers are much happier to buy an overpriced item at reduced price than a full price item because they feel smart, they're as much looking to beat the "fair" price as the marketers are. And you shouid always recognize that a marketer will talk about the ideal customer, that "Teach Photoshop in 21 days" will not make you an artist, that exe
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You my friend, are labouring under the presumption that human-beings are rational. Taking advantage of the human condition is why we have a laws in the first place -- because we could scape every law in the rulebook if people could be trusted to behave themselves.
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You must be very ignorant of what actually goes into marketing to make blanket statements like this.
There is a reason major marketing firms hire psychologists and wire people with electrodes to correlate stimulus techniques with brainwave response.
Regards.
Re:Microsoft hounds (Score:4, Insightful)
Marketing was created as a systematic way of lying to people. Marketing not only shows a contempt for Democracy (Marketing for candidates), but contempt for Markets (which are supposed to work with "perfect information", the very thing marketing avoids.)
Re:Microsoft hounds (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that's always the case. What if you have a good product that no one knows about? There's a lack of information in the market, which marketing can help fix.
The problem is dishonesty in marketing, not marketing itself.
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You can remove the marketing from dishonesty, but you cannot remove the dishonesty from marketing. Buyer beware.
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True to a point. But if a product is really good, word of mouth takes over, the product becomes well known and eventually starts to "sell itself". What then is the need for a marketing effort in a company such as Coke, or Microsoft? It certainly doesn't consist of educating people about the product. More often it consists of giving the public a warm and fuzzy feeling about the company itself. Paving over mishaps as quickly as possible, pushing product out a retail channel faster than might be needed,
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'Good' marketing (in the sense of good for the economy and population at large, which isn't always the same as good for the company paying for it) helps that market assumption of 'perfect information': It informs you of a product you didn't know existed, and gives you the reasons why it might be a product you would wish to buy.
Of course, most of the people/companies paying for the marketing would rather it informed you of a product you didn't know existed, and created a need to buy that product. Regardless
Immoral (Score:2)
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So Microbox - what do you do for a living? Do you work for a company? Are the marekting people there imoral?
My question is this : why the broad brush? Is it all marketing that you have qualms about?
Useful comment? (Score:2)
This is a reply to several of your comments, not just this one. It seems that I have something to say that may or may not be useful in your thinking.
As you have seen, people are often very negative about Microsoft. They are also usually not very eloquent or organized in their thinking when they express their negativity.
There is, however, a strong foundation for their negativity. Microsoft top managers have in the past been extremely destructive toward Microsoft customers. For example, Mi
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Hi FuturePower,
I think that is a salient comment. One of the reasons Ive chosen to participate here on Slashdot is to be an apologist [merriam-webster.com] for Microsoft people specifically, and for the company to an extent.
Two things bug me the most
In related news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft Corporation announced today that customers who deploy their server solutions can save over $400,000 when compared to deploying a solution based on SUSE Linux.
Keep in mind the extras (Score:2, Informative)
Customer != users (Score:5, Insightful)
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Xcalc? (Score:1, Funny)
This struck me as a very interesting figure, because after firing up XCalc, I figured out that if indeed...
Was that before or after jumping into his Ferrari and flashing his iPhone? Why do people need to display their smug superiority from the unwashed masses when any decent calculator would give the same result?
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How is that smug superiority. It's what he did and likely he didn't think anything of saying that.
People do say "firing up calculator", "firing up google", "firing up IE". when they do those things.
And running a calulator program on a computer is hardly "elite" or smug.
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For example:
"I drove to the recycling center and got in line behind the other cars" vs. "I drove my Prius to the recycling
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Except that Xcalc is shorter than calculator. So it's both more accurate and less verbose. Both your examples are simply adding extra words which serve no purpose other than advertising themselves. There's no addition in the xcalc example, it's a simple way of saying "I didn't add this up in my head".
I would say "fired up calc" over "fired up a calculator", and showing that I use the window calc program isn't the goal of the statement. It's just how I see the action. If I used excel instead I'd say "fired u
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Yes, but... let’s say... Apple users are especially well-known for using Apple products as e-penises. ;)
Of course far from all. But unfortunately the loudest ones are usually the worst, and are seen best.
So it’s likely that GP’s experience made it most efficient, to just assume it’s a fanboi.
You can judge that as prejudice. But pay attention that you’re not falling into prejudice with that, yourself.
I just see it as “most likely possibility, based on own experience”
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Your funny comment got modded as Offtopic. I guess we have to meta-meta-mod down the Slashdot community again (-1 Whoosh).
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I thought XCalc was a calculator for the X windowing system. :)
Oh, and if somebody brags with his material stuff, we all know that that’s all he has, and *needs* to brag, in order to be able to accept himself. Just like acting all “Oh, what time do we have? Wait, I’ll just look at my *$30000 ROLEX*” will not get you any real girls. (Except for those that you don’t want anyway.)
No need for you to mention it. We’re on your side already.
By the way: Qalculate! is the best cal
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Speak for yourself. Money may not be able to buy love, but it sure can buy a few nights of steamy passion -- and sometimes, that's all that is wanted.
Bad math alert! (Score:2)
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Re:Bad math alert! (Score:4, Insightful)
When it comes to Novell+Microsoft,, there hasn't been much clear thinking making the rounds.
For example, the whole Mono fiasco. de Icaza is a Microsoft fanboy, but that doesn't mean that openSuse is somehow "contaminated" by Mono. Just remove mono-base with teh package manager and it all goes bye-bye. Your machine will continue to work just fine (actually, better than fine since doing so also removes Kerry Beagle, resulting in a much more responsive machine).
Then there's the whole "patents deal" hysteria. What do I care about what Microsoft claims the deal was about? Ultimately, Ballmer is a snake-oil salesman, after all. The deal was more likely made as a back-door way to compensate Novell for the expenses Microsoft indirectly caused by financing the SCO attack against linux, which Novell has been doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the courts - remember, there was talk about piercing the corporate veil wrt the $50 million PIPE deal.
SLED is not opensuse. There may be stuff in SLED (which has proprietary extensions and applications), that needs Microsoft's okay for virtualization to work with Microsoft products. So what? Doesn't affect me, since I can't see any scenario where I would want to run linux instances hosted on a Microsoft server, or Windows instances hosted on a linux server.
The numbers are there (Score:5, Informative)
If you click the links in the slashdot summary, you'll end up at the original announcement, which told you roughly how many subscriptions the deal was for: 70,000.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116249026689311557-helTbrheLKgbaJ5iO5z40ZFCiOs_20061109.html?mod=blogs [wsj.com]
I guess that's not as much fun as wild speculation though.
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So actually numbers are $240,000,000/70,000=$3428.57 per coupon. Seems to me the term "subsidized SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) deployments" is a pretty accurate statement, don't you agree?
Now I get it. (Score:4, Funny)
When you put it that way, Windows 7 ultimate is a bargain!
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It finally proves that Linux has a higher TCO.
GPLv3 tries to take advantage of this (Score:1)
3.5 years later (Score:4, Interesting)
Novell stock has lost 30%
Microsoft stock has lost 1%
Redhat stock has gained 78%
Good going Novell, yet another stellar business decision. The $240mil had to have been the value of the entire deal, which was mostly beneficial to Microsoft in that they weren't going to be sued by Novell since Novell owns a lot of the UNIX patents. The licenses were being resold by Microsoft at prices substantially less than ($240/77)x1000
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I get it, when we're talking about Bing search share, any % increases are to be downplayed by 'well increasing from 0 to 1 is a Infinity% increase!' whereas when it comes to Red hat stock, play it up. Alright.
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What if those UNIX patents were to fall into other hands through the acquisition of Novell?
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Novell stock has lost 30%
Microsoft stock has lost 1%
Redhat stock has gained 78%
Stock price probably isn't the best way to demonstrate that a firm is doing well or poorly as it is based largely on speculation. I like to look at profit per employee. If you take that metric:
Microsoft: $156, 656
Novell: - $59,083,
Red Hat: $28,107
or if you're looking to actually invest in one of these companies, price earnings ratio (smaller is better) is a useful metric:
Microsoft: 15.63
Novell: N/A
Red Hat:69.37
So you can see while Red Hat stock price is doing pretty well, Ret Hat itself isn't making a
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It's not inconceivable that Novell would be a smoking hole in the ground today if they didn't deal. No, I don't believe it either. Also, from where I'm sitting, Novell already looks like a smoking hole in the ground. Or, at least, some kind of hole.
Ill bet (Score:1)
I'll bet that one of those customers is that "slashdot" site I've heard about. I've heard they'll do anything for a freebie. What a bunch of MicroSoft fanboy's!
Just see it for what it is... (Score:2, Insightful)
What is going to happen in 2011? (Score:2)
To be honest, I haven't the faintest idea what will happen to Novell's customers. If I screw my tin-foil hat on tighter, I'd guess that Microsoft would start to rumble about customers with Mono to have to pay royalties. After all, the agreement's duration was long enough for Mono to have caught on in mission-critical software, surely there's pr
documenting those deals on http://en.swpat.org (Score:2)
I've just started a wiki page to document the Novell-MS deals :
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, so if you'd like to contribute to building the case against software patents, dig in!
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They are selling SUPPORT. The idea is to essentially kick out a RedHat subscription, at a customer ready to change the way they manage support. The MS subsidy makes this an attractive change.
SuSE runs on HyperV with native hooks - Like Server 2008 does. This is a way to ensure MS doesn't get lost in the data center - but continues to emerge as a player.
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LoB
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SuSE runs on HyperV with native hooks - Like Server 2008 does.
Is it just SUSE that does that? I was under impression that the necessary code was admitted to mainline kernel...
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Yes. But not supported - as the word has meaning to CIO's.
You can call SuSE tech support, and have a seamless case hand-off to Microsoft on this support.
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Choosing to get rid of Vista isn't really a choice...its a necessity The consumer just chose to throw more money at the problem and swear next time they'll buy a Mac. Win7 is better than Vista! Great job! That must have been tough...
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Yeah, because it's not like they couldn't have easily chosen a Mac if they didn't want Windows, right?
Re:Value of Software (Score:5, Insightful)
Your posts are usually insightful and this one is on the whole no exception. However, I have to comment on the "The[y] could just have just as easily chosen Linux": that statement totally forgets the monopolies Microsoft has been able to build in the last fifteen years (legally or otherwise) and the "traps" that were built on top of those monopolies. Most operating system customers _cannot_ choose non-MS products, and that is not just because the competing products themselves aren't good.
The OS and document format monopoly, the IE-trap that many companies unknowingly stepped into ten years ago and the well documented anti-interoperability stance that seemed to be the M.O. at Microsoft for some time... These things may not be illegal (although I expect they may be in combination) but I have no problem calling them immoral.
In any case saying that customers have a choice is bollocks. They had a choice ten years ago, and hopefully will again after five or ten years... Let's hope so.
I'm not talking about the parent necessarily (Score:2)
I don't understand how people can simultaneously claim that OpenOffice can read and write MS Office files and then turn around and say MS customers are "trapped".
In addition, anybody who designed an application around IE certainly went in to it with their eyes wide open to the fact that it was a Windows-specific solution. There are thousands of non-MS applications that won't run on Linux.
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I don't understand how people can simultaneously claim that OpenOffice can read and write MS Office files and then turn around and say MS customers are "trapped".
The word you're missing is "mostly". OpenOffice's compatibility with MS Office files is probably in the 95-98% range. For most home users and probably a lot of businesses, that's good enough. There are some times, though, when a customer has done something that MS Office saves in a way that OpenOffice can't handle, so your only choices are to just use MS Office or lose business. Until formats that are truly and completely open become standard, this problem will continue.
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Funny I don't see any marketing that says it can only handle 98% of MS office files. In any case, if your numbers are right, it's a rather minor barrier for switching from Windows to Linux.
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Again, a minor issue.
It's just that some people can't admit that there are MS customers who are actually pretty satisfied. There always has to be some alternate explanation.
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I don't see why you brought this up. I think my comments on this subject have been fairly rational and in line with each other. Why did you even start talking about people who won't see reality for what it is, unless you were implying I'm one of them?
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There is just one major problem with this view of the world of OS monopolies, its simply and utterly false.. If a shop had chosen linux 10 years ago, they would be JUST as locked in and forced to continue to use Linux as they are "forced" to continue to use
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In any case saying that customers have a choice is bollocks. They had a choice ten years ago, and hopefully will again after five or ten years... Let's hope so.
10 years ago was nearly the height of Microsoft's "monopoly power", to say nothing of the relatively dismal quality of the alternatives. Probably the point of least "choice" in the last two decades.
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In any case saying that customers have a choice is bollocks. They had a choice ten years ago, and hopefully will again after five or ten years... Let's hope so.
Customers do have choices. The integration/cross-system compatibility has been significantly enhanced for both Linux/BSD and Macs with Windows office formats recently (so they don't speak fluent docx, neither does several 100 million earlier copies of Office).
As for the IE trap - when you take a shortcut you can get burned. Rather than develop to webstandards, they drank the MS coolaid, took the shortcut, and are now hosed.
As for MS's "sparkling" Q4, the initial reports I've seen indicate that W7 sales are
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What is not "free" is support above web forums and such and "Enterprise" level distros tend to include programs that run on but are by no means Open Source. In fact even individual level distros have things like DVD players and other commercial programs that run on Linux.
Re:Free? (Score:5, Funny)
And I think we should all write the name SUSE as "$U$E" to make up for the way we've been unfairly referring to "M$" all these years.
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M$? Everyone knows that £oo£l€ are the new evil empire.
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Re:Free? (Score:4, Funny)
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$on¥
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Re:Free? (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenSUSE is free: http://www.opensuse.org/en/ [opensuse.org] - we run it here.
SUSE is not free. However, when your Oracle server has decided to keel over on the development server, and you've spent a couple of hours now trying to find out why, you really begin to wonder if it wouldn't have been cheaper to pay for the version with support and be able to call someone (OpenSUSE isn't an officially supported Oracle platform, so we couldn't even call them) and have them fix it.
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Fun with departmental vs team budgets. For 2 years my team had no hardware/software budget (or, more accurately, we did but we didn't have any way of accessing it), but we have a site license for Oracle so could run it at no cost to the team.
Once we did get a budget, it wasn't until Oracle keeled over that we went "Wait, we have a budget, why are we running unsupported OSes?"
opensuse.org = free beta (Score:2)
Isn't that what opensuse really is ? free beta testers. I've been running suse now since their 6.0 version (switched from redhat because they were the only ones that supported my g200 gfx card). I've always noticed that Dell Hardware (which we run) ran the 9.0 version while the 10.0 version of opensuse was available. One day I got smart figuring I would download the fully patched 9.0 version of suse being the cheap bastard that I am. Turns out it didn't exist on any mirrors anywhere.
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This one case of linux and it is being subsidized ie it is costing the customer LESS than free.
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is that like, "None more black."