[CLUE-Tech] United Linux

[Joe Brockmeier]

Jeffery Cann wrote:
> On Thursday 30 May 2002 09:13 am, Crawford Rainwater wrote:
> 
>>This is a combined effort of Caldera, SuSE, Turbo,
>>and Conectiva distributions.

> Anyone else for / against the per seat proposal?

As long as they don't violate the GPL, I'm not adamantly opposed to it - 
but I'd never buy a distro that has a "per seat" license. This is one of 
the reasons I wanted to get away from Windows - after I bought a second 
computer for my home and realized that, technically, I was supposed to 
be buying two licenses to use Windows just because I installed it on two 
machines that only I used. Sorry, but that just didn't seem like a very 
good deal to me.

I realize that SuSE, Caldera, et al are in this to make a buck and 
sometimes what they do ends up helping the Free Software / Open Source 
effort - but a "per seat" license is exactly what most companies want to 
get away from with Free Software and Open Source. So... even if the 
costs are lower than Microsoft's per seat licensing, you're no longer 
offering one of the main benefits of using Linux. If all the companies 
pursue a fee for each machine, this plan may backfire and make Red Hat 
stronger instead of weaker.

AFAIK, Caldera is the only one that actually plans to do "per seat" 
licensing, as they are now. To me, that's just trying to shoehorn Linux 
into the Microsoft business model - and if you're going to support that 
business model, then you might as well just keep using Microsoft or 
proprietary UNIX.

Now - a "per seat" support fee would be another matter entirely. That's 
entirely reasonable. The companies who need/want support might be happy 
to sign up for support per user/machine. But if I already employ several 
top-notch admins, I probably don't need the support and I'll go with a 
distro that I can download or buy one or two boxes and stick it on all 
the machines that I want. I realize that this poses a bit of a problem 
for a company that's trying to make money selling software in a box, but 
it's not in my interest to subsidize a broken business model - which is 
exactly what proprietary software/per seat licensing is.

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier -=- jbrockmeier at earthlink.net
http://www.DissociatedPress.net/
ymessenger: jbrockmeier / AIM: ZonkerJoe
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