Terrasoft appears to be taking order for YDL 4.0 now

[Ryan Nix]

You said:  
Well, umm, well, umm. If you want to use the software and want to get
bug fixes/updates there has to be some incentive for a company to work
on it, doesn't there (especially if the company doesn't sell
hardware)? (though, the paradigm for OSS is somewhat different)

Reply:  Terrasoft doesn't work on that much. Its OSS.  Its a community effort, of which, we who answer questions on this list are apart of.  The incentive, is to sell service.  My company sell services based on open source software, but we don't charge for the software itself.


You said:  
They do allow people to d/l from a mirrored site, for free!

For the whole of $0 you get an OS that's not that far behind Mac OS X
in terms of capabilities, robustness, and, with every passing year,
user friendliness.

I'm amazed that they go to the effort to put together an ISO for
people to download _for free_. I think it'd be absolutely fair to
charge $10 or $20 to d/l the ISOs. Just because it's "Open Source"
doesn't mean that it has to be free!

Reply:
They don't allow YDL 4 to be downloaded from the mirrors.  Where is it?  Why isn't it allowed?  Can I upload it to, say, the Univeristy of Oregon servers?  Its open source after all.  Terrasoft isn't like SuSE that has proprietary extensions or  Linspire that also has proprietary software bundled.

Knoppix is free and can be downloaded for free.  Mandrake, Debian, etc are all downloadable for free.

Lasty, you said:

There's one other bonus of having companies involved in the making of
distros -- if they're going to sell copies they need to make sure that
their distro works out of the box on a number of different types of
computers... and YDL does.

Reply:
YDL 4 didn't work on my iBook G3 600mhz right out of the box.  I still haven't gotten a response out of them on this.  I can't call them either.  Its this list that Terasoft rely's for the community to help.  


Mandrake 10.1 PPC works fine and I'm probably going to switch.



Eric Dunbar wrote:

>On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 14:21:48 -0600, Ryan Nix <rnix at prometheon.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>Thats like saying buy Windows XP to support further development of Windows.
>>    
>>
>
>Well, umm, well, umm. If you want to use the software and want to get
>bug fixes/updates there has to be some incentive for a company to work
>on it, doesn't there (especially if the company doesn't sell
>hardware)? (though, the paradigm for OSS is somewhat different)
>
>  
>
>>Yellow Dog might gain better traction if they let people download it for
>>free from a mirrored site.
>>    
>>
>
>They do allow people to d/l from a mirrored site, for free!
>
>For the whole of $0 you get an OS that's not that far behind Mac OS X
>in terms of capabilities, robustness, and, with every passing year,
>user friendliness.
>
>I'm amazed that they go to the effort to put together an ISO for
>people to download _for free_. I think it'd be absolutely fair to
>charge $10 or $20 to d/l the ISOs. Just because it's "Open Source"
>doesn't mean that it has to be free!
>
>  
>
>>Its certainly worked for Redhat.
>>    
>>
>
>Fedora (the "home user" version) is no longer a money making
>operation. It also has a _much_ larger user base than all of the Mac
>distros of Linux put together. Judging by the fact that RedHat spun
>off/eliminated the home version of RedHat (now an independent project
>called Fedora) I'm guessing that there wasn't enough money in the
>home/casual user side of things to justify devoting resources towards
>making a "home" version.
>
>I haven't used the other Linux distros on the Mac but I suspect
>they're not quite as polished as YDL. It's nice to have a company do
>the hard work of making Fedora run on the Mac.
>
>There's one other bonus of having companies involved in the making of
>distros -- if they're going to sell copies they need to make sure that
>their distro works out of the box on a number of different types of
>computers... and YDL does.
>
>Eric.
>_______________________________________________
>yellowdog-general mailing list
>yellowdog-general at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
>http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general
>HINT: to Google archives, try  '<keywords> site:terrasoftsolutions.com'
>  
>


-- 
Ryan Nix
President
Prometheon, Inc
phone 312.286.5718
fax 312.552.2381
email rnix at prometheon.net
http://www.prometheon.net