I was wondering:
What does the community here think of as a reasonable pricetag for their favorite OS?

I , myself , am of the opinion , that , albeit an OS is as much a part of computer as the engine is of a car , the developers deserve a reasonable compensation for their hard work.
So , that said , I think anything upto 50 bucks should be a right price for a single/double-cd distribution with a decent manual ; this would certainly cover the costs and fork over a bit of moola to the guys , that did the gruntwork.

Then I look at the actual prices of several commercial OS-es and think : "WTF?!?!?!"
Didn these guys learn anything from Mr Ford and his concept of "Low pricetag , big sales"?

Instead , they start whinging about "pirating".
They seem to forget , that the average computer-user has to keep some money aside for eating as well....

I just paid the princely sum of £2.18 for mandrake 9.2

(unofficial disks from a third party vendor)

ridiculously cheap considering the content

the official version is somewhat dearer
but still WAY cheaper than xp

in the "reality" that is capitalism
when you take into consideration manhours, content, potential, power etc
a Linux distro should weigh in at about £700+

i still cant understand why so many go with m$

talk about manufactured consent

I have 2524 commands on my system, which is substantially fewer than many have. If we average out the trivial junk and stuff like bash, doesn't a dollar a command sound ridiculously cheap? How much bash for your buck? So $2,254 dollars sounds reasonable.

But I be damned. I don't have that kind of money. There's just two ways of going - if it costs what it's 'worth' it won't sell and so it's worthless. Paradox. So you charge what's reasonable. And 40 bucks or so is reasonable.

Then again, everybody who *wrote* these commands is giving them away. Then people are coming along and packaging them for money. Yeah, it's a service, but it's also making something off of nothing. It's no harder to package than it is to write. So why not give the packaging away free, too?

So I think it's ideal now. Download if you want - buy a box if you want. And the prices are getting more and more out of hand with RH and SuSe and Mandrake leading the charge, but some are still reasonable.

I'm happy with £30 quid for a boxed set..... - alternately

Would people still download Mandrake if they started charging $7 dollars for an ISO set ?

In general - what does anyone think about paying a token amount - say - $7 dollars or £3 for a download set?

It would of course depend on how many programmers worked on it and how much they got paid and all of that, Just off the top of my head I would have to say Windows should cost about 30 dollars for the full version cuz once they have paid off what it took to create it initially, its all profit. Paying 5 or 10 bucks for the small linux distros is fine.
I paid almost 50 for RH9 and didnt really mind cuz i knew i was getting a decent product but 200$ for XP is rediculous.

I don't mind paying, really ... but until they provide a better way of getting it, it's really a no go ... I had to wait about a month to receive my slackware cd's, and on top of the price I paid to slackware, I had to pay quite a bit of money on customs.

If charging is applicable, make sure you distribute your product everywhere... I mean we have redhat in stores, sporadically something else like Suse or mandrake ...

It just was a lot to add about 20 euro extra for those cd's ... but that's not slackware's fault, that's belgian customs...

So once they change the policy on downloading and don't provide my favourite distro in stores here, I might as well have to go with debian or gentoo

ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/mirror/slackw...so-bittorrent/
There's the full FOUR slackware-ISOs for you , my dear "platenbakkie"
It just requires a little searching in the wrong places (kinda)

I have no problems paying for an OS if its reasonable amount. Paying over a Thousand to me isn't worth it unless its definitely needed and maybe for a business purposes, etc.

I would pay 200 dollars for a decent linux distro ie: Debian.

EDIT: That includes,of course, source, Documents(books), the media itself on CD's and DVD's.

Is that too much to ask? Suse sells that for around 100 dollars.

Over a Thousand??? You must be getting the Windows2003 server "bling, bling" edition complete with platinum CD case and silk instruction manual or something.

Personally I think anything over $50 is pushing it. I was thinking about trying SUSE9 out, but the professional edition is like $80 ($120 for 64bit vesion). Ouch! I still might go with Personal edition, but we'll see.

it's not so much about the iso's I had slack up and running a month before I decided to purchase the cd's just felt like supporting them ... still do, but customs are making me second guess my bright ideas

i paid £19 for suse 8.2 pro the other day, however i think pcworld had mispriced it as home was also £19

i was quite happy to pay it as i got 2 lovely manuals and 60 days support should i need it

if your whinning about $120 for the suse 64, check out the mandrake 64 once. it's just a little bit more, and i know that you can't download this one.

cheers.

Yeah, that would take some serious digging in my couch to find enough change for that one. Obviously, I wasn't including corporate or enterprise editions though. Now that I think about it, it would be nice to get 24 hour incident response.

Does make you think twice about going with a 64bit processor.

Oh, well,

I don't mind paying "through the nose" for anything as long as it's got a good logo

also, if you all e-mail me your full personal banking details, I'll pay you all lot's and lot's of money. Honest

regards

John