Ubuntu Discs have arrived!

[Morgan Collett]

> The most asked questions was:
> 
>  Why do they pass out CDs free?
>  How do they make money on it?

Here's my 2c:

If you charge the average man in the street for it, then you're
effectively competing with the proprietary alternative(s). Then you
start obsessing about the money you're making, and pretty soon you
start raising the prices to keep your shareholders happy. If you know
you won't make money from the public anyway, it takes the pressure
off. Anyway, you can download it free of charge, and this certainly
helps for those of us in developing countries where bandwidth is very
expensive. And it doesn't hurt the distrowatch stats... :-)

(Large) corporates want support from a vendor. They want somebody to
be on the other end of a telephone, who can be called out in the
middle of the night to fix the CEO's laptop or the dead web server or
whatever. They are prepared to pay big money for this. Every piece of
hardware and software must be supported, on the "I'll pay you now so I
can sue you later" philosophy. That's where the real money lies...

Morgan