Thank you for the salary information.
In the Midwest/Great Lakes part of the USA, admittedly the area with the
best overall standard of living, a set of Debian CDs costs between about
1/100 and 1/500 of the typical cost of the hardware it runs on, or about
the same cost as perhaps two or three months worth of electricity to run
the computer.
It's true, if you have "connections" with people in industry, you can get
old hardware for free, or if you live at a university, your electricity
bill is probably "free", included in the tuition. But realistically, if
you have "connections" so good that you can get free computers and free
electricity, you can probably get some free Debian CDs with little extra
effort from the same people. I suspect the situation is the same in Russia
regarding getting "free things" from "connections".
I think a response with similar comparisons from Russia would help us
understand the Russian cost issue. I find it hard to believe that a
typical Russian PC costs less than 20 times as much as a typical Russian
Debian CD, but maybe that is true...
Another issue, occasionally there is a flamewar on debian-devel about how
"Debian should no longer support old hardware, because no one uses it, and
if we change Debian to optimize compile for 1 GHz xeons only, then our
programs will run exactly 0.01 % faster, because that's what the marketing
people at XYZ Linux distribution said, so it must be true". The arguements
against that usually revolve around comments that the enhancement is really
only 0.00001% so the effort wouldn't be worth it. Obviously one solution
to the infinite flamewars about dropping support for old hardware is simply
to get more developers who use old hardware...
However, I think there are good "social issues" and "environmental issues"
reasons for keeping support for old hardware, even if the majority of Rich
Americans don't use old hardware.
I think some useful information for the list would be what kind of hardware
is used in Russia and how much does it cost compared to the CDs. Has
anyone done a formal or informal survey of this for different countries?
Peter
Novodvorsky To: David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org>
<nidd@debian. cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, (bcc: Vince
org> Mulhollon/Brookfield/Norlight)
Sent by: Fax to:
Peter Subject: Re: Open letter to Debian community
Novodvorsky
<nidd@www.log
ic.ru>
01/31/2001
07:41 PM
++ 30/01/01 23:20 -0600 - David Starner:
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 03:42:55PM +1100, Brian May wrote:
> > >>>>> "David" == David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org> writes:
> >
> > David> Where are you buying your CDs? You can get Potato for less
> > David> than $10 from some of the CD places. If that's too much,
> > David> you can buy just the first CD.
> >
> > Careful here (unless you know better then I do), it might be different
> > in Russia.
>
> Going to the CD list to the Russia distributer, they offer the 6 cd set
of
> Debian for 500 p, and the 1 cd for 75 p. If I'm right in assuming
p=ruble, then
> that's $18 for the 6 cd set and $3 for the 1 cd, according to Yahoo's
currency
> converter. (Which corresponds to what I saw in America - I somewhat
mispoke on
> $10, which was for binarys only.)
Firm I'm working for distributes only 6CDs in complect. We don't sell
It by one CD (I tried to say them, they didn' understood and thought
that they will loose money if they sell by one CD). And 18$ is very
expensive for people living outside Moscow and St.Petersburg. Will you
buy 18$ box if you have 100$ salary? (85$ salary?) Please, don't
answer, that you'll never have such salary, so you needn't imagine it.
NIDD
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