Linux in China

"Sun Microsystems has pulled off a huge coup in signing a deal with the Chinese government for up to a million Linux desktops over the next year."

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5108336.html

Anonymous
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Like one visitor on the site asked, is China actually paying anything for these systems? Or did they manage to convince Sun that their presence in China is reward enough?

Chris Nahr
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

LOL!
"So how much did China pay for these systems?"
"Nothing"
"How do you plan to make a profit?"
"Volume!"

Philo

Philo.
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Some of us here are way too old for OSS bashing.

Li-fan Chen
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

If this forum weren't like Slashdot, we would read the article and see $50-150 per user.

anonymous
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

By the way, I'm not talking about the China deal, but how much normal users would pay.  They're trying to gain credibility for their system by the China deal.

anonymous
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

"we would read the article and see $50-150 per user"

The deal is nowhere in the article. As a wild stab I would be guessing around 5$-7$ per seat for Sun, but hey, your guess is as good as mine.
The stuff is selling at 50$ single licence end user retail for the moment, so any volume deals, and especially this one, is going to be far far below this.

Just me (Sir to you)
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Obviously I missed something -- did Sun give up on Solaris?  How does selling software written in Java earn them anything more substantial than, say, articles in ZDNet?  (=

Sam Livingston-Gray
Wednesday, November 19, 2003

"If this forum weren't like Slashdot, we would read the article and see $50-150 per user. "

And if we were not too busy frothing to read the article carefully we'd see that those figures may not apply to the China deal anyway.

Robert Moir
Wednesday, November 19, 2003

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