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Best Buy Is Selling Ubuntu
SirLurksAlot writes "It appears that Best Buy is now selling Ubuntu, both through its Web site and in its brick-and-mortar locations. Going by the release on the product page, Ubuntu has actually been available for the low, low price of $19.99 since May 6th of this year. It is being packaged as the 'Complete Edition.' While they don't specify on the site what version is being offered, a quick call to a local store revealed it to be Hardy Heron, the latest Long Term Support version. How did this development fly under the radar for over two months without anybody noticing?"
because verily nobody is stupid enough to buy something they can download legally! Right? Right!? I mean come on, people don't even buy stuff they can download illegally anymore ...
Nobody who knows anything about computers shops at Best Buy.
You thought wrong.
Non-techies are in general scared of downloading programs from the internet.
In my experience if software is available in a package with a reasonable price tag people feel better about using it. It may be worth $20 to someone to not have to download and burn the software, the package may also contain information on how to find support.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
What I think would be smart is if they added a really good printed manual and/or Ubuntu book with it. I read through the description and couldn't find anything about extra material, but again, I think what they are doing is ok, but for a non-expert, a really nice install guide / intro to Ubuntu would make it look more tempting than say, just downloading an .iso file and burning your own disks.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Seeing as how we have been purchasing bottled water (free almost everywhere you go...) for the last decade or so, it shouldn't come as too big a shock......
The store version makes a better Christmas present than a downloaded-sharpie version.
Now if they can start selling computers without the Windows tax, we'd be all set.
I don't think buying Ubuntu is supporting Linux at all. It's supporting Best Buy if anything. If I want to support linux by paying I'll just donate on their website.
wtf? I thought you weren't allowed to actually "sell" Ubuntu for money? (Besides, of course, ordering the cd from Ubuntu for like $1)
Break out the beer folks, this one's gotta be good.
Absolutely nothing in the GPL states that you couldn't sell it (as long as you include the source code).
But are they?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Let's assume most people in BestBuy that have computers already have Windows. How are they going to use Ubuntu exactly? Last time I checked, most Linux distros can use free space to sit alongside Windows or blitz it completely and sit on top. Most machines don't have any free space....
This isn't a troll, I'll be real interested how many people accidentally pick the latter option without realising the consequences.
This should fly with geeks, but if too many joe sixpacks end up bombing their partitions accidentally, it could backfire?
throw new NoSignatureException();
Or a silkscreened shipit version and $20.
Yes, i know a lot of fairly competent people that have been effected by the marketing strategy of the BSA and RIAA.They now think that anything free is somehow illegal or filled with viruses. For many the entire concept of giving away ones work is completely foreign to them.
I believe one of the failures of opensource or free software in general is the fact that programmer nerds completely ignore the fact that marketing is necessary. You can still pull off a successful marketing campaign with effectively zero dollars. This is what non-profits that operate on donations do to stay in operation. Similar concepts can be applied to free software, but everyone likes to think of marketing as an evil corporate-only tool. It is a tool available to everyone and even an individual with zero budget can still have an effective marketing strategy.
For the people that still don't get it that means if you want this year to be the year of the linux desktop, you need to understand a few things. One of those things is that the target market for the "linux desktop" are computer users of all ages who don't care about free software principles or even much about software cost. In fact there are tons of ways in which this target market differs. They may not even use 99% of the internet except email, yahoo, and youtube. They may be slow learners. But as you zero on in a more specific target market that is smaller, you will find more effective strategies at marketing towards that group. If you go broad and target everyone, you may have very few effective strategies because a larger group has fewer common traits to zero in on.
I honestly think linux is a better alternative for businesses rather than a home desktop user. Think about it: if a business switches to a linux desktop the business will finance the training involved in getting users trained as well as distributing (installing) the system for each employee. With a home user you have to do both of those things for them. Therefore an easier way to get awareness is to slip in from the business-use side (don't forget businesses like to pay $ for support) and once a significant number of fortune 500 companies are using linux as a desktop and successfully showing some benefits, you will get your tipping point. Other businesses will likely copy the successful linux deployment. More workers will get trained. More people will get hands on experience with a "linux desktop". That translates into more people ripe and ready to use linux at home.
Finally free software nerds and companies that want to sell support contracts but keep the software free are doing an amazingly bad job of it. Here's what they do: "we give you the free software and we'll charge you support annually!" So in the consumer's mind they are paying for support for a product that they are getting for free. Meanwhile look at cell phone service providers: "we give you this phone worth $300 for free if you sign a 2 year contract!" In the consumer's mind now they're getting a discount on a product up front and all they have to do is stick with the plan for 2 years. They're still giving the product for free but they're selling millions of service contracts! Markup or put a (fake) value on the software in terms of dollars and rephrase the "selling" line. In fact stop calling your software "free" software because most people don't understand what your definition of "free" means (nor do they care). Call it "open" software but don't define open. Come up with a fancy chart and pricing scheme comparing the up-front cost of vista to the annual support cost of "open software". So for example if you want to charge $20 annually per an individual home user, and vista premium costs $120 retail. You say "If you switch today, for $120, you can buy 6 years of support with open software and at the end of that we'll give you the next version of the OS (worth $100) for free!"
Telling people to "Go download and install Ubuntu" is like telling someone to go dig a well: Its not hard where more or less the explanation is no more complex than "just do it" but it is still dirty and may be dangerous. Although easy for some to figure out how to download and burn the latest and greatest Ubuntu, it isn't so trivial for others. And for neophytes, some of the steps seem "dangerous" because they are fairly unfamiliar to someone who spends most of their time surfing the web.
Or to think about it another way: Trying to explain to someone the steps on how to download and burn and reboot and all of the pre-install stuff they need to know is a bit much when they can get all of that if I buy them a disk with a manual in a box instead. There is also the odd quirk that people will believe "dead tree print" more than a "web page" even if it is the exact same text.
I have written a shell script to create 'Home' and 'Pro' versions of Ubuntu. It's essentially a list of apt-get commands to add and remove software.
You must also have the Ubuntu 'popcon' software installed to use my 'Home' edition script.
This is because it works by finding the apps you use most, and then uninstalls them.
There are lots of other companies which sell the CD including Canonical itself:
http://www.amazon.com/Canonical-Ubuntu-8-04-DVD/dp/B0019KKM4O/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1215628185&sr=8-1