[H-GEN] LSL retaliates over freight refund request

Greg Black gjb at gbch.net
Fri Dec 5 02:39:52 EST 2003


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On 2003-12-05, Harry Phillips wrote:
> Greg Black wrote:
> >
> >As far as I can tell from their web site, they don't sell the
> >product I'm after -- they do have a two CD set of the ISO's that
> >are freely downloadable from the 'Net (and which I have already
> >obtained, thanks to Humbug).  But they don't list a DVD with the
> >whole universe on it, which is what I purchased from LSL.
> 
> Now you have me curious, what product are you talking about?

The product I purchased from LSL was FreeBSD-4.9-RELEASE on DVD.
My purpose was to see what kind of job they did, so that I could
decide if they were a viable alternative to the rather peculiar
American resellers[2] I've been dealing with in the past.

> Have you contacted EverythingLinux to see if they have but don't list 
> it? Have you asked them to create what you are after?

It would be extremely premature to contact them at this stage.
I have the product I ordered from LSL and don't need to buy
another copy.

When the next release of FreeBSD comes out that fits into the
same internal mental category as 4.9-R did for me, then I will
be in the market for a DVD with that release, together with all
the packages that they have built for it[1].  Whether that will
be another 4.x release or a 5.y release (where y >= 3), I cannot
predict.

Certainly, although EverythingLinux do list FreeBSD CD's, they
are limited to the CD's that you can create from the ISO images
that are freely available on every FreeBSD mirror in the world
(and which are normally trivial to get from PlanetMirror at a
Humbug meeting -- although the disk space that normally contains
FreeBSD, and a lot of other software, on PM is out to lunch at
the moment).

The DVD images, while obviously available to FreeBSD retailers,
seem not to be otherwise available.  At present, LSL is the only
such retailer in Australia.  I am inclined to suggest that other
retailers apply to the FreeBSD distributors (see the FreeBSD web
page at http://tinyurl.com/xtxf) and perhaps that FreeBSD should
look for a better representative in Australia.

However, I wish to attempt one final approach to LSL first; but
that will now have to wait until the new week.

Cheers, Greg

[1] Actually. "will be in the market" might be overstating it.
    By then, I might have decided that the best way to go is
    download the distribution ISO for each release of interest
    at a Humbug meeting and to start managing the third party
    software manually rather than using the packages.  I would
    then make a regular financial contribution direct to the
    FreeBSD Foundation equivalent to what I used to spend on
    subscriptions and direct purchases of CD/DVD releases.

[2] I first purchased FreeBSD-2.2.6 on CD from the then thriving
    Walnut Creek CD-ROM people; when that went off OK, I bought
    a subscription, which was intended to get me each new
    release on the "stable" branch as it came out.  Over time,
    Walnut Creek were taken over by BSDI, who were taken over by
    Wind River, who dropped FreeBSD; the original Walnut Creek
    people popped up again with another name as resellers.  In
    the course of all this, credit card details were cheerfully
    exchanged between companies without any agreement from me;
    some releases were billed several times to a variety of
    cards; releases that came from the "current" branch (which I
    had been assured would never be sent) were shipped several
    times and billed; and so on.  Although each extra charge was
    eventually credited back to me, the waste of time and effort
    involved in keeping on top of this just got to be too much,
    so I cancelled my subscriptions and looked for a local
    alternative.

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