On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 5:53 PM, Per Jessen<per@computer.org> wrote:
Peter Albrecht wrote:
- problem/responsibility, hire a programmer or become one." "Fix it yourself as it is a community distro. The community is not doing enough or is too small." What happens is or feels like the various groups that are part of the community are not fully trusted. What I see/feel/hear is that globally the openSUSE distro is moving to the bottom of the Linux Distro Heap. I am being asked to move to CentOS as it has a longer support window. "Having to update my OS every 2 years is a real pain in the butt! Now it is moving to a 18 month window. I really need to look at something else that meets my needs" Business like to stay as long as they are able to the release. "If it aint broke don't fix it!" "We really need a fall back position. What are your recommendations? Doesn't Novell realize who pays their salaries? What about Ubunto, Debian, Fedora/CentOS, or Solaris, BSDs?"
My question is: Why don't these customers move to SUSE Linux Enterprise (Server and Desktop)? Is that EUR 300.00 per year an amount they do not want to pay for getting 7 years of support, updates and training? Don't they want to pay additional money for the services? Are they not happy with the services offered by Novell or with the way Novell treats them?
That's exactly what I thought too when I read Boyds item#4.
Hmm I thought they'd have to pay EUR 2,100 to get 7 years of support. No? Anyway, I think the existence and popularity of the CentOS distribution establishes beyond dispute that there is demand for this, albeit in a particular market segment. Back on topic. I think an openSLES/openSLED distro could actually encourage some users to stick with openSUSE, but I feel this will hurt Novell revenues much more than what I propose below. I also think this openSLES/openSLED effort could dilute the time spent on the openSUSE release that feeds into SLES/SLED. I do think , like the CentOS crowd, that having the openSLES/openSLED distro would be better than not having it, .i.e I'd be happy to bear the cost of the diluted openSUSE effort. My current reasoning is this: At the moment I make bug reports for openSUSE x, then I get to lose the 'benefit' of that investment when I have to migrate to openSUSE x+, furthermore I have to pay cash (in addition to the time already paid) to get SLES/SLED and have the ongoing long-term-benefit of the time previously contributed. It doesn't seem right that I could skip committing time to openSUSE, then pay the /same/ amount of cash for SLES/SLED /and/ now have bugs fixed for me when I report them in SLES/SLED... I'm assuming SLES/SLED bug reports receive more professional reponses than is the case for openSUSE - maybe not? Anyway, I think Novell has created some 'interesting' incentives, perhaps with the unintended consequence of creating an incentive for bug hunting to take place in SLES/SLED. At least if I had openSLES/openSLED I could employ those on my stable machine(s) and so retain the benefit of the bug hunting and reporting I, and others, did in the openSUSE x release. This long lasting benefit encourages me and others to continue bug hunting... trust me I'd rack up EUR 300 in no time tracking a bug. Of course this begs the question: Why don't Novell cultivate their code and bug reporters/contributors by 'granting'/bestowing SLES/SLED licenses to these people. Could be tricky to work out a rewards/points scheme, but it might be worth the effort? It might eliminate any dilution of openSUSE effort that would accompany an openSLES/openSLED effort. Besides airlines, finance and supermarket firms managed to get their heads around these reward schemes. Perhaps an open source distro vendor's business analysts could too ;) ? To be ahead all Novell has to do is get more than EUR 300 of code and/or reporting effort contributed each year before they grant a SLED/SLES license to the contributor/reporter. To work the reward scheme would have to be structured carefully and be effective from the outset - i.e. it should not be require herculean levels of effort to earn licenses - I'm not sure how much more bad press Novell/openSUSE can sustain. At the moment I'm thinking of jumping to Ubuntu (Redhat have created the same incentive problem Novell has, witness CentOS), precisely to use the LTS release in a hosted environment. So I'll also migrate my laptop to hammer on which ever is the release that is intended to be the next LTS release. my 2c Mark
/Per Jessen, Zürich
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