Roger Whittaker wrote:
On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 07:16:03PM +0100, Thomas Hertweck wrote:
[...]
Ubuntu doesn't have an Enterprise version lurking in the background, that's why I think an LTS version makes sense for them.
[...]
They do, or at least they wish to. And the "Enterprise version" IS the LTS version (that's what they offer paid support on) - you can even (announced this week) buy a dedicated support engineer from them.
That's more or less what I meant. Fedora -> CentOS -> RHEL Ubuntu -> Ubuntu LTS openSUSE -> openSLES -> SLES OR openSUSE -> openSUSE LTS You are of course right that Ubuntu LTS tries to cover both the CentOS and the RHEL world, at least with the latest support offers from Canonical. In the SuSE world, however, there's no equivalent for Ubuntu LTS and/or CentOS right now, that has puzzled me for quite some time.
And that's the interesting difference - Ubuntu LTS competes with openSUSE in the "unpaid for" Linux market while the same distribution (Ubuntu LTS) competes (or hopes to) with SLES in the "paid for" market, but with a different business model.
So far, Canonical has not made a commercial success with Ubuntu, but Ubuntu has had a remarkable amount of success in the "community mind-share" stakes.
But if Ubuntu begins to be a commercial success and begins to break into the "Enterprise" market, both Red Hat and Novell will need to rethink their Enterprise Linux business model.
Agreed.
My personal view is that we really do need an openSUSE LTS to be able to continue to compete with Ubuntu in the "unpaid for" and "community mind-share" areas.
Wouldn't openSLES also play in the "unpaid for" business? At least regarding the costs from a user/customer perspective. The big difference I see is that Canonical officially supports the LTS version and pumps money into that project because it's (as you said above) also their Enterprise-like release and tries to compete in that area. The same wouldn't happen in the Novell world though, at least as long as the business model around SLES exists. openSUSE LTS would be driven entirely by the community, and require quite a large amount of resources that need to be catered for. A practical question about the LTS: For instance, who would backport important kernel and filesystem changes for the openSUSE LTS project? Who would test and sign off these ports? It will be quite tricky to support software for several years and you need experts to do so. Are there enough real experts in the community who are willing to take on such an important and time-consuming role? Or would the LTS release give up the current support model and allow later software versions to appear as updates? Fedora tried the LTS route, if I remember correctly - as far as I know, it didn't work out. I am just a bit concerned that the same could happen to an openSUSE LTS due to lack of resources (human and financial). This is certainly something that needs to be avoided - therefore, it's important to be honest when it comes to the amount of work and the available resources. Cheers, Thomas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org