Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (422 mails)

[Thomas Hertweck <Thomas.Hertweck@xxxxxx>]

On 02/12/10 16:46, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:
> [...]
> I would love to have an openSLES but I won't fight it out with Novell if
> they don't change their mind.

I agree, out of respect for Novell as sponsor of openSUSE it should
perhaps not be done without some kind of (at least unofficial) approval.

> I still think that an LTS version would be possible as well.
> I cannot believe that there are no people out there who could spend a
> few hours a month to make it possible. I'm also thinking about companies
> here who would invest a bit of their time to have an openSUSE LTS
> option. But apparently they are just going for the complete free
> solution CentOS :-(

Well, I think it's time for a reality check: As I said, I work in the
oil&gas industry where we have large compute resources (clusters with
thousands of CPUs), many desktop systems, many servers, disk storage is
measured in Petabytes, etc. However, the OS (i.e. Linux in this case) is
only a tool for us, we don't employ Linux kernel programmers, we employ
geophysicists, geologists, geoscientists, etc. That's the main difference
to IT and software companies. When you say companies should invest a bit
of time to have an openSUSE LTS, that's easier said than done, in
particular for companies whose shares are sold on the stock market. At the
end of the day, it's about making money and keeping your share holders
happy - this holds for us just like it holds for Novell. There's CentOS
out there which works fine, and the combination of RHEL for (important)
servers, CentOS for cluster compute nodes (binary compatible with RHEL),
and Fedora for desktop systems (where stability isn't such a crucial issue
and having up-to-date OpenOffice or browser versions is more important)
works fine and saves quite a bit of money (we are talking about several
thousands of systems here, or even more in large companies).
Unfortunately, in the openSUSE world there's no such OS combination
available.

I play a bit the devil's advocate here, I hope you realize that.
Unfortunately, over the years I've seen far too many overly naive opinions
in the community when it comes to Linux. Novell hasn't made openSUSE a
community project because it's great fun and the company loves to throw
money out the window - no, Linux is a business and Novell certainly had
and has this in mind, just like RedHat and other companies in this
business sector.

Anyway, I've a general question at the end which fits somehow into the
whole discussion here: Usually, we get new clusters now and then and older
clusters will be decommissioned. These clusters are no longer based on the
latest hardware (i.e. we probably speak of dual-CPU dual-core clusters
here which are currently being decommissioned as opposed to new clusters
based on, for instance, dual-CPU hexa-core) but they still work fine. Last
time we had some problems actually getting rid of such a cluster. My
question now is, would openSUSE be interested in getting a hand on such
second-hand hardware? Somebody mentioned that Packman, for instance,
doesn't have enough resources. Of course, the computers/cluster nodes
would only be a piece of the puzzle, you would still require somebody
who's going to pay the bill (air conditioning is a huge factor), you would
require some space etc, i.e. somebody else would have to provide the
infrastructure. But I guess if there's some interest to (at least) get the
hardware (for free), there might be a way to achieve that.

Regards,
Thomas
-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx