Marcus Meissner wrote:
Ubuntu is shouting about their Long Term Support, Quoting: "Ubuntu is freely available, including security updates for five years on servers, with no restrictions on usage and no requirement to purchase support contracts or subscriptions per deployment.".
Where is the money coming from? Please ask yourself this question. At some point in time Marks money might run out, or he might lose interest...
I don't think many people are really looking to use Ubuntu in servers right now. It's parent Debian has a much longer history. The point of the Long Term Support right now is to see if it actually happens. If they do support Dapper Drake for as long as they're saying, then the next LTS release, when Ubuntu is more mature, will be getting a munch harder look by sysadmins. In the scheme of things, Ubuntu is VERY young. People I talk to generally look at it to be a replacement for Fedora and, sadly, openSUSE.
In my market, (mostly small businesses) deploying SLES, which will be obsolete in two or three years VS Ubuntu with 5 years guaranteed support becomes harder to justify.
How much is this Ubuntu long range product changing over its lifetime? I bet it does not change much.
Does SLES 10 change over its' lifetime? Personally, I don't know any small businesses that can afford SLES, or even medium size ones. It comes down to "1 SLES server or 2 Debian/openSUSE/etc Servers". It's rather hard to justify the cost, unless you're running massive applications like Oracle.