Feature changed by: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) Feature #306982, revision 9 Title: Create an open SLES openSUSE-11.2: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Stephen Shaw (decriptor) Description: It would be great to have something like centos but that is based off of SLES. This would give people the abililty to use openSLES (for example) and move over to SLES if needed. I believe it would help to grow our user base in the enterprise as well by allowing small companies to start and grow and later move to a supported model. I don't think we would loss customers as these are the people that probably wouldn't be buying licenses in the first place. As they grow this could completely change and they would be well positioned to buy support from Novell. Discussion: #1: Stephen Shaw (decriptor) (2009-07-29 19:29:57) I think there are tons of good reasons for this. Please add them as you can. #2: Alexandre Rogoski (aledr) (2009-07-29 20:23:22) We offer server services to a lot of our customers and we use openSUSE for their server since years ago. They like to know that openSUSE is enhanced by Novell, it gives credibility to openSUSE. And as soon as their business grow they can turn on Novell customers too. I guess this is a commom scenario around the world. #3: Stephan Kleine (bitshuffler) (2009-07-29 21:41:44) Actually, with the current decision to reduce the lifetime to 2 releases + 2 months (with the current "one release every 8 months" policy lifetime get's reduced to 75% from former 24 months to mere 18) this is more important than ever because most wont bother installing a server with such a short lifetime. It was said that the community is free to create a community supported LTS and Novell will help to provide the necessary infrastructure but will not help by maintaining any packages. I really doubt there are that many people able to properly backport e.g. security fixes and drivers for the kernel and so on which is why I think the idea of a "cummunity supported LTS" wont work (or at least wont produce anything one wants to run on a public server). Therefore I would like to suggest the following: Create a LTS version based on the openSUSE version on which SLE is based and also apply the SLE fixes to it with a lifetime of 3-5 years. Perhaps reduce it to what is needed on a server without any X, KDE, Gnome et al so it should be quite some work less, compared to the "full" system, and since it is done anyways for SLE it shouldn't matter that much anyways. That way one could be comfortable to have a professionaly maintained system without any dangling sword of Damocles (which is IMHO how a "community maintained LTS" sounds). Why doesn't that harm Novell / SLE sales: 1) It would be an easy entry level to get a professional server OS for free and then later update to SLE once support / more is needed. I can't provide any numbers but currently you have the choice between CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu (somehow). Naturally people who install CentOS wont switch to SLE once they need support but to RHEL since it's pretty much the same. 2) If you concentrate on the server there's no chance it could harm SLED. 3) Novell targets only big sales. That would be an easy entry point for smaller corporations who then will upgrade to SLE once they need support / more. Last but not least that's also the reason why their fear that an openSLE will decrease SLE sales is a big logical fail in the first place. 4) Red Hat apparently is doing mighty fine not albeight there is CentOS but because of it. Also, together with Ubuntu, we were the only distro to offer a LTS edition. Contrary to theirs ours would work ;D So, IMHO creating an openSUSE LTS would really help SLE but merely "community supported" without SLE patches it wont happen. + #4: Jan Engelhardt (jengelh) (2009-08-09 14:34:11) + SUSE products are IMHO mature enough and there's free support (and I + would claim we have more lightbulbs than others too) to warrant not + having an extra LTS edition to worry about. + + And on the other hand, LTS is a headache for volunteer supporters that + would need to get their heads into totally outdated systems when a lost + soul comes along. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/306982