Hi Lars, Lars Marowsky-Bree wrote:
[...] This only works as long as you take _exactly_ the same sources, and recompile them with _exactly_ the same options, resulting in _exactly_ the same package versions. Basically, you restrict the differences to the branding bits.
If even that - surely, /etc/SuSE-release will differ, zypper products etc too, which some apps (mistakenly) check for, so for example an Oracle installer will be unhappy.
Basically, if that is what you're striving for, there's very little differentiation except the price.
I admit that I'm not exactly thrilled by a distribution like that. It reminds me of Oracle's attempt to undermine Red Hat with UBL.
Well, what do you think CentOS really is at the end of the day?
[...] If you're going down that path, you might directly argue that the certification is worthless. (A position that is not without merit ;-)
Perhaps. It really depends on why a certification seems to be required in the first place. In other words, I think this needs to be looked at on a case by case basis.
[...] I wonder how you'd expect to resolve a bug that turns out to be in the OS, then. Pressure the app vendor to report it via their technology partnership, so that the base OS gets fixed/backported, and the fix gets re-published for free, while there's absolutely no contributing community? Nice stunt.
Frankly, I and my bank have opinions on that ;-)
Frankly speaking, I think you've missed the point and it looks like you didn't follow the email discussion over the last two weeks which becomes obvious from what you wrote here. Nobody said important servers should run an OS as proposed in Boyd's project. If you need support, install an Enterprise OS like RHEL or SLES. However, if you are running clusters with thousands of nodes, not all of them will require such a support level but may still have to run third-party software. Similar considerations hold of course for smaller businesses. At the end of the day, it's of course partly about money. Why do you think CentOS is relatively successful? Certainly not because of its first-class Enterprise support ;) As somebody pointed out recently, the business model currently used by RedHat and Novell may no longer work in the future.
If you're heading down that path, I would be more happy if you chose a real community distribution and became a contributor. But that may be a minority position.
Well, I have a position and an opinion as a private individual, and one position (which is more business related) and an opinion as somebody working for a large company where I have influence on OS, hardware, and software decisions. These opinions/positions do not necessarily agree with each other ;) I certainly observe that the more commercial opinions and positions are usually not very welcome in the community. I've certainly seen and observed what has gone on in our line of business over the last, say, two years and frankly speaking, I wouldn't be surprised if openSUSE/SLES loses more users/customers of a certain type described in some email threads here because the Fedora/CentOS/RHEL and the Ubuntu/Ubuntu LTS solutions become more attractive. You don't have to agree with me on that one, it's however my opinion based on recent experience. Only time will probably show what and who is right or wrong. Cheers, Thomas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org