Why should we "respect" Novell's wishes? As Kim pointed out Novell is a business like any other company, of course they don't want a free version of SLES when they can sell it just fine for $2,000 or whatever it costs. In a perfect world do you think RedHat wants their RHEL given away for free as CentOS? Not if they could be making more money.... I think the best way to "respect Novell's wishes" is to read the GPL license that comes with SLES which says the software is free to be redistributed. I for one wouldn't need any support contract or warranty. Instead of upgrading/reinstalling openSUSE every year or two (because of being forced to... deleted repos and such) I'd rather have 1 OS run for a long time. So wa On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 04:55, Thomas Hertweck <Thomas.Hertweck@web.de> wrote:
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@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org
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