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
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