On Thursday 01 June 2006 15:43, Ken Schneider wrote:
On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 20:03 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
Ken Schneider wrote:
It just seems as though the SUSE kernel dev guys attitude "after feb 2008 we will prevent non-oss USB code from intitializing" --- is harsh, unless there is an alternative way to provide access to such hardware
Looks like a date to have another distro in the works for install. Must be nice to -think- you are a big enough distro to bully your customers. I was raised to -always- treat the customer first, the customer is -always- right no matter what. Unless you don't care about going out of business.
Ken, that deadline has nothing whatsoever to do with SUSE nor Novell. It was set by a kernel developer, Greg Kroah-Hartmann - and although he is paid by SUSE/Novell, I doubt if they've "put him up this".
It is not about being a big distro, nor about bullying anyones customers, it's about all the distros (and all of us) relying on the free work of other people.
If you disagree with Greg KHs decision, you might need to remain on an increasingly dated kernel for which support will dwindle away, or even migrate back to Windows.
I don't disagree with not using binary only drivers in the system space I am only against taking away something that has worked well and -NOT- offering a working replacement. And this is really not directed just at Novell but any distro something without offering a working replacment.
I guess after all these messages on the list, I still have no idea how a deadline two years from now relates to a decision to delete drivers from a release now. I would have thought that a major policy change like this would be reserved for a major release, not a point upgrade. I'll say again that as someone who is new to SuSE, I have the impression that there is little concern from Novell/SuSE about jerking their users around. It's pretty clear from the mailing list discussion that the ZEN/Yast disaster was imminently foreseeable and no one cared. It's equally clear that yanking a bunch of driver support on a point upgrade for no apparent reason (2 years from now there will be a problem is not a reason) will foreseeably cause current users a lot of problems. So, either no one cared or no one was paying attention. From my perspective it matters little which it was. The protests from SuSE that they tested ZEN/Yast before releasing it serve to convince me that they have little understanding of what testing means. In many ways SuSE 10.1 is a very nice distribution, it's unfortunate that these failures in a few critical areas overshadow that. I do hope that SuSE gets their act together and does well in the future. Scott K -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com