Anders Johansson wrote:
You're missing the key. It's not SLES vs. Microsoft. It's SLES vs. OpenSUSE vs. Ubuntu vs. Debian. I certainly can't justify the extra thousands per server of SLES over the others to my boss.
The key is "certifications". If you want support from companies like Oracle, you need that, and those cost money.
You're forgetting your roots, as RedHat did. The legions of sysadmins working in small businesses, startups, and underfunded departments that snuck Linux in through the backdoor. We don't have the thousands of dollars to spend on support contracts per server nevermind affording Oracle's hefty price tag. I'm not against the existance of SLES/SLED. Obviously, that support and those certifications cost money. For those that need it, they will spend the money. I am, however, against making OpenSUSE simply a cvs snapshot of SLES, which is what 10.1 is. If OpenSUSE cannot be trusted to provide proper, stable releases that each improve on their predecessors, then what's the point? Why should anyone install it? It's just giving Novell free beta testing at our own expense.
OpenSUSE, if the trend of 10.1 continues, will be too suspect to run on production servers, just like Fedora. If that's the case, I'll be moving to Ubuntu or Debian, and so will an awful lot of others. I know of several that have already made the switch.
Between 10.1 and the announcement of GPL-only in OpenSUSE,
You talk about moving to Debian, and then in the next breath you complain that openSUSE consists of only open source (not just GPL by the way) software. Forgive me, but I fail to see the logic. What do you think Debian consists of?
Think about the above... SuSE was providing more than Debian, but it seems with every passing day, the gap is narrowing as suse sheds the very things that made it better than Debian. Don't you see? If OpenSuSE is unstable, gpl-pure, and has a short lifespan, then why would anyone use it over Debian or Ubuntu, which have more stable releases and much longer lifespans?
The "add-on" CD with third party software was available already during the beta phase for openSUSE, it just wasn't shipped along with it. I can't say exactly why, but I'd be willing to bet it has to do with licensing issues
Perhaps I read the announcement wrong, but as I understand it, there will no longer be any of those "add-on" cds...
And openSUSE being developed in the open, you have every opportunity to test it as it's being put together, and raise your complaints while there is still time to do something about it.
Really? And for how long of 10.1's testing phase was zen/rug tested with the new repo's? How "open" was the decision to rip out a time-tested superior system and replace it with a Novell-branded system that was specifically designed to work better ONLY with the rather expensive Novell ZenWorks system, that few if any user of OpenSUSE is likely to have, just because it was planned for SLES/SLED?
have you installed openSUSE 10.2 alpha yet?
What's the point? At any time, Novell could completely replace things at it's whim, just before release, even at the release candidate phase. It's already done so. OpenSUSE is not "open", it's simply visible. If I were to submit a patch to replace zen/rug with the old system, do you honestly believe that it would be in the release, even though by every technical definition it would be superior to the Novell-branded abomination currently in use?