On Jan 16, 2008, at 8:02 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
Good discussion, so I just thought I would add my 2 cents... Ubuntu, SuSe, and Red Hat have different models. SLES and SLED are targeted toward the enterprise and include support options. They are also more stable releases. The paid-for OpenSuSE includes only installation assistance.
Canonical is a commercial company that supports the Open Source Ubuntu family and provides support for a fee. I would suspect that if there were a reasonable demand, Novell could provide fee-based support services since the mechanism is there with SLED and SLES. Canonical provides 9-5 support desktop for 1 year at $ 293.76 and server support for $ 881.25. The difference is that SuSE and Red Hat both provide enterprise versions where Ubuntu provides a desktop and server version free of charge where you buy the support as an extra. The advantage of the SuSE model is that releases of OpenSuSE can be more cutting edge where releases of SLES and SLED are stable built on the experience learned from OpenSuSE. Just a different way of doing the same thing.
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SLED/SLES is worth it if you want stability and support. 3 years ago all the desktops here ran Windows. Now, more than half our desktop machines are deployed with SLED 10 SP1 or Mac OS X (and VMWare Fusion). This coincides with one production installation of SLES and five development build servers running SLES. I've only recently installed openSUSE 10.3 on my workstation just to test the latest features for use with our software in knowing that it will eventually trickle down into the Suse Enterprise versions. My first project was to port a large commercial app to SLES 9 on POWER! ;-) If you want "LTS" go for SLED or SLES. --Shawn -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org