Per, On Tuesday 21 June 2005 00:19, Per Jessen wrote:
Randall R Schulz wrote:
...
My employer runs its huge fleet of production Linux systems on RHEL3. Sadly, we have to use the same for development, which irks me, but I live with it.
To some extent I can't help thinking that the various "enterprise" versions are nothing more than a safety-blanket for pointy-haired managers.
They're not something for which I feel a need, but I'm not responsible for mission-critical operations. When we have significant outages, people lose their jobs. Since we do a lot of on-line business, a down system is lost sales and possibly lost customers. The head honchos at my place take such things very, very seriously.
Again, SuSE Professional is a leading-edge distribution. If you have these requirements, then it's a dubious choice to use such a distribution instead of one of the more stable enterprise counterparts.
What did people do _before_ the enterprise versions came about? Did we all run dubious systems? Most systems here are based on SuSE 8.2, one or two are still 7.3, and I think one or two non-critical boxes might be on 9.0 by now. There's little bleeding edge around here.
Keep in mind Linux is young. It's the youngest OS used supporting large-scale commercial operations. Before there were supported, more heavily tested enterprise distributions, end users were accepting much more of the responsibility of keeping a Linux system going. This is not a good way to promote an OS and people like the founders of RedHat and SuSE saw the opportunity to sustain and promote Linux and do so in a profitable way. And here we are. I pretty much trust the people at SuSE and appreciate their work. That's why I buy my distributions and do so regularly. That's also why I apply YOU patches regularly (while paying attention to just what I'm applying).
/Per Jessen, Zürich
Randall Schulz