On 9/21/2010 5:04 PM, Brian K. White wrote:
I see plenty of opportunity for conflicts of interest to the detriment of opensuse and any users of it. I see plenty of prior examples that showed me the hard way what to worry about, not because I'm all that much of a worrier in general.
So I say it's exactly the right time to think about things like, why do you use opensuse now? What might be vmwares motives wrt opensuse? Of the key points that cause you to use opensuse, are those points possibly met elsewhere such as centos or ubuntu ?
Personally, I chose opensuse for my company (this means all production application service boxes as well as all other backup and special purpose boxes like hylafax servers etc...) for several reasons. Some of those initial reasons have since become untrue, but the remainder have remained. I no longer think it's the "best engineered" distribution. I no longer get much value out of yast. And with this news I can't exactly continue to think it has the highest probability of staying the same over time. Switching to the 6 month release cycle has already almost killed me. It means now, _most_ of my live production boxes have _no_ official repos for me to install the occasional new requirement from. Lucky me I've been maintaining my own mirror of every version I've used along the way. I haven't gotten a functional bootloader install out of the installer in years and I always have to do it myself from a shell in the installer, except in the dead simple and utterly useless case of a single-drive-desktop. The installer now installs a kernel that is broken for server use, no matter even if you select the text-only minimal system install.
But I have found tolerable ways to deal with the bootloader and kernel-default vs kernel-desktop.
And opensuse build service is AMAZING.
SuseStudio is AMAZING.
I think rpms and the obs are way easier to use than the ubuntu launchpad ppa, and I don't know if redhat/centos even has an equivaent of the obs let along susestudio. obs and kiwi are open source so one could be set up, but how much of the amazingness is the web front ends? How much of that is available to copy or easy to re-implement?
So in my case I'm not actually doing much just yet. But I AM at least thinking ahead. For my usage, I think my best bet if I were to switch would be to Centos. I should and shall invest some time evaluating Centos and maybe others from the redhat family, and perhaps one or more of the debian family. And perhaps, since I already have to do so much myself anyways, maybe for me there is really no longer very much value in a full service distribution like suse anyways and I should just move to arch or gentoo. More responsibility but more flexibility.
The point is the initial news about the sale is EXACTLY a valid reason to begin this kind of preparing, and now is EXACTLY the time to at least start this kind of thinking.
Not necessarily to do anything. You need a little more cause than that. But neither is it smart to just pretend all is well.
Spot on. If Vmware buys the linux portions, Its been my observation that they are not particularly evil, and have a history of providing free platforms (vmware server vmware player) in support of their paid packages (Workstation) and their high end bare metal software. On the other hand Oracle is also mentioned, and if that comes to pass I'm gone. RedHat is also mentioned, and you know damn well they would more or less shutter SLES/SLED and probably jettison OpenSuee. They have done this with their own community before. So I do have to plan ahead, and I have customers running SLES today that have no clue this is coming down the pike at them. Chances are they will be just fine because SLES makes money. Someone has managed to force a cancellation of a Webinar by Don Chapman, former President of Novell Canada. Wagons being circled: http://forums.novell.com/novell-community-forums-stuff/community-chat/421211... It may not happen at all. And the software will continue to run just fine even if Novell ceases to be. No reason to rush into anything. But If I worked for OpenSuse I would be at LEAST contemplating a Fork, just as a user I'm contemplating different distros. -- _____________________________________ At one time I had a Real Sig. Its been downsized. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org