Am Samstag, 10. September 2005 23:13 schrieb Eberhard Moenkeberg:
Hi,
On Sat, 10 Sep 2005, Marcel Volz wrote:
Am Samstag, 10. September 2005 16:37 schrieb Pascal Bleser:
Marcel Volz wrote:
What about a openSUSE Server Version, just like CentOS or Whitebox ? Perhaps with the same core as SLES? Is there a chance that Novell or openSUSE release such a distribution?
Novell does, it's called SLES.
But it's not OpenSource! I like SLES very much and work with it very often. I would like to see a OpenSource Enterprise Server based on my favourite distribution.
SLES is always based on SUSE-Linux. SLES9 is deerived from SUSE-9.1. SLES10 will be derived from SUSE-10.x.
The point is that i don't get security updates, bugfixes, maybe ServicePacks for SUSE-Linux, but for SLES.
I'm not at Novell and i don't know how much Novell earn with each SLES license, but I don't think that this is much. Maybe much more could be earned if there is a open source version and the additional services would be sold. With the Open Source Version there could be a much more widespread. But that's only my opinion.
How would you define "open source maintenance"? You can download SLES-9 from novell.com for free (and even get a 30-days maintenance), but after evaluation, you have to pay if you want to get further maintenance. And: you would have to pay just for maintenance, nothing more. Totally transparent to me, the maintainers need their payment, and Novell lacks the license to print money.
The listprice for a 2 CPU i386 SLES is about 350 € + yearly maintanence. The price for a Novell Open Enterprise Server 5 User is € 1.120,00 + yearly maintance. I think if there are more SLES (maybe for free) there will be much more people/business which are intererested in and will buy OpenEnterprise Servers and additional services. So Novell could pay the mantainers (and everybody is happy?!).
But feel free to start a new SUSE variant specialized on servers and based on SUSE Linux 10.0, just like Andreas Girardet does with SUPER: http://opensuse.org/SUPER That's what "openSUSE" is really about ;)
Maybe I think about it. But I don't know if it make sense. For a "Enterprise Distribution" you need a long lifecycle, reliable security update and bugfixes, hardware and software certification and much more. I don't think that a community could do this.
The "long lifecycle" is just the point where most competent expert work is needed. This has to get payed, or it will disappear...
I agree with you. Even the Debian Project with many hundreds of developers (with many high skilled) has some problems with their security updates. I think that making patches for software that is many years old is not very much fun :-) But if we could have the srpms from SLES we could recompile them, use them for a openSUSE Server, similar to CentOS. That would much less work. All we need then is a infrastructure for this and some people who mantain this. At the CentOS Website there are 10 named people which form the CentOS team. (But I think there are more behind.) -- Marcel Volz