Am Montag, 20. Februar 2006 08:07 schrieb Silviu Marin-Caea:
On Sunday 19 February 2006 19:50, houghi wrote:
On Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 11:00:34AM -0500, Joseph M. Gaffney wrote:
You mean, SLES is not a home use desktop product - SUSE Linux *is* a home use desktop product.
I thought it was already stated here that there are businesses that use SUSE and very happily.
To each his own. Those businesses do it on their own responsibility.
The categories are clear:
1. The consumer product: SUSE Linux - home user, "tech enthusiast"
2. The business products: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Novell Open Enterprise Server Novell Linux Desktop
You can build your own plane with a car engine, and it can fly. Maybe you can fly it alone on your own risk, but I doubt it would be wise to start selling flight tickets to the public.
:-)
Considering they all use a common code base, the analogy doesn't work very well... I would compare it more to flying with a budget airline or flying with a "real" airline, you get the service and extras you pay for. SUSE Linux will work fine for smaller businesses, and the reduced costs can be the determining factor if the budget is tight (a couple of hundred € or less (or even free) for SL, a couple of grand for SLES and NLD rollout and several grand for Windows Server and XP rollout). But, if they have problems, they are on their own, unless they buy additional support. SLES and NLD have better business support options, are more controlled and easier to configure and rollout large installations. A company with half a dozen workstations and a print/file server just don't need all the extras that SLES brings, the samba server is a doddle to install and just sits in the corner for months on end without anyone touching it, apart from backups. If they have hundreds of users and dozens of servers, then yes, SLES isn't going to be the answer. But if the company started small with SL, they might very well switch to SLES and NLD as their userbase grows... And they'll probably need more help managing and configuring such a large userbase, which is when they will really need that additional support. Dave -- "I got to go figure," the tenant said. "We all got to figure. There's some way to stop this. It's not like lightning or earthquakes. We've got a bad thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change." - The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck