Anders Johansson wrote:
On Sunday 20 August 2006 22:03, John Andersen wrote:
SuSE's 8 month release schedule has always been something of a mixed blessing. It kept your machines current when kernel development was fast and furious, but it is the bane of the corporate world, the very market that Marcus indicates is Novell's big concern.
Ubuntu is shouting about their Long Term Support, Quoting: "Ubuntu is freely available, including security updates for five years on servers, with no restrictions on usage and no requirement to purchase support contracts or subscriptions per deployment.".
In my market, (mostly small businesses) deploying SLES, which will be obsolete in two or three years VS Ubuntu with 5 years guaranteed support becomes harder to justify.
Not sure what you mean here. SLES has a guaranteed support life span of seven years
And it will cost $2,095 per server for those 7 years, just for the privilege of SLES. (Three years of updates for SLES is $873, one year is $349, vs. $0 for Ubuntu and Debian) You're missing the key. It's not SLES vs. Microsoft. It's SLES vs. OpenSUSE vs. Ubuntu vs. Debian. I certainly can't justify the extra thousands per server of SLES over the others to my boss. OpenSUSE, if the trend of 10.1 continues, will be too suspect to run on production servers, just like Fedora. If that's the case, I'll be moving to Ubuntu or Debian, and so will an awful lot of others. I know of several that have already made the switch. Between 10.1 and the announcement of GPL-only in OpenSUSE, I'm getting the impression that Novell execs have gotten it into their head that they can drive OpenSUSE customers to switch to SLES/SLED. It's easy to imagine the pointy-haired guy in the suit with his big chart of SLES/D customers and OpenSUSE users and how if he moves them from one to the other, then it will generate this massive revenue... RedHat made that decision, and now their being marginalized by the first newcomer to come around with a slick interface. I will say it point-blank: SUSE is superior to Ubuntu. It's far more mature, yast makes everything nice and consistent, AppArmor is a definite plus, and overall, is simply better (aside from the abomination of zen/rug). But it doesn't matter. Ubuntu is going incredibly far on sheer style points alone. I would love to be able to afford those support contracts, but I don't have the budget. I do have the budget to buy a few SuSE boxed sets every release or more often every other release (given my upgrade times, I usually skip a release)