On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 11:33:11AM -0700, John Cherry wrote: > - Enterprise desktop management (configuration management, software > installations, software upgrades, integrated defect tracking, remote > management, etc.). Products exist for most/all of these > capabilities, but those considering enterprise deployments need to > be educated/convinced. > > Are we missing any other obvious inhibitors? Sometimes it is the > elephant in the room that is the most difficult to see.
Well, one potential elephant in the room issue with the enterprise desktop management may be a question of if there is any fragmentation here in how these are solved across distros? Are there steps that could be taken to ensure enterprise users have a compatible solution for these things regardless of what Linux distro(s) they're using? (I think the thing that makes this into an unmentionable elephant is that this area has a lot of quite valid value-add / competitive advantage aspects.) As an example of something we've run into at OSDL, it'd be handy to be able to do version verification/upgrade across a heterogeneous collection of distros. So when there's a bulletin that foobar-1.23 needs to be upgraded to foobar-1.23.1, some tool could translate this into the set of commands necessary to upgrade machines of distro A to 1.23.1-7, distro B to 1.24-1, get debian and gentoo resync and update, etc. OSDL is probably a corner case since by nature we run just about every distro, but the advantage of having this capability is that it reduces lock-in for the end user, and allows them flexibility in selecting distros to run (i.e., they could use distro A for servers, distro B for non-technical staff, distro C for engineers, etc.) Obviously, if I were a distro I'd want the customer to use my distro for all three use cases, but I think the ability to use the best distro for a given job class makes the most sense. Bryce _______________________________________________ Desktop_architects mailing list Desktop_architects@lists.osdl.org https://lists.osdl.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects
