Ché Kristo wrote: > Hi Stephen, > > A few questions: > * Wouldn't there be issues in the circumstance where a user was using > 2008.11 and wanted to stay on that release but 2009.04 was released into that > repository forcing them to upgrade. Will there be sub repository for each > release for those wishing not to track against the most current release for > whatever reason? i.e something like > http://pkg.opensolaris.org/release/2008.11/ > > * Will there be a proprietary repository for things things like Flash, > acroread, Opera, Fluendo plugins etc? > > * Any news on http://pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib/? > > Many thanks - Che > If Sun doesn't do it, some person with the means (Foreign server, like Packman on OpenSUSE) will do it. By not supporting their OS longer than 6 months with security and usability bugs, they effectively kill its usefulness in corporate environments, where full releases replacing large amounts of the desktop frameworks (Such as GStreamer, glib, GTK+) brings to surface bugs that hinder the operation of in-house custom software. Clearly assuming any company deploying more than 50 desktops will pay for support costs on a per-machine basis is ludicrous and short-sighted.
With such a bad economy, most in-house IT management is done by a small team of less than 5 people managing the whole infrastructure and not just servers, so cost effectiveness of implementing desktops at least in such environment would not be warranted, especially for companies who depend on software which most be ported by external freelance programmers, which affects available IT spending budgets. Per-site licensing that's more palatable on small to medium sized businesses has so far not been one of Sun's concerns, but hopefully is met through something comparable to Microsoft's Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) where the comparable solution would be a single system which can broadcast out the image updates, which are handled in part by those local administrators. (Packaging, quality assessment and installation) While in most cases I fear for the longevity of Sun as a company, who is dependent on such revenue, alternate ways to acquire that money should be the intention for startups, including small to medium sized businesess under 1000 employees who lack the means to do more than a given amount of its own R&D and deployment on migrating to non-Windows operating systems, as is Sun's intention. Such a risk is much more beneficial to Sun as it establishes its competitiveness with companies such as Red Hat and Novell who have already ironed out such barriers to entry. I believe that more emphasis should be given on attracting revenue from training on custom image deployment for such IT operations, which would increase the quality of what is put out in such environments to reduce the support cases involved to justify allowing such deviant uses of OpenSolaris. Commercial software repositories are something Sun has so far proven it cannot do if lack of integration with Fluendo despite Codena being ported, or Fluendo itself still not providing anything publically other than the mp3 decode is an indication. MPEG video support is quite important, and not just for the ability to play arbitrary files downloaded from the internet. There's cases where IP telephony and conferencing software could be rapidly deployed and supported on the Solaris platform, but such lack of options has kept that from happening. Internet conferencing is one of the important pieces that must be supported, and it's usually not within any smaller sized company to provide itself, rather it is expected to have been dealt with by the OS vendor itself for something as taken for granted in the modern age. James _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
