On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Troy Benjegerdes <[email protected]> wrote:
> As a business owner (farming and technology consulting), I have the
> following suggestions:
>
> 1) educate business owners on the benefits of the Debian distribution
> to allow long-term (30 year) support with no forced upgrades.
>
> 2) provide community support for 18 months
>
Probably be 36 months or so.
>
> 3) distribution support for the distribution's term
>
> 4) Provide offers for long-term support contracts (based on Debian)
> so that I, as a business owner, have a full, up-front accounting of
> the NPV of running whatever version I happen to be running on the
> latest 'community' supported version/distribution combo.
>
I think one has to understand though what the cost of running an accounting
system on a computer for 30 years is.
As background I want to say I have a tendency to run computers for insanely
long times. My firewall ran a Pentium 1 chip until the chip and hard drive
both gave out in 2006 several years after the fan stopped running. The
computer would have been at least 12 years old and the approach to
firewalling that I took with that system is similar to what I would take in
other areas today.
Similarly I have been running Linux servers since 1999, and have some ideas
of how security concerns have changed in that time.
With our current codebase, the basic problems you will run into are as
follows:
1: If you don't upgrade components, you set yourself at risk for security
issues.
2: If you do upgrade your software components but not your hardware
components, eventually you may find that the hardware just isn't sufficient.
3: If you upgrade your hardware components but not your software
components, eventually you may find that the software won't run on the
newer hardware and then you will be forced to upgrade.
I don't doubt that in some cases, a well engineered server might run with
minimal interruption for 15 to 20 years, but beyond that I would begin to
doubt that.
>
>
> As some background: I can buy a 30 year old combine for around $5,000,
> and then fix it up, and the quality of the grain it harvests is exactly
> the same as a brand-new $250,000 John Deere.
>
This is true. But they operate in very different environments. I doubt
any server hardware of today will get 30 years of life and so the complex
interactions between software and hardware have the potential to be
somewhat problematic.
>
> In 30 years I expect to be fabricating silicon for replacement CAN
> controllers because at some point I'll be able to pick up some combines
> that are fully functional, except for lack of a chip that nobody makes
> anymore.
>
>
> I would really like to see a 30 year NPV calculation of the total cost
> of ownership of an up-front investment of say $10,000 in ledger-smb
> consulting and setup, and running it for 30 years, vs what the NPV of
> the upgrade treadmill of windows/macos/cloud hosting/quickbooks/whatever.
>
It would be interesting to look at this in terms of both upgrading and
non-upgrading. Obviously upgrading too often increases the total cost of
ownership, but not upgrading often enough may do the same.
>
>
> I think the formal 'end of life' proposal is that there *is* no end
> of life, so long as you are happy with how everything works, and
> understand you need to run this system on an isolated network that is
> firewalled by something that *does* get security upgrades.
>
This is true, and is largely the point made above.
FWIW, I don't envision turning anyone away from my own consulting services
for running software that is too old. The thing is that at a certain point
there are additional costs that get incurred and as a consultant I would be
remiss if I did not advise my clients that an upgrade might save them money
and hassle in the long run.
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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