Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:
On Wednesday 15 February 2006 23:31, Hans-Peter Jansen wrote:
This is in no way an exceptable solution for anybody owning any of these
pieces. Imagine - some companies I advised Suse Linux - depend on a
e.g. working fax solution. Sure, 10.1 disqualifies in this discipline.
Why do you recommend to *companies* a product designed for home
use/enthusiasts?
Suse Linux professional for years has been used in business, with
excellent reliability. One could count on Suse Linux to work "out of the
box", and to keep running for years.
If the plan is to introduce disturbances and annoying perturbations into
Suse linux, so as to point buyers to the comparatively stale, but more
expensive enterprise offerings, that would be rather shabby.
It reminds me of the way shrink-wrapped or downloadable redhat linux
used to be used in businesses, until redhat killed off the reasonably
priced version, and pointed people to the $2500 enterprise version. They
also trotted out fedora core 1, which was basically redhat 9 + bugfixes,
and denigrated it vigorously, claiming it was only "for hobbyists", and
that any real use of linux should involve their enterprise version.
I left redhat behind, and began a massive migration to Suse in the wake
of that fiasco, so it's disturbing to begin to hear the same smug little
catchphrases and buzzwords again, that Suse linux is only for
"hobbyists", and that serious users must buy the enterprise version if
they want things to "just work", as they used to on Suse linux
professional for so many years.
Frankly, the enterprise version is rather stale, and has a lot less
software included, and also a lot less software available from 3rd party
repositories. The build toos and infrastructure has been showing it's
age as well - upgrading my Suse 10 servers to dovecot-1.0 was a snap,
but getting the rpm to build on SLES has been frustrating and fruitless
so far.
I think the popularity and good reputation of Suse linux professional
has greatly helped the sales of SLES. I fear that, as Suse linux is seen
increasingly as just another "me too" fedora-like OS, shipping with
serious regressions, and causing annoyance, disappointment and extra
work for users, that the former Suse faithful will decide to switch to
kubuntu or xandros, and in a ripple effect, the uptake of SLES will also
be adversely affected.
I certainly don't want to see that, and I certainly hope the smart
people inside Suse/Novell have a plan.
Joe
