On Wednesday 14 March 2007, kanenas wrote: > Someone at novel must have been able to predict or even after the fact see > that removing smbfs AND usbfs support from the kernel is bound to lead into > at least some 10.2 sales losses. The fact that a recompile is required is > guarranteed to turn some customers away and both file systems are needed > for basic functionality in some major applications.
Of course this leads to a discussion of the more generic problem. Namely, that essential software simply disappears in the Linux world. Often for no reason at all, often with no warning. What is all this singing the praises of open source good for if we are dependent on Hans Reiser to stay out of jail or an entire file system goes tumbling down. Its open source for pete sake! Suse made it a mainstay, why can't they maintain it? Now smbfs, (which I admit is non-essential for (guessing) 80% of linux users simply is yanked because there were no maintainers. The source is available, it had no show-stopping bugs, and the replacement wasn't ready. Suse isn't alone in this problem, I've seen it in other distros, and even on rare occasion in windows products that Microsoft simply drops. But Open Source should not have these problems. That's why its open. Anybody can pick it up and maintain it. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen
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