Quote:
Originally Posted by thetank
is there extended support, as in updates, for opensuse? Also, is there phone subscription support? If yes to these two questions... If I became a direct seller of opensuse, how would I budget it?
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As noted, SLED and SLES are the Novell products which are positioned in the market for longer term support. There is a Novell forum as well that is specific to those products:
If it was openSUSE (which has a 2 year life cycle) that you were interested in, then there is detail on the openSUSE community support here:
Communicate - openSUSE where that includes:
- our community online forums;
- the community IRC chat channels
- the community Mailing lists
- various web blogs of community members,
- various social networks with sub-areas about SuSE (twitter, facebook ...etc ...)
- News portal
- other ....
In terms of Novell Support, there is limited support that comes with the openSUSE boxed DVD set, as documented here for openSUSE-11.1 :
OpenSUSE 11.1 - openSUSE where it is noted that there is free 90 day phone and email support from Novell (although that support is limited in that it has many caveats as to its scope). You can read those caveats for phone support from Novell here:
NOVELL: openSUSE: Support Requirements and here:
http://support.novell.com/products/o..._overview.html
The Novell site lists the support numbers here:
NOVELL: openSUSE: Contact Information
Note there is an active community supporting openSUSE, with many wiki and many volunteers , and many 3rd party applications packaged for openSUSE. Its because of that community, with the support given, that I myself prefer the openSUSE product over the SLED/SLES. Having typed that, some users do not like the 2 year openSUSE life cycle.
One thing that many MS-Windows users (and also many MacIntosh users) do not realize when moving to openSUSE, is the importance of the openSUSE community. The openSUSE community is a key part as to the quality of the end product, and if the community do not participate in the developement process of openSUSE, then the end product that is released is not as good. For example, the past few years, where I have been maintaining openSUSE on relative(s) computers, I have started participating in the development process, where I did not before. That is so that I can be certain that the applications that I support for my relatives, and the applications that I need to support my relatives, function in the final GM (gold mastered) release of openSUSE. .... While users are encouraged to process in the beta cycle of MS-Windows, IMHO it is much more important in Linux (than in Windows) that there is user participation.
You can read up on some openSUSE concepts here:
http://en.opensuse.org/Concepts
Again, note I am referring to openSUSE, and NOT to SLED nor SLES.