openSUSE will shorten the maintenance period to 2 versions plus 2months [18 months]

[jmartini]

> Change in maintenance for openSUSE 11.2 and future versions
> "With regards to the discontinuation mail for openSUSE 10.3 [1]
> sent out by Marcus the other day I'd like to clarify the changes
> in the maintenance period of openSUSE.
>
> openSUSE will shorten the maintenance period to 2 versions plus 2 months
> which translates with the current release cycle of 8 months to 18 months
> instead of 24 months we had with openSUSE 11.1 and previous releases."

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-a.../msg00009.html

[Chrysantine]

Everyone's been asking for LTS style versions so what do they do?

They cut the support even shorter. I guess they really want to kill any business interest in running the open versions - too bad it'll most likely cause those unwilling to fork out money to bleed to other systems like U/LTS or Cent. Great strategy.

[RedDwarf]

Everyone asks for everything...
- Larger support time, but without affecting the support quality of latest versions. That probably means more payed programmers are needed, but we want it for free.
- Maintained KDE3, but without affecting KDE4 quality.
- More work in fixing bugs, but with the same rate of new features.
- The latest versions but with max stability.
- Older, stable kernels but with drivers for the latest hardware.

...you know, Novell must pay all that work.
Ubuntu LTS? Latest I know is that Canonical still doesn't makes money from that.
CentOS? From what I understand they just take RHEL sources, remove Red Hat logos, and recompile. You can do the same with SLE sources...

You know, *Novell* isn't going to support openSUSE for two years. That doesn't means that Microsoft, Canonical, LG, your own business... or the community can't provide support for five years if they want.
Novell is free to do whatever they think is better for them. If someone thinks openSUSE needs a larger support time... just provide it.
I (not working for Novell) have enough making the packages from OBS under my responsibility compile on openSUSE 10.3 right now when I always use the latest stable version. So I'm not interested in providing such support. But one would argue that there is some correlation between the number of people/business needing that support and the number of people/business willing to provide it, so...

[Chrysantine]

...you know, Novell must pay all that work.

They don't seem to have issues taking other peoples work and selling it as their own?

Ubuntu LTS? Latest I know is that Canonical still doesn't makes money from that.

Your point being? At least they're offering one.

CentOS? From what I understand they just take RHEL sources, remove Red Hat logos, and recompile. You can do the same with SLE sources...

Not really, because Novell does not offer full SLES source code for download.

You know, *Novell* isn't going to support openSUSE for two years.

Microsoft offers 10+ years of support for their products for the same cost as one version of boxed openSUSE. What's your point again?

Novell is free to do whatever they think is better for them.

Sorry I poked your fanboy hive. I'll try not to do that again.

[malcolmlewis]

> CentOS? From what I understand they just take RHEL sources, remove Red
> Hat logos, and recompile. You can do the same with SLE sources...
Not really, because Novell does not offer full SLES source code for
download.

Hi
Form my SLED system I have the source code, for SLES
SLES-11-DVD-x86_64-GM-DVD2.iso contains the source code?

Along with any updates I can download the built rpm as well as the
updated src rpm.

--
Cheers Malcolm ��� (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 (i586) Kernel 2.6.31-rc5-git3-2-desktop
up 12:48, 2 users, load average: 0.16, 0.18, 0.19
ASUS eeePC 1000HE ATOM N280 1.66GHz | GPU Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME

[chief_sealth]

Microsoft offers 10+ years of support for their products for the same cost as one version of boxed openSUSE. What's your point again?

10 years? I don't know where you get that information. I believe it's usually five to seven years, but people lay down hundreds of dollars for Windows in the first place. openSUSE is free, or the boxed version is $50. MS can absorb the costs much easier than Novell can.

[chief_sealth]

I wonder what direction Novell is going. Laying off openSUSE developers last year, now this. On the other hand, the Studio has a lot of promise and I'm sure they hope to bring a lot of people over to their OS. Some people don't see Novell as an open source company, but their contributions are hard to dispute. They're no Sun, but look what happened to that company.

[RedDwarf]

Hi
Form my SLED system I have the source code, for SLES
SLES-11-DVD-x86_64-GM-DVD2.iso contains the source code?

Along with any updates I can download the built rpm as well as the
updated src rpm.

He probably means that Red Hat provides public access to the SRPMs of updates. Novell only provides such access to people with a subscription (isn't a GPL violation since you only need to provide sources to people to which you provide binaries).

But that doesn't really matters. CentOS isn't done by a single person, neither a SLE's equivalent would do. A group of people willing to provide it would just require a single subscription and then they could redistribute them so many times like they would like. They could even get the money for that single subscription from donations to the project.
From a quick look it seems the cheaper option is 720€/3years = 240€/year. Note that this isn't the only cost of a CentOS-like project...

[BenderBendingRodriguez]

I see nothing wrong with that, at least there will be less BUGs to concentrate on, less costs to maintain repositories,
less bandwidth, less to maintain, Novell CEO happy

[oldcpu]

It would be nice if the openSUSE community could partly mitigate this 2 version plus 2 month policy by supporting (for 3rd party packages) the older openSUSE versions a bit longer .... say support 1 or 2 versions longer (I propose support for 4 versions). I note the repos for 10.2 is still up on packman, albeit there are not many packages packaged any more for 10.2: Index of /pub/linux/misc/packman/suse

But that is really up to the volunteers, who can advise as to the impact on their time such additional support requirements will have. Also, will the build service support such older versions?