Normally I abhor reading the mailing list because it’s tedious but one thing caught my eye after it was noted in IRC, open-slx’s Balsam Professional & Balsam Enterprise distributions which apparently are binary compatible forks of SLED/SLES.
You can read the discussion regarding the stance of some of the community members here;
[opensuse-project] Balsam Professional & Balsam Enterprise](http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2011-04/msg00290.html)
Opinions?
While I see the reasons for creating Balsam (poor support of a big German user base, the German openSUSE Wiki disaster…), I’m of course not excited at all. It’s a narrow line between symbiosis and parasitism.
Uwe
On 04/27/2011 08:32 PM, Uwe Buckesfeld wrote:
> the German openSUSE Wiki disaster…
oh? i believe was done to the english Wiki was a disaster but i hadn’t
heard the German wiki suffered also…
wait, wasn’t openslx the contractor hired by Novell to ‘upgrade’ the
wiki?? were they also paid for what was done to the German wiki??
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 + Thunderbird3.1.8 via NNTP]
HACK Everything → http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5b4CCe9pS8&NR=1
What was the German wiki disaster?
the german wiki is a disaster 
I have nothing to do with it, as I am just a user but searching in this wiki is hell on earth. Most of the time you end up typing your question into google and it finds the german wiki sites for you - faster as if you would search inside the wiki
another point is the structure of the articles - there is no… poor translation of english articles… no real structure inside the articles, sites built so poorly that you don´t wanna read them in the first place… and so on. Sometimes I feel that I also would like to help on this - I really really would like to, but I just can not figure out how I can get in touch with the coordinators for the wiki articles and so on.
I am just a normal user but I can translate pretty good from english to german and vice versa. But as I said: I can´t figure out what to do. Maybe I am also too stupid for that. But during my Ubuntu time I also translated a lot and it was pretty easy to participate…
regarding the Balsam topic:
first of all the name is totally… ehh, okay… lets leave that.
But I mean for a normal user or a small company which just wants to have a longer support time than these 18 months or so for their system, a LTS with longer support would be a good deal. I think, SLED sounds too expensive, maybe that you tie yourself into this system too much, or whatever for a lot of people and companies. Maybe also SLED is too oldfashioned for them… thats why I think, something like the old SUSE Professional would be cool. Balsam delivers that.
Personally I feel that this should rather come from the openSUSE guys themselves and not from a contractor company… don´t know…
It’s close to non-existant, IMHO.
Uwe