> 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.”
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.
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…
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.
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.
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…
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
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?
I cannot unless I fork out money for SLES. If you wish to provide us with all the RPMS/SRPMS for all the updates for SLES I’d be more than happy to receive them and re-distribute them forward.
Hi
LOL, think I would get into big trouble with that one but with SLED
and the SDK you get most of the good stuff for SLES and updates.
To be honest, it works out cheaper with SLED on a per year basis if I
was buying a boxed set of openSuSE every release, so I’m just getting
one when I update my SLED update fee.
I’ve thought about SLED a couple of times, but never seriously considered SLED, because when I looked for 3rd party packages, I note openSUSE with Packman (and also with many other 3rd party repos for openSUSE) has a far better selection than what is available for SLED. Yes, often an openSUSE variant will run on SLED, but not always.
The lack of packman (and other 3rd party repos) direct support for SLED always has, and probably always will be, the main reason why I will never even consider SLED.
Hi
OBS has made a significant change from my point of view as I can just
build or link to others and create on my SLE repository. Also now that
susestudio is available I can roll a custom version of SLED for my
requirements which is my plan after 11.2 release.
I gave up the codec war and just purchased the fluendo codec bundle and
dvd player, along with handbrake (my build) it’s three rpms to install
and everything works from the multimedia point of view. I just dump the
rpms in a local directory repository and either use yast or zypper to
install.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.2 Milestone 5 (i586) Kernel 2.6.31-rc5-git3-2-desktop
up 0:14, 2 users, load average: 0.24, 0.24, 0.19
ASUS eeePC 1000HE ATOM N280 1.66GHz | GPU Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME
Ik think this is a very bad choice. A new release every 12 months with more focus on stability would be much better. Also less reposistries to maintain.
The longer support time was one of the reasons for my switching from Ubuntu to opensuse. That advantage is gone now.
18 months isn’t that bad for someone like us, who uses this as a desktop and we administrate our own computer but it becomes a problem. They can’t extend the support time on every version cause that just isn’t possible, it’s a waste of resources. I think the best compromise is an ubuntu style “LTS”. Have a certain version of openSUSE let’s say the .0 release have a longer the usual support time maybe 2.5 years. That way people like me can update every 8 months when the new version and people with servers or people who are supporting others have a version with a longer support time.
openSUSE is not like Fedora that it introduces changes that will completely break some people’s system. openSUSE moves forward but at such pace that it won’t lose it’s tail lol!
Of course it is a burden upgrading the system every 18 months but what is the point of running legacy applications :)?? Since running older system you’ll more likely encounter some incompatibilities with newer software
but with SLED