Security Support for Debian 3.1 to be terminated

Security Support for Debian 3.1 to be terminated

Posted Mar 3, 2008 22:57 UTC (Mon) by vmole (subscriber, #111)
In reply to: Security Support for Debian 3.1 to be terminated by sbergman27
Parent article: Security Support for Debian 3.1 to be terminated

Of course the human resource is the biggest cost in any large installation. But those costs are ongoing regardless of the distribution, and it is not unreasonable that for a large installation, the cost of an upgrade every three years instead of six is evaluated as being less than the cost of "Enterprise Class" OS licenses. And while support contracts may be desirable to some enterprise customers, to some they're not. They have in-house expertise, and while the vendor license isn't a big fraction of the total cost, it is, to some, pure waste.

(Originally, I wrote a few paragraphs arguing about the Debian upgrades were definitely smoother and easier than RH. But then we'd just end up arguing details and preferences, so why bother.)

To operate in that capacity, the distro maintainers must give enterprise customers what they want.

Debian maintainers give its customers *exactly* what they want. That's because Debian maintainers *are* the customers. Some of them work for large enterprises, and some of them don't. The fact that many others find the distribution useful is a bonus. But they're not the customers. That's the whole point: Debian is NOT a commercial distribution. If Debian is not suitable for your purposes, DON'T USE IT. I don't care.

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