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OpenSUSE maint. period: 18 months, Release schedule: 8 months

Posted Aug 16, 2009 18:07 UTC (Sun) by dmantione (guest, #4640)
In reply to: OpenSUSE maint. period: 18 months, Release schedule: 8 months by socket
Parent article: OpenSUSE cuts maintenance period to 18 months

I'd rather see some people step forward that start working on updates for
old OpenSUSE releases rather than canibalize on the work Novell is doing
to maintain their enterprise releases.

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Posted Aug 18, 2009 20:45 UTC (Tue) by socket (guest, #43) [Link]

You know, I wouldn't mind stepping up to do that work, but that would probably require more of a time commitment than I can make without it being my day job. Good maintenance is more than just minimal security updates, after all.

Now, if Novell (or anyone else) would like to hire me to help them extend the maintenance period of OpenSUSE, I'd take that job.

Why would they pay?

Posted Aug 18, 2009 21:26 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Novell paying to extend the maintenance period of OpenSUSE would be like KFC paying you to shoot, cook, and give away wildfowl outside their restaurants, or like Red Hat paying for longer maintenance of Fedora. The key to making business users go for an "enterprise" distribution instead of the "community" distribution is that the community distribution will be EOL before a customer can complete an IT project using it.