Enterprise distributions suck and free software rules [LWN.net]

Enterprise distributions suck and free software rules

Posted Mar 8, 2011 20:43 UTC (Tue) by lmb (subscriber, #39048)
In reply to: Enterprise distributions suck and free software rules by airlied
Parent article: Enterprise distributions and free software

QA cycles can be shortened. That is "merely" an engineering problem that can be solved: automation, parallelization, smarter tests, and better test plans. Not to mention better code review. There's a whole stack of books on continuous delivery & deployment out there in your library.

And even if the test cases were only run for, say, for every three upstream releases, I postulate that this would a) greatly reduce the chance that relevant regressions get introduced, b) even rev'ing the "enterprise" kernels every three upstream kernel releases would already be a huge boost over rev'ing them every 3 years.

I'd never have expected that, of all people, the _Linux_ folks would be the ones to claim that Linux/OSS can't work in an mission-critical environment but needs to be curtailed to a legacy "enterprise" model! I'm truly amazed.

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Enterprise distributions suck and free software rules

Posted Mar 9, 2011 4:22 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

I think you are missing a large point, if you have competent admins, and I stress admins, (having one super-hero admin is a really bad business decision and you deserve your whitebox+Linus solution to fail hard when your admin has some life altering event), then you can totally deploy Linus tree into mission critical places. Google, facebook etc are prime examples of this, even though google might be a few kernels back they are getting closer to mainline. However if you have management or admins who like to spend time with their kids/families then you have to have some sort of support place you can call and someone you can blame. Now the company providing that service cannot provide bespoke Linus kernels every 3 months, it just isn't practical.

Enterprise distros also have a whole bunch of certifications (government, application) etc that it isn't feasible to redo every 3-6 mths it can takes a year or so to get some of them finished.

Enterprise distributions suck and free software rules

Posted Mar 9, 2011 4:27 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"QA cycles can be shortened. That is "merely" an engineering problem that can be solved: automation, parallelization, smarter tests, and better test plans. Not to mention better code review. There's a whole stack of books on continuous delivery & deployment out there in your library."

If you can make this model work, you have a brilliant edge over the competition. Feel free to try.

"I'd never have expected that, of all people, the _Linux_ folks would be the ones to claim that Linux/OSS can't work in an mission-critical environment but needs to be curtailed to a legacy "enterprise" model! I'm truly amazed."

Linux can certainly work in a mission critical environment. The debate is not about that at all but whether the current enterprise model is legacy or necessary. I would say that it is possible to tweak the model and vendors occasionally do that but it is not going to go away unless some vendor decides to provide a sustainable alternative.