The end of Scientific Linux

This is very sad, because an independent distro tied to a very long term project like the CERN Grid was very useful to have around for "continuity". But first CERN lost interest in SL, and decided to adopt CentOS, and then the end of SL was inevitable.

It is part of a general trend: universities and research organizations always cut first non-research engineering jobs, because they are "overheads", not "front line" and the result is inevitably a considerable shrinking of the ability to operate and maintain infrastructure, or later having to pay a fortune to vendors for remedial operation and maintenance.

But in the short term dumping/recycling a few (probably SL took 3-4 engineers, a drop in the ocean of HEP staff levels) staff jobs and letting a vendor fund the equivalent work seems to work.

At this point I guess that if we are to be limited to "in house" "not so independent" community distributions, OpenSUSE looks very attractive compared to CentOS, with much better support from their vendor, and much nicer update cycles, and SUSE has been growing robustly, so it is a viable long term sponsor.