OT: linux overhead (was: Re: OT: printing filepro on SERIAL PORT Linux)

[Brian K. White]

On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 22:10 -0500, D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
>   > Oh, my gosh folks, you'll have to excuse me. I've got to go and tell all
>  > our Fedora Core clients that they are going to have to stop using their
>  > BackupEDGE products, right now.
>  >
>  > When they ask me why, I guess I'll tell them that I was reading the
>  > filePro mailing list and Enrique Arredondo wrote...
>  >
>  >> "(Now I wonder why Microlite's BE won't support Fedora Core AT ALL!!)"
>  >
>  > So it must be true.
>  >
>  > Cheers to all, and Merry Christmas.
>  >
>  > Tom
>  
>  I think I misunderstood this from your website, sorry about 
>  that.ftp://ftp.microlite.com/support/rhfedora.ts.txt
> 
> You've got me there, Henry. We've messed up.
> 
> That text is, of course, directly at odds with our home page, which
> currently states:
> 
>   "Now certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Fedora Core 5, Novell
>   SUSE Linux 9.x and 10.x Desktop and Server on IA32, EM64T and AMD64."
>  
> and our Linux 2.6 / page (on the link whose title on the home page is:
> "Linux 2.6 Kernel and Fedora Support Information"), which amplifies...
> 
>   "Later releases also add support for Fedora (Core 3, Core 4, and Core 5),
>    with the following limitations:"
> 
>   "Because of the frequency of updates to Fedora, support is on a "best
>    effort" basis. While we will make every effort to keep up with the
>    latest patches to it, we cannot guarantee that they will not be
>    introduced faster than we can qualify them."
> 
> Despite our feelings and Red Hat's statements on Fedora, we saw that clients
> viewed it as Red Hat 10 and were going to deploy it anyway. So we bit the
> bullet and started supporing it at Core 3, when we brought out our first
> 2.6 kernel support at the 2.6.9 level (I wouldn't give you a plugged nickel
> for any 2.6 kernel prior to that). That was in 02.01.02, April 2005.
> 
> I'd have been very grateful if you'd pointed that old link in the support
> database out in an email, since we obviously missed it. I appreciate knowing
> about it now: we'll push an update to the web site on Monday morning to
> delete it.
> 
> 
> 
> We currently have Fedora Core 6 in the lab, and have 32 and 64 bit Suse 10.2
> CDs and DVDs in transit for certification. We're aware of a change in
> disaster recovery for FC6 (and that seems to have propogated back to
> the latest FC5 updates) that must be addressed. It's listed in the kernel
> sites as a bug, so we're not sure whether to write around it or wait for
> new kernel patches to be released, and test it then.

All this having to constantly keep up with a wheelbarrow full of
different dists each with their own pile of versions in use
is a perfect example of the overhead of linux.

I'm guilty myself using suse but really only because sco killed
themselves, not for the typical reasons everyone else rushed to it (or
grew up on it never having seen anything else in person)

Each one of those dists probably needs almost as much work as one whole
traditional platform like osr5 or aix, etc...
Maybe a little less since all the linux ones will have some things in
common, but then thats probably offset by the fact that each linux dist
changes a lot more often than any of the commercial platforms ever did.

so I can only assume that one of these is true:
* you hired more staff to keep the quality, thoroughness, testing, rate
of product development all up to par and had to jack up the price.
* the staff and the price stayed the same and something about the
product now suffers compared to before. be it the perfection and
thoroughness of the app itself, rate of development, quality of support
(for an os that was just released a few weeks ago how in depth and
arcane can the support possibly get compared to osr5 that changed so
rarely)
* the staff and quality of the app and quality of support and product
development and price of the app all stayed the same and you are working
like a dog 23.5 hours a day now.

I don't like any of those.
-bkw