On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 02:32:35AM -0800, Jon R. Doyle wrote: > OK, but if I bought SuSE and (SLES comes with support) I would not expect > anything from Redhat. You, or Florian rather are just saying that RH has > support, that right? If this is the case it would help to say that you > offer it like SuSE and Turbo, nothing new, it seemed like the message was > saying somehow RH only has support. Redhat is new to zSeries/enterprise > (Itanium,iSeries,pSeries etc). The messae seemed to indicate that it > (Redhat) was capable of something new.
Hello Jon Doyle, maybe my email sounded strange as I indeed wanted to point out that a real Open Source development makes a real huge difference to the support and service you are getting from a Linux vendor. The other part is of course also true: If you think Red Hat Linux is a good platform and you want to have support, we'll be glad to offer it. While the second thing is done by many companies, the first part is often done wrong. I have created the first version of SuSE Linux 4.2 and have been working on the core part for many years. My personal understanding is that I have been able to deliver a stable core system by maintaining a real Open Source Linux version called "jurix Linux" and then pushing the stabilized versions into SuSE Linux. I enjoy the huge developer community behind Red Hat Linux and the close cooperation with Internet-style and Open Source style development at Red Hat. I concur with you that the s390 support in Red Hat Linux has just seen its first product and s390 support is still under development. I'll be glad to improve it as long as Red Hat management decides to invest on this as important platform for Open Source software. I know SuSE has done a real lot of work for the install process as well as many other parts of their distribution and have good results to show. Red Hat is pushing this a bit further by providing their complete distribution as Open Source and allowing anybody in the devel community to use it or even try to compete with Red Hat here. Many other distros are in fact based on Red Hat Linux and this is a good thing for Red Hat as well as the devel community and in my belief also for customers. Not doing this correctly means the devel community will be glad to live without you and I do question what you are then delivering to your customers. :-) SuSE is doing these things mostly correct and I hope they are doing the right decisions to keep things that way. Many things can be said about the current products from SuSE and from Red Hat and they both have pros and cons. This is not what I am talking about. My own focus is to drive the development of a Linux distribution and doing this with Open Source methods seems the appropriate way of doing this, just like for the Linux kernel. Providing current sources on the ftp server is a key thing for this, otherwise you are doing something else. While it is easy to come up with a Linux distribution on your own and keep updating that for a long time, I see it as something completely different if the devel community is part of your development effords. Excuse my frank words, Florian *speaking for myself* La Roche
