If your employer is a for-profit entity, then the neo-liberal profiteer
model indicates your firm should be funding ("paying for") what it uses,
except for the neo-liberal reality of "welfare for the wealthy". As
your employer is using SL, supported from public funds in different
nations (e.g., the funders of Fermilab and CERN), perhaps assisting
setting up what would be in the USA a non-profit corporation for the
development, maintenance, and distribution (e.g., software download over
the Internet) of an "enterprise" production linux (or BSD, or ... ,
"unix" clone) would address what you describe below. This could
(should?) include various non-profit university partners. The entire
distro would be professionally developed and maintained with dedicated
professional (not amateur) staff, as is done at both Fermilab and CERN.
However, a university, or consortium thereof, cannot do this, at least
within the USA, because of the funding and revenue models. Given the
endowment of Harvard and/or Stanford in the USA, it is possible that
these entities internally could fund such a development. [Aside: It also
is likely that the PRC could (and probably) will fund such; however, any
application, firmware, etc., from the PRC owes primary allegiance, as
specified by PRC law, to the PRC totalitarian government through The
Party, and thus can only be used with great caution by those who do not
share such fealty. If you think IBM is arbitrary and capricious (as
evidenced by the CentOS reality), consider the dictates of the PRC
government.]
Outside of the conversion issues, for now, Ubuntu LTS seems to meet the
same niche as SL. There are other distros based upon Ubuntu (e.g.,
Mint), so there could be a SLubuntu that is based upon LTS. One thing I
personally would like is a LTS list that is the same as this SL list.
None of the "lists" that I have found for Ubuntu are equivalent to this
SL lists. I can elaborate upon the differences if there is any interest.
However, for SLubuntu or the like, some entity needs to provide the
level of professional staff that Fermilab/CERN provided for SL. Unlike
Fermilab that survives based upon the whim of the USA Federal government
(currently, Trump et al., decidedly pro-theocracy and anti-science, else
the USA would not be suffering from COVID-19 as it is and withdrawn from
the WHO, etc.), and may suffer the same fate as Arecibo (strictly a
matter of funding -- had the repairs and maintenance been done, rather
than "deferred maintenance", that facility would not have collapsed),
CERN appears to have a more stable funding source (by treaty or the
equivalent?). Very few if any USA universities have the same stable
funding.
Yasha Karant
On 12/9/20 7:25 AM, Larry Linder wrote:
In the early days of Windows 3.0 and OS/2. Windows 3.0 was short lived
because every user knew it was a dog.
OS/2 was pretty nice but had a fatel flaw as it only had one exit que.
i a program dies and not gracefully it was rebo0t time.
This is trivia trash but reflects on the Corporate Character of the
perpetrators.
RH 8 and Cent 8 should die quickly. The community with the support of a
stable university should restart SL.
Everytime I am forced to use Windows 10 my neurons rebel at the moron
aware SW.
If the linux community took a stable set of Linux and made 25 functional
improvement a year and I don't mean rearanging the fruniture or new eye
candy. Most of our computing OS nightmares would go away.
As an example I just opted to get a new version of VariCAD and during
installation it requested two different libc.SO's and a new C++
compiler.
Tor rebuild the libc.so for 2.15 took almost 20 minutes it worked. I
froze at rebuilding the C++ lib after looking at it.
One thing I learned from the people at "stackOverflow" was that 2.15 did
not contain all of 2.10 or 2.11 or 2.12. etc. The latest is 2.34. The
tangled web of good intentions is killing Linux.
Without the stability of RH most developers will flounder and sink. As
the supporters of GNU retire and die off - the new generation has no
desire to stay the course.
Without the long term stability the applicaions / CAD developers will
abandon it too.
The bright side is that there is no automatic self destruct mechanism in
Linux so even when the official support is ended we can still user what
we have but not be able to upgrade our applications.
We are a commercial user since SL 4. As a for profit organization the
cost of just dumping 50 systems and install new OS's and applications is
beyond our budget. A few new machines are introduced each year to
support engineering / development. Most are used in the shop / factory
as you would use a dish washer - just an appliance. The primary goal is
stability.
So the sword had many sharp edges.
My 2 Cents worth
Larry Linder
