java again really

[Les Mikesell]

Craig White wrote:

>>>>> Peter's assertion is surely clear enough, that Fedora does have
>>>>> community participation and you can join the development group to help
>>>>> guide the packaging, at least to become involved in the process but
>>>>> clearly you want this ability without the commitment. Some people choose
>>>>> to curse the darkness and some choose to light candles.
>>>> I'm not interested in helping a distribution become self-contained and a 
>>>> limited subset of what it could be if it simply cooperated with 
>>>> independent 3rd parties.
>>> ----
>>> and the likelihood that you will still be on this list 2 years from now,
>>> cursing the same darkness and lighting no candles?
>> That depends on what changes, of course. The only way a candle could be 
>> lit would be to change policy, which isn't something I can do. My main 
>> reasons for caring about fedora at all is that it historically is a 
>> preview of what RHEL/Centos will be in the next release and it shares 
>> the same administration style.  If their courses continue to diverge in 
>> ways like the Sun jvm inclusion in RHEL, jpackage breakage in fedora 
>> there won't be a compelling reason to deal with the usability issues. Or 
>> if my company finds a better alternative for the server side to replace 
>> RHEL/Centos (and we do have someone promoting Suse), then the 
>> administrative similarities will no longer be interesting.  But, I sort 
>> of expect the same old things to continue and it might be inconvenient 
>> to get the support contracts for some software moved over to a different OS.
> ----
> SuSE, Ubuntu offers SLA's
> 
> How many systems/entitlements do you manage that have RHEL/WS SLA's
> anyway? Perhaps you can get Red Hat's attention.

I'm sure its not enough to matter to anyone.  We only get OS support in 
the cases where it is a requirement for commercial support for an 
individual application like our main subversion repository.  On the 
larger server farms (e.g. http://www.quote.com) the main attraction of 
linux is being able to clone as many copies as we need without 
additional cost or license tracking.  The developers are all running 
windows which, of course, doesn't matter for java.  I'd just like to see 
more than the web front ends and a few internal servers running Linux 
and don't expect it to happen without better desktop usability for the 
developers and/or large and measurable network performance improvements 
compared to 64-bit windows with the high-end Intel cards.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com