Comments on: Guest Blog: Much Ado about Nothing – Except Choice

By: Michael Applebaum

Michael Applebaum — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 20:12:33 +0000

A Linux User:

We publish the source RPM's for our complete products and our individual maintenance updates to paying customers and others with a subscription. However, that was not my point. What customers and partners care most about is being able to review changes to the kernel and other packages over time, to understand how updates might impact a production environment.

Unlike Red Hat, Novell publishes the full patches of all packages including the kernel in a consumable and traceable way to customers and partners. And unlike Red Hat, Novell publishes the full development path of our kernel and other key components, which are open to everyone.

We publish both the binaries and sources for SUSE Linux Enterprise products on http://download.novell.com/index.jsp , and they are available for free to everyone. (Try finding Red Hat's product binaries or sources without a subscription – not easy.) Anyone interested in the quality of our maintenance support can get a free 60-day evaluation subscription of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server at http://bit.ly/ekOCNU .

In addition, I'll note that our enterprise products are based on openSUSE, and for anyone interested in our packages, the openSUSE Build Service provides a great way to follow and participate in the development of the packages that ultimately go into SUSE Linux Enterprise products.

Michael

By: Lenz Grimmer

Lenz Grimmer — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 22:36:19 +0000

FWIW, the git source trees including all patches of the Oracle Linux Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (and several other OSS projects) are available from here:

http://oss.oracle.com/git/

(Disclaimer: I work in the Oracle Linux Team)

By: A Linux User

A Linux User — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 02:01:32 +0000

Michael -

I think you have to answer Chris's question about "where can you find the patches for SLES". You are sidestepping it and that does show any trustworthiness in your original post.

Red Hat puts out the patches on a regular basis upstream and since Novell does have folks working on the kernel, it is easy for them to discern the differences – trivially.

Please do not obfuscate the issue.

Thanks.

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By: John Nash

John Nash — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 05:28:33 +0000

It is perhaps inappropriate to criticize Red Hat's source code policies when Novell's (and even SuSE's before its acquisition) are considerably more restrictive? There is a reason why Centos exists and "Slentos" does not... Thanks, -John

By: Michael Applebaum

Michael Applebaum — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:25:48 +0000

Jeremy, there are certainly mixed opinions on Red Hat's actions, but judging from the conversation at http://lwn.net/Articles/430098/ it appears there are plenty of people unhappy with the move. From our perspective, the bottom line is that it doesn't impede Novell's ability to support RHEL and help customers migrate over time to SLES – as many organizations are now doing.

By: Jeremy L. Gaddis

Jeremy L. Gaddis — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:05:25 +0000

Michael-- Like Chris asked, "where can you find the patches for SLES?" The Linux community is an "imagined community" and Red Hat's move doesn't have "the community up in arms". I've been running Linux boxes for 15 years and happily run RHEL in the enterprise (Debian, which powers my own machines, is vastly superior to both RHEL and SLES, IMO) and have no issues at all with what they're doing. Thanks, -Jeremy

By: Michael Applebaum

Michael Applebaum — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:21:58 +0000

Thanks for your comment Chris. Yes, there are many reasons customers are moving from RHEL to SLES — SUSE Studio ( http://www.susestudio.com ), openSUSE Build Service, our partner solutions with Amazon, VMware & SAP, better support, etc. As Brian Proffitt points out at http://bit.ly/hzjpj4 , Red Hat's move has the community up in arms, and he questions whether Red Hat can still compete on value and support.

By: Chris Cox

Chris Cox — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:26:03 +0000

With that said, where can you find the patches for SLES? Sure… you can sort of find the source (with strings) for the release and for each SP… but what about the source for the patches?? Yes… if you pay for them, you can get them… but hardly the "open ecosystem" mentioned above is it?? There's a reason why there isn't a community CentOS like thing for SLES.

I think there might be other reason for choosing Novell SLES over RHEL, but easy source code is NOT one of them.