[Novalug] Ubuntu LTS for web/email server

[James Ewing Cottrell 3rd]

What I don't like about Certification is that it is a Formal Process and 
usually an Absolute one. It may also be a Costly and Lengthy one.

I was recently working for a company who certified their app on HPUX 
11.2 but not 11.3 which is already two years old. So were were forced to 
use 11.2 and had to pay for some nice feature that existed in 11.3.

A less formal process process froze another company at RHEL 5.2 even tho 
5.3 was out, and 5.4 came out before I left.

It would have been a lot nicer if the developers had moved to 11.3 on 
their own development machines ... they probably couldn't have told the 
difference.

C'mon, unless you had a bug that didn't work in version X.Y, how often 
will you ever notice a difference in X.Y+1? Almost Never!

Of course, every so often people will break things, like the KDE4 
people, or the Horrible Redesign of SuSE's Software Installer.

You know it's interesting that emacs and all the GNU software can adapt 
themselves to many different systems and versions by using the configure 
script. Maybe those ISVs should start coding differently, or more 
importantly, avoiding the dark corners of specific systems.

SAP can certainly develop on SuSE, but they shouldn't ship if it doesn't 
install on RHEL, and it might be a good idea to have a few other distros 
to test against as well.

It costs a Lot Less if these things are developed In Parallel, together 
from one source base.

JIM

P.S. Hardware, of course, is a Different Barrell of Fish, a Horse of a 
Different Flavor.

Kevin Chin wrote:
> As consumers of the OS, we of course want the ISV and IHV to say they 
> will support whatever version of the OS with whatever application we 
> want to install.  As a practical matter however, an IHV or ISV can not 
> do this.  It is costly to do this, and directly impacts the potential 
> for customer sat, and thereby future business.  So they specify a subset 
> of OS's... and because they don't want to have to retest/certify for 
> each minor rev, they typically choose enterprise supported or LTS 
> versions of an OS.
> 
> I agree with Bryan, ISV/IHV certs are a big advantage in my book.  
> Again, it's not to say that you can't get those ISV/IHV products to work 
> on your non-certified OS, but generally it should work more smoothly 
> since the ISV/IHV has tried it before.  More importantly if there's a 
> problem, the ISV/IHV support folks can actually provide a higher level 
> of support experience than if it isn't certified if you use a certified 
> OS. If you desire enterprise support, this fact can't be overlooked. If 
> you're a self-support kind of shop, it may not be nearly as important to 
> you.
> 
> James, I'll say that it would be nice if the development platforms were 
> known for all apps, but even if it is, that's no guarantee that it will 
> drive an OS decision.  Most ISV/IHVs are agnostic when it comes to the 
> OS.  For example, SAP is an app who's reference platform is SUSE Linux, 
> but the majority of customers running SAP are running it on Windows OS 
> (many run it on Linux, but not most).  Despite this fact, I am not 
> expecting a mass migration of SAP from Windows to SLES anytime soon.
> 
> HTH,
> --Kc
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 10:54 AM, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd 
> <JECottrell3 at comcast.net <mailto:JECottrell3 at comcast.net>> wrote:
> 
>     I disagree about Certifications tho ... they can be lengthy and actually
>     hinder progress. What I'd rather see is the ISV saying "we develop on
>     $OS" or "we have many customers running $VER and it installed/ran
>     cleanly" than "we are certified for $REL".
> 
>     ISV's should keep up with the newest releases and so should customers.
> 
>     JIM
> 
> 
> 
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