On Mon, December 29, 2014 04:22, Ned Slider wrote:
What business model do you have that you can't build around a product guaranteed to be consistent/supported for the next 10 years?
Well, despite the hype from Wall St., Bay St. and The City, a large number of organisations in the world run on software that is decades old and cannot be economically replaced. In many instances in government and business seven years is a typical time-frame in which to get a major software system built and installed. And I have witnessed longer.
So, seven, even ten, years of stability is really nothing at all. And as Linux seeks to enter into more and more profoundly valuable employment the type of changes that we witnessed from v6 to v7 are simply not going to be tolerated. In fact, it my considered belief that RH in Version EL7 has done themselves a serious injury with respect to corporate adoption for core systems. Perhaps they seek a different market?
Think about it. What enterprise can afford to rewrite all of its software every ten years? What enterprise can afford to retrain all of its personnel to use different tools to accomplish the exact same tasks every seven years? The desktop software churn that the PC has inured in people simply does not scale to the enterprise.
If you wish to see what change for change's sake produces in terms of market share consider what Mozilla has done with Firefox. There is absolutely no interface that is as easy to use as the one you have been working on for the past ten years. And that salient fact seems to be completely ignored by many people in the FOSS community.