[CentOS] Design changes are done in Fedora

Mon Dec 29 15:02:09 UTC 2014
James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca>

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.

-- 
***          E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel          ***
James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
Canada  L8E 3C3