On Mon, December 29, 2014 9:02 am, James B. Byrne wrote: > > 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? I said elsewhere that these changes are partly induced by changes started in kernel some 5 years ago. But now I do realize that at least part of them was pushed on the kernel level by folks from RedHat team... > > 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. > Well, there are similar changes in other areas of our [human] communication with computer hardware. Take the step "up" from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 for instance. From the way that worked over two decades (with logical tree like access to what you need) all switched to please people without brain and ability to categorize things... just able to do search. And you can continue describing the differences each confirming that same point. Which leads me to say: Welcome to ipad generation folks! Valeri ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++