Re: Debian Enterprise?
On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 01:45:05AM -0500, Andres Salomon wrote:
> Over the past week, my boss and I have had discussions about the niche
> left by RedHat, and the possibility of working on a
> distribution/sub-project aimed at enterprise folks. The plan is to target
> those RedHat users and companies who are unwilling (or unable) to pay for
> RedHat Enterprise Linux, but need HA features. Our company falls into
> this category, but made the RedHat->Debian switch earlier on.
>
Check out the Beowulf list archives @ www.beowulf.org for
October/November where just these sorts of discussions have
been happening. I've been trying to advocate a switch to Debian
from RH for a lot of the high powered folk who run major clusters.
I'm not sure that a separate distribution would fly - Progeny would
have carried on otherwise. Bruce Perens' proposed ??UserLinux??
would possibly be a candidate here. Nor am I sure that a "sub-project"
is ideal. A customised kernel or two and potentially a meta-package
might be enough.
It doesn't make sense to fork unless you _really_ need to fork. A
distribution based on woody + backports would be OK now, with a
distribution based on the new stable once we release :) Pace Knoppix
and Lindows, basing a distribution on testing may be more than a little
difficult. Talking to Libranet and merging your Enterprise stuff
there might be another option. In the longer term, I'm slightly
sceptical about how many Debian-based distributions can survive outside
Debian - but then I've had 9 1/2 years of 20/20 hindsight :)
Just my 0.02 Euro / 0.03 US$
Andy
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