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Re: Questions for candidate Walther



On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 03:42:17PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> Ubuntu supports each release for 18
> months, even though they release every 6 months.

Correction: they *claim* they will support each release for 18
months. I can not only do that, I can call forth spirits from the
vasty deep[0].

We have yet to see whether they can deliver, and how badly
they're going to multilate their definition of 'support' once some
real customers start using it (anything on the scale provided by
somebody like IBM or Redhat is an absurdity, given their comparative
resources; 'real customers' excludes anybody who would deploy a
platform that's less than six months old, since they'll have test
cycles at least that long, so they can't have any using it yet).

The track record of software companies is not good at this sort of
thing. They usually start telling customers to upgrade once the
support requests begin piling up, or redefine "support" to mean
"handholding, not programmer time".

Ubuntu should not be used as an example of an alternative way to make
releases before they actually demonstrate that they can do it, at the
very least.

[0] Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 1. Go look it up.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
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