Majority of Ubuntu community servers compromised, servers were using clear-text FTP ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> I noticed that you always misspell Canonical as Conical.  You
> might want to fix that before anyone mistakes it as some sort
> of deliberate insulting slang.

Ack!  Thanx for pointing that out!  Heck, for years I used to spell
Red Hat as RedHat (no space). 

> What Canonical is striving for is not something new and they
> have deliberated followed a Red Hat Linux like business
> strategy of a single product with optional support and
> services. It wins over a substantial number of users but
> unless the market is substantially changing they might end
> up rediscovering that pure support without product tie-up 
> isn't very sustainable.

And with releases every 6-10 months (05.10, 06.06, 07.04), but a
promised 3 years (5 years on server) Long Term Support (LTS), I tend
to agree that is going to be rather hard to sustain once 3 years (5
years on server) of support turns into 5+ releases (possibly 7+ in
the case of server ;).

I don't know how many times I have to point out to complainers of Red
Hat that the distro they are supporting has never supported a distro
has yet to support a distro as long as they claim they will, let
alone as long as Red Hat.  Not trying to "argue" with them, just
point out the fact that they should just "leave Red Hat be" and focus
on their own distro.

In reality, the same people who complained about Red Hat have turned
to complaining about other distros.  As I eluded to, "one the newness
wears off," often as the company realizes there's more to supporting
3-5 years than just a statement, those same people tend to just start
complaining there too.

> It is good that they have the luxury of experimenting with this
> without the pressure of a being a public organization. We will
> get to know the success (or lack of it) in a few years.

The thing is that I've seen the "in a few years" too many times now. 
;)  I know more people are using Linux, and the volumes are greater
now, but people who fund those distros (or lack thereof) haven't
changed the basic "economies-of-scale" concept.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith   Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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     Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution