Beta 8.10 released

[Art Alexion]

Billie, I think you are wrong as far as Cannonical is concerned.

Cannonical does not produce a commercial version of ubuntu. Rather,  
they make money mostly from enterprise support and providing some  
commercial packages. You are partially right about Novell, though.  
SLED is about one and a half steps behind opensuse. E.g., SLED 10.2  
was released about six months after the release of opensuse 10.3.  
RHEL, on the other hand, is a totally different distro from Fedora.  
CentOS is the free version of RHEL, and as far as I know, follows  
RHEL, instead of preceding it.

Businesses buy RHEL instead of using the free and almost identical  
CentOS is the commercial support.

The other thing that the commercial Linux companies do is produce  
custom apps and other customizations for their customers.

So Cannonical does not sell a commercial Ubuntu. It sells support and  
custom enhancements for the same version that you and I use. We are  
not their "beta testers" in the way that opensuse users might be.

--

Art Alexion
Sent unsigned from an iPod. That's the reason for the top posting as  
well.

On Oct 7, 2008, at 11:36 PM, Billie Erin Walsh <bilwalsh at swbell.net>  
wrote:

> On 10/07/2008 Art Alexion wrote:
>> Thinking of Linux users as all beta testers plays into the fears of
>> those who cling to the commercial OSs, that Linux is a toy for the
>> hobbyist, and not usable by the masses or ready to support the
>> enterprise.  While that isn't true today and hasn't been for a while,
>> I
>> fear that those who force the adoption of a work in progress as the
>> default, and those who say that all Linux users are beta testers,  
>> feed
>> that misconception.
>
> It was me that said that all users of the free versions of Linux are
> beta testers for the commercial release that each company puts out on
> the market. This commercial release is the bread and butter for these
> companies. It's what pays the bills so that "we" can use a free OS  
> that
> is cutting edge.
>
> I said this because every distro that I know of does not run as  
> cutting
> edge software in their commercial releases as they have in their free
> versions. Novell does it. Red Hat does it. I'm sure Canonical (sp?)  
> does
> it to. Perhaps someone KNOWS for sure, does the commercial version of
> Ubuntu run the latest software or does it lag a bit behind 8.10 in  
> some
> respects. Note I didn't say Kubuntu because I don't know if Kubuntu  
> has
> a commercial variant. If it does I'm willing to bet that it doesn't  
> use
> KDE4.x
>
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