News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:“Long term support” Unixes and versions of software in them by tialaramex on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @08:12AM (#31082062)
> "It is remarkable, love," he said, looking at Nell for the first time, "how much money you can make shovelling back the tide." [ "Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson ]

What the customer wants here is impossible, but some customers (larger enterprises in particular) will pay handsomely for you to try. Why is it impossible? Change is the one constant in our universe. Long after there is no consciousness left to perceive it, change will continue.

Red Hat are doing the same thing as Microsoft. You have a support programme, and then a more expensive extended support programme, and then sometimes yet a further even more expensive programme. Charging people for their over-confidence is a successful strategy, because every customer believes they are going to get off the old version in plenty of time, and many of them are wrong, but you don't care which ones.

If Enterprise desktop users want to pay $$$ for longer term support they could make it worth Red Hat's money to do this work, shovelling back the tide. But I'd guess that Linux has far fewer cases of "desktop" systems that are actually servers. I know at work there were at least two "desktop" machines sat in empty offices over the pandemic, switched on with big "DO NOT SWITCH OFF" notices because the Windows "desktop" software running on them was vital to normal operations, even though that's clearly very stupid and the software ought to live on a server somewhere.

Re:“Long term support” Unixes and versions of software in them by necovek on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @04:03AM (#31094034)
> What the customer wants here is impossible, but some customers (larger enterprises in particular) will pay handsomely for you to try. Why is it impossible? Change is the one constant in our universe. Long after there is no consciousness left to perceive it, change will continue.

Companies (and their budgets) like predictability.

Sure, it's unavoidable that you'll have to upgrade or abandon certain software, but it's an altogether different ballgame when you know exactly when that's coming.

If I know I've got guaranteed security fixes in whatever is installed on my system for 5 or 10 years, it means I only have to do the work once every 5 or 10 years.

That's service being provided, and I'd like to test that hypothesis sometime with starting a company to support your dependencies for a monthly fee.

Existence of enterprise Linuxes like RHEL and SUSE offering confirms the market is there, the biggest question is if the overlap of those willing to subscribe to such a model matches those who want this type of predictability. You'd be basically paying for distribution-type development focused on packages you need.