On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 19:55 -0400, Aron Griffis wrote: > In my humble opinion, Gentoo is missing too many points to be an > enterprise Linux. We commit to a live tree. We don't have true QA, > testing or tinderbox. We don't have paid staff, alpha/beta/rc cycles. > We don't really have product lifecycles, since we don't generally > backport fixes to older versions, requiring instead for people to > update to a more recent release. We don't have, and probably will > never be able to offer, support contracts. We support as wide a range > of hardware as the upstream kernel, plus hardware that requires > external drivers; we don't have access to a great deal of the hardware > for which we provide drivers. We understand when real life gets in > the way of bug-fixing, because all our developers are volunteers.
I don't feel that the list of requirements you have for "enterprise" linux is necessarily what the enterprise needs.. I think Gentoo has some steps that can be taken to be a better enterprise player, but to come out and state that it won't work is a bit bold. It might not work for HP's description of "enterprise", but that doesn't mean it wouldn't work for someone else. I have talked with people who have used Gentoo in HPC clusters with great success, and I would consider that an enterprise arena. > I think that attempting to take Gentoo in the "enterprise" direction > is a mistake. I think that we are a hobbyist distribution. This > doesn't mean that we should not strive to meet some of the enterprise > goals. Those things can be important to hobbyists too. But I don't > think we should be aiming for corporate America. Wow... as a sysadmin who has run Gentoo in some very high profile production systems that's a bit offensive to think I used it outside of a hobbyist platform.. IBM didn't just donate a $30k system for ppc64 development to make it better for someone's basement use, so I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Gentoo is above "hobbyist". > I don't even understand why that goal appeals to people. Let other > distros go there! I want Gentoo to run in people's homes, in student > dorm rooms, etc. Places where people want a fun distribution that > they can tailor and work on easily. Let other distros go there at $1500/year/node (RHEL AS)... Gentoo is already a fun distribution.. I don't think that has to change to meet enterprise goals. > If RH or SuSE (or another for-profit Linux vendor) wants to take some > of those developments and use them to make a profit, that's fine with > me. We're over here having fun. Personally, I was drawn to Gentoo by the community, which was a lot of fun. I still have fun working with the people in this community. I don't see why an enterprise goal should be equated with losing the fun aspect of Gentoo. Cheers, -Corey -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
