[Gllug] So, that's the end of that, then

[Jason Clifford]

On Wed, 2010-11-24 at 11:54 +0000, John Hearns wrote:
> Its all a matter of support, and what are referred to as ISV codes.
> In HPC, people run commercial software - LS-DYNA, Fluent, Abaqus etc.
> etc. These software licenses cost real money - in fact if you
> are a small consultancy probably more than the workstation you're
> running it on - so it makes sense to ask your supplier what platform
> they
> develop on, and what platform they certify, and you purchase similar.

If SuSE were a derivative of Debian there would be nothing to stop them
from packaging up and including all the packages and revisions to
existing packages that make SuSE attractive to those commercial
developers and users today.

> There's also the small matter of Debian's fanatical devotion to the
> GPL - you're rather more likely to get non-free software packaged up 
> for SuSE than Debian.
> As a for instance, there is the really nifty 'one click install' for
> SuSE - visit a webpage with the particular software
> you're after, and one click will get it added to your repository list.
> There will be similar for Debian of course.
> But what I'm thinking on is Nvidia graphics drivers - dead easy to get
> them installed an running on Opensuse desktops

See Ubuntu. Seriously all the questions about inclusion of non-free have
already been done to death many times. Installing the Nvidia proprietary
drivers in Ubuntu is just as simple and works very well. The box I am
using right now (it's been my desktop for several years now) is running
Ubuntu with proprietary nvidia drivers. It's never been a problem.

Whether or not such a switch would make sense for SuSE isn't really a
technical question though. It's more a matter of decided policy and how
those responsible for maintaining SuSE think customer perception would
run. Certainly there would be a valid concern as to whether competitors
could use such a change to suggest SuSE had become a less commercially
reliable and even viable solution. 

Any kind of radical change would give such to such a fear but a move to
more obvious reliance upon any group with such a strong "pure" Free
Software focus would almost certainly result in such FUD.

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