C
Curt Wuollet
Hi Michael, Nathan, etal.
This would indeed be a major improvement and it is doable. The very large number of Linux distributions available demonstrates that a company could "own" the Linux their package runs on and have far better control over the lifecycle of the product. Upgrades could be coordinated, and no one, not even a predatory monopoly, could simply declare all your hard work obsolete. This could be done with very limited resources as you can start with a good distribution and simply maintain it as long as you want. All necessary upgrades would be provided by the community and could simply be reviewed for applicability. Many "old" releases are well supported because there are still large numbers of people using them. The work needed simply to ensure their product continues to run well would be far less than what MS churn requires and if they write reasonably portable code there would be minimum disruption when they want to rev the whole package because unlike with MS, they could know exactly what changes are happening in the base distro as they happen and plan as they go along.
The cost savings would have to be large and the number of crunch events would be close to zero with good management. This is in comparison with developing on Microsoft's rather erratic schedule with bumps and panics every so often even after the release and first rounds of fixes. Automation people have shown they greatly prefer not to mess with that which is not broken and this would make it practical and practicable to accommodate them.
As for not having Windows on their automation machines, I think people would deal far better with that than all the consequences of having Windows on their automation machines. The OS drops into the background (or should) and the operations become prime.
Regards
cww
This would indeed be a major improvement and it is doable. The very large number of Linux distributions available demonstrates that a company could "own" the Linux their package runs on and have far better control over the lifecycle of the product. Upgrades could be coordinated, and no one, not even a predatory monopoly, could simply declare all your hard work obsolete. This could be done with very limited resources as you can start with a good distribution and simply maintain it as long as you want. All necessary upgrades would be provided by the community and could simply be reviewed for applicability. Many "old" releases are well supported because there are still large numbers of people using them. The work needed simply to ensure their product continues to run well would be far less than what MS churn requires and if they write reasonably portable code there would be minimum disruption when they want to rev the whole package because unlike with MS, they could know exactly what changes are happening in the base distro as they happen and plan as they go along.
The cost savings would have to be large and the number of crunch events would be close to zero with good management. This is in comparison with developing on Microsoft's rather erratic schedule with bumps and panics every so often even after the release and first rounds of fixes. Automation people have shown they greatly prefer not to mess with that which is not broken and this would make it practical and practicable to accommodate them.
As for not having Windows on their automation machines, I think people would deal far better with that than all the consequences of having Windows on their automation machines. The OS drops into the background (or should) and the operations become prime.
Regards
cww