[ale] CentOS repositories question

[DJ-Pfulio]

On 05/12/2015 08:07 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> there's no excuse for third party vendors to not keep their product current.

I have an excuse.

               Cost.

The vendor dev team is working on new features, new platforms and new
customizations for NEW contracts. Every platform supported, tested, maintained
adds cost.  When a client asked us to support brand new or really old platforms,
too small to do that.  We already supported 12 platforms with a team of 6
people.  That was 1 current version per OS and perhaps 40 customizations 1-2 for
each client.

We did offer to support more versions only for the largest customers for huge
support costs. Nobody bought it - it was almost as much as the cost of the
software.  Our server room was already full, software licenses to create our
software were expensive, plus the storage, backups, and people to do the work -
all costs money AND time.

For example, I run Ubuntu Server and wish that no developers ever released
software for non-LTS versions.  I consider all of those alpha releases. 6-9
months of "support" is a joke.  If all the commercial software vendors got
together and agreed on a "best practice support model" - then followed it. That
is the best we can hope.  Get the major 5 vendors to do it to get the ball
rolling. It will take 5 yrs, so old contracts expire.  I don't know enough about
RHEL support to suggest anything.