[csw-maintainers] Our infrastructure on Solaris 9

[Laurent Blume]

On 06/08/13 13:49, Peter FELECAN wrote:
> A fact is part of a causality chain. What's the cause of this effect? Is
> this not a myth, folklore, FUD, &c?

Of course not. You just provided another example. If you believe that 
people running S9 are a myth, then just suggest dropping it altogether.
Me, I know there are people still running it, and they want to continue 
running it, their reasons, goodf or bad, are their own.

But I think we all assume there are plenty of S9 out there.

> The point is that for such an infrastructure to exist it must be
> maintained, administrated, &c. So it costs, indirectly, energy from
> OpenCSW members. If someone wishes to take a contract job of this kind
> he should provide also the material par of it.

See below.

> Per previous point, it's certainly not.

Because for some reason you want to split them :-)
My point is very clearly to outline something that would not cost 
OpenCSW when S9 packages start breaking, and somebody requests an update.
Whatever is needed, money, hardware, human operators...

If somebody wants to pay for such a support, OpenCSW very clearly has a 
very interesting infrastructure existing, so why not, a. make it somehow 
available, and b. make sure the result of those resources invested can 
be shared with others rather than have 1000s (okay, maybe just dozens) 
of people reinventing the same wheel separately,

Ideally, OpenCSW could even allow those people to pool resources if a 
given package is requested several times.

> Seriously, has any of the foundation's members a request of this kind?
> If someone propose me a contract of this kind I will gladly provide a
> quotation.

Well, that's why I'm talking about, and there could be a page on OpenCSW 
advertising it.

The goal is that nobody feels ripped off. If I got such a contract, and 
I could use OpenCSW's infrastructure, I'd made sure to make it clear 
what I need and what's needed in exchange.

But that's all to make it clear to companies that if they seriously 
intend to continue using obsolete OS's, there's a cost. Since the human 
cost is so often ignored, a direct fee makes it clear, If it convinces 
them to switch to S10/11, it's obviously better. If they have no 
interest whatsoever, and just want some free lunch after having wasted 
so much money on expensive hardware, then it's their problem.

But then again, maybe that's not possible, and maybe OpenCSW does not 
want to get involved in that (I'm aware there are very good arguments 
against, particularly with Oracle's attitude).

Laurent