Re: Proposal to formalize end-of-life

[Troy Benjegerdes <..hidden..>]

As a business owner (farming and technology consulting), I have the
following suggestions:

1) educate business owners on the benefits of the Debian distribution
to allow long-term (30 year) support with no forced upgrades.

2) provide community support for 18 months

3) distribution support for the distribution's term

4) Provide offers for long-term support contracts (based on Debian)
so that I, as a business owner, have a full, up-front accounting of
the NPV of running whatever version I happen to be running on the 
latest 'community' supported version/distribution combo.


As some background: I can buy a 30 year old combine for around $5,000,
and then fix it up, and the quality of the grain it harvests is exactly
the same as a brand-new $250,000 John Deere.

In 30 years I expect to be fabricating silicon for replacement CAN
controllers because at some point I'll be able to pick up some combines
that are fully functional, except for lack of a chip that nobody makes
anymore.


I would really like to see a 30 year NPV calculation of the total cost
of ownership of an up-front investment of say $10,000 in ledger-smb
consulting and setup, and running it for 30 years, vs what the NPV of
the upgrade treadmill of windows/macos/cloud hosting/quickbooks/whatever.


I think the formal 'end of life' proposal is that there *is* no end
of life, so long as you are happy with how everything works, and
understand you need to run this system on an isolated network that is
firewalled by something that *does* get security upgrades.


On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 08:05:22AM -0800, Chris Travers wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 7:32 AM, o1bigtenor <..hidden..> wrote:
> 
> > Top posting to follow present custom!
> >
> > Speaking as a business owner I am much more likely to run for far
> > longer than 36 months. I know people running businesses using record
> > keeping (its not really accounting) software that is 7 to 10 years
> > old. As long as the computer works they are happy. Forcing upgrades
> > means that you are requiring such individuals to become more computer
> > savvy than they might want to. As there are millions of
> > people/businesses out there using very old versions of the windows
> > based competitors - you may want to look at their problems. One of the
> > reasons for a regular update is associated employee deductions - if
> > that is not being used (or is perceived as not important) then there
> > is no real incentive to upgrade.
> >
> 
> I think there are several questions that remain unanswered when we talk
> about end of life.
> 
> I think the thorny issue is going to come up when we talk about upgrade
> paths.   I would like to deprecate 1.2 after 1.4 for upgrade purposes.  The
> major reason there is that 1.2 is really clunky db-wise and there are a lot
> of db issues that have been tightened up since then.  This makes upgrades a
> bit of a pain.
> 
> However in all cases, I think what we are talking about with support is "a
> community supported and maintained codebase" and the form of that support.
>  Beyond the support period, there are support options available for the
> indefinite future.  The question however is how long the development
> community can maintain the codebase as a community project.
> 
> >
> > I switched from Fedora  to Debian primarily because I got real tired
> > of the forced upgrades. I look for things that work, that let me work
> > the way that I think and don't MAKE me change things on any short term
> > kind of basis. In this I don't think that I'm to different from many
> > major companies - - most of the software using for stock and checkout
> > at my grocery stores is actually in the 25 to 40 year old range - - of
> > course with a few tweaks and hacks but its OLD. Now this causes other
> > issues so I'm NOT advocating 25 to 40 year software lifespan just
> > pointing out the incredible levels of software longevity that are out
> > there.
> >
> 
>  We aren't really talking about forced upgrades here.  The key issue is
> where we put our effort and what we can guarantee as a community.  Beyond
> that there are certainly going to be options for whatever support you need,.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Chris Travers

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-- 
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Troy Benjegerdes                'da hozer'                 ..hidden..

Somone asked my why I work on this free (http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/)
software & hardware (http://q3u.be) stuff and not get a real job.
Charles Shultz had the best answer:

"Why do musicians compose symphonies and poets write poems? They do it
because life wouldn't have any meaning for them if they didn't. That's why
I draw cartoons. It's my life." -- Charles Shultz