As long as the environment can be built to be stable, I'm in complete agreement. While our initial adopters may be the tinkerers and the risk-takers, I'd say that a good number of those people already try out SER (and may ultimately choose something with less of a learning curve). The biggest market for a SER bundle in the long run is going to be those who want to get a carrier grade SIP proxy up and running quickly and easily. Who that might be is somewhat difficult to determine, but I dare say we don't want to position ourselves as building a bundle for those who're willing to take risks. ;)
That said, the decision for CentOS came about because it is simply a GPL-compliant duplicate distro of Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- the single most common and most popular distribution amongst people who run linux in a carrier-grade situation.
Fedora Core, being the test bed for RHEL, has the same structure but newer, slightly less-vetted packages. However, if we can ensure stability, then none of that matters and no one will really care what distro it's built upon (as long as it's familiar to the admins who manage it). If you say you can build a stable FC-based SER server, then I say we go for it.
Do we have a second to Mike's motion to use FC as the base distro?
Mike Trest - Personal wrote:
Hi,
This is to summarize my opinions about FC* distro use.
IMHO, I think FC* is best selection as it contains many more fixes than does the older CENTOS (based on 5). I have deployed several hundred FC* boxes in VoIP applications. This is over 10,000 active ports without "Enterprise" stability issues.
IMHO this project needs the quickest path to the Enterprise community regardless of the OS/distro used.
I suppose the ultimate question is who is our target? Ourselves, naturally. However, I suggest our target is not the bankers or major corporations with lots of rules and procedures. That group will never adopt SER until they have a commercial-grade support system to advise their IT folks what to do for every question they may have.
IMHO our initial target is those early adopters who are trying to create new businesses in telecomm or consulting-on-telecom. We want them to have a solid core that they can leverage into their new appliances and specialized applications.
The early adopters are risk-takers (This means us as well!) They demand an open box in which they can face the SIP world with some assurance of standards compliance while at the same time they can face their clients with something better, faster, cheaper, and innovative enough to get paid well for their efforts.
Making a technology "buy - in" decision at any point in time is only a check point - not a final resting place. IMHO, we are better off selecting an OS/distro effort that has a large share of both early adopters and long term commercial support - - - so long as it meets our current and future technical **AND** target market requirements. Research confirms that the RH/FC community is the largest community with name recognition and respect among both the "geek-innovator" community as well as the Enterprise community.
..mike..
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