Quote of the day

[Michael Torrie]

On 05/17/2016 08:27 AM, Paul Rudin wrote:
> Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> writes:
>> That's a long time to be without a product to sell.
> 
> But you do have the option of building a kernel incorporating your fix
> and using that.

Sure as an individual end user that may be the best option. But not
necessarily for a business.  The cost of doing that could be
prohibitive.  Sometimes we forget just how costly open source software
can be (really *all* software).  They can either deal with lost revenue
waiting, or they can budget a tremendous amount of money, time, and
effort to support their own kernel which would entail doing updates, QA
testing, etc.  Letting the upstream vendor do all that (their core
business after all) is often the least costly option.  Though it sounds
like they've already spent a lot of money doing QA to identify this bug.

When I did IT professionally, our policy with regards to Linux was to
stick with existing packages from a known set of (mostly) official
channels and to discourage any installing of libraries and frameworks
from source.  Allowing packages to be installed from source was just a
maintenance nightmare.  RPM (or deb or whatever) brings at least a tiny
bit of stability and consistency.