If your employer is a for-profit entity, then the neo-liberal profiteer 
model indicates your firm should be funding ("paying for") what it uses, 
except for the neo-liberal reality of "welfare for the wealthy".  As 
your employer is using SL, supported from public funds in different 
nations (e.g., the funders of Fermilab and CERN), perhaps assisting 
setting up what would be in the USA a non-profit corporation for the 
development, maintenance, and distribution (e.g., software download over 
the Internet) of an "enterprise" production linux (or BSD, or ... , 
"unix" clone) would address what you describe below.  This could 
(should?) include various non-profit university partners.  The entire 
distro would be professionally developed and maintained with dedicated 
professional (not amateur) staff, as is done at both Fermilab and CERN. 
However, a university, or consortium thereof, cannot do this, at least 
within the USA, because of the funding and revenue models.  Given the 
endowment of Harvard and/or Stanford in the USA, it is possible that 
these entities internally could fund such a development. [Aside: It also 
is likely that the PRC could (and probably) will fund such; however, any 
application, firmware, etc., from the PRC owes primary allegiance, as 
specified by PRC law, to the PRC totalitarian government through The 
Party, and thus can only be used with great caution by those who do not 
share such fealty. If you think IBM is arbitrary and capricious (as 
evidenced by the CentOS reality), consider the dictates of the PRC 
government.]

Outside of the conversion issues, for now, Ubuntu LTS seems to meet the 
same niche as SL.  There are other distros based upon Ubuntu (e.g., 
Mint), so there could be a SLubuntu that is based upon LTS.  One thing I 
personally would like is a LTS list that is the same as this SL list. 
None of the "lists" that I have found for Ubuntu are equivalent to this 
SL lists.  I can elaborate upon the differences if there is any interest.

However, for SLubuntu or the like, some entity needs to provide the 
level of professional staff that Fermilab/CERN provided for SL.  Unlike 
Fermilab that survives based upon the whim of the USA Federal government 
(currently, Trump et al., decidedly pro-theocracy and anti-science, else 
the USA would not be suffering from COVID-19 as it is and withdrawn from 
the WHO, etc.), and may suffer the same fate as Arecibo (strictly a 
matter of funding -- had the repairs and maintenance been done, rather 
than "deferred maintenance", that facility would not have collapsed), 
CERN appears to have a more stable funding source (by treaty or the 
equivalent?).  Very few if any USA universities have the same stable 
funding.

Yasha Karant

On 12/9/20 7:25 AM, Larry Linder wrote:
> In the early days of Windows 3.0 and OS/2.  Windows 3.0 was short lived
> because every user knew it was a dog.
> OS/2 was pretty nice but had a fatel flaw as it only had one exit que.
> i a program dies and not gracefully it was rebo0t time.
> 
> This is trivia trash but reflects on the Corporate Character of the
> perpetrators.
> 
> RH 8 and Cent 8 should die quickly.  The community with the support of a
> stable university should restart SL.
> 
> Everytime I am forced to use Windows 10 my neurons rebel at the moron
> aware SW.
> 
> If the linux community took a stable set of Linux and made 25 functional
> improvement a year and I don't mean rearanging the fruniture or new eye
> candy.  Most of our computing OS nightmares would go away.
> 
> As an example I just opted to get a new version of VariCAD and during
> installation it requested two different libc.SO's and a new C++
> compiler.
> Tor rebuild the libc.so for 2.15 took almost 20 minutes it worked.  I
> froze at rebuilding the C++ lib after looking at it.
> 
> One thing I learned from the people at "stackOverflow" was that 2.15 did
> not contain all of 2.10 or 2.11 or 2.12. etc.  The latest is 2.34.  The
> tangled web of good intentions is killing Linux.
> 
> Without the stability of RH most developers will flounder and sink.  As
> the supporters of GNU retire and die off - the new generation has no
> desire to stay the course.
> Without the long term stability the applicaions / CAD developers will
> abandon it too.
> 
> The bright side is that there is no automatic self destruct mechanism in
> Linux so even when the official support is ended we can still user what
> we have but not be able to upgrade our applications.
> 
> We are a commercial user since SL 4.  As a for profit organization the
> cost of just dumping 50 systems and install new OS's and applications is
> beyond our budget. A few new machines are introduced each year to
> support engineering / development.  Most are used in the shop / factory
> as you would use a dish washer - just an appliance.  The primary goal is
> stability.
> 
> So the sword had many sharp edges.
> 
> My 2 Cents worth
> Larry Linder
>