I'm an independent electronics inventor, heavily dependent
on both competent software and competent laboratory science,
both for the knowledge I depend on and the tools I use to
transform that knowledge into products and services for
my customers.  

SL has been a very good tool for that.  Thanks to all who
have contributed.

I depend on "benign neglect" for a stable computing
platform - just enough funding and staffing to fix urgent
problems, but not continuously mutate the platform to
conform to ephemeral fashion or management whim.

I moved /from/ Windows to gain that stability, even if
that limits the choice of new widgets I can attach to my
(older) computers.  I have plenty of replacement-spare
old widgets, and I don't need the distraction of a
rapidly mutating platform optimized for market churn
and planned-obsolescence sales. 

I'm actually glad that Microsoft, Apple, and IBM are
busily churning those markets, because it keeps their
customers distracted and not bothering me with those
distractions while I think and work.  The hardware cast
off by the fashion-chasers is still abundant on eBay,
and I have enough of it to last me for life (except
for the batteries and backlights for my old Thinkpads).

I presume there are enough like me, some of whom are on
this list, that we can continue to carve out a community
space on top of CentOS, focused on inquiry and reliability.

If CentOS 9 or 10 or 11 goes off the rails, there are
enough of us here to tweak CentOS 7 or 8 into something
we can continue to use, just like Linux was "in the good
old days". 

While "security by obscurity" is not optimum, I presume a
smaller community of impoverished science geeks is a less
tempting target for professional software criminals than
million-dollar IT departments for billion-dollar
corporations and governments, or billions of hapless
consumers.  We are part of the global target, but we are
unlikely to attract specific attention from the bad guys.

And while we still benefit from the use of servers at
Fermilabs for our "static" distro and our active mailing
list, perhaps we should have a backup plan for migration
in case some bureaucrat decides to pull the plug on us.
That has /always/ been a risk for what we do here; we are
one presidential tweet away from Saint Louis USDA exile.

As a community of scientific, like-minded Linux users,
let's begin to prepare a rudimentary plan B, and hope
that we never need to implement it.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]