Re: How is the CGL adding value in 2020 (Was: Re: CGL 5.0 Registration)

[Florian Heigl <florian.heigl@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Since the whole list is so low-volume and I'm not even sure if there was a customer post in the last 10 years, please allow me to post some ideas as a working theory.
I'm not at a carrier and not at a carrier vendor. But I can still remeber the pains building industrial systems with COTS distros, and know/remember enough of the CGL specs.

Am 15.12.2020 um 22:41 schrieb Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx>:
> 
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 02:41:28PM -0500, Joe MacDonald wrote:
>> 

>> That said, we had a quick conversation over the weekend and I'm here to
>> reaffirm the support within the group for the CGL specification and the
>> registration process.
>> 
>> I'm going to take some time over the next couple of days to catch up on
>> the outstanding CGL work and I will be updating everyone accordingly.
>> Please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions or
>> concerns or if you'd like to bring up any additional topics.
> 
> Something which I'd love to understand is what is the market demand
> for CGL registration today.  That is, what kind of customers are
> making buying decisions based on whether a Linux distribution is CGL
> certified or not; what value are they getting from the CGL
> certification; what parts of it are most valuable; and how could the
> CGL specification be changed to improve its value to a larger segment
> of the customers in this market?

- carriers (the customers, the market)
- vendors (the customers, the market)
I.e. my Juniper NFX runs Montavista Linux as the hypervisor layer OS.
There's a prior version with a COTS distro that falls apart while booting.

> 
> I assume it must be adding value in some way, because at least some
> number of Linux distributions are requesting CGL registration, and
> presumably they wouldn't be spending engineering effort doing this
> unless it was helping them in the market place.  It's just a question
> of how it is helping, and what segment of the market it happens to be,
> since this would drive any potential future work on the CGL
> specification.


- knowing they deal with a distro vendor who's out of their own will already got process and staff in place to check their distro covers the needs of telcos

that is a major competitive advantage over another vendor who doesn't.
imagine you'd need or just appreciate a certain feature and the effort involved with getting that from a distro vendor that doesn't have the market insight.
imagine, say, your voice application needing a certain non-upstream realtime patch that would be unsupported by a major distro vs. keeping support with someone who even has had actual customers using it.
imagine discussing your backplane tcp/ip driver with support staff at a mass market distro vs. knowning your 'CGL registered' distro has open ears for enabling your driver.

I want to make the case here that - whatever further advantages you'll hear about from vendors and customers as you reach out further - the first advantage is that you'll be dealing with a spezialized, competent vendor and your systems integrators will look forward to working with that distro versus dreading each and every single support interaction ahead of them while doing 100s of modifications to a 'normal' distro. IOW: less friction.

Back to lurking mode,
Florian
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