[CentOS] New to CentOS, is this a safe bet?

Franki franki at htmlfixit.com
Sat May 7 12:10:36 UTC 2005


Preston Crawford wrote:
> I know this may be a stupid place to ask, but I have to ask. I'm looking
> for a new Linux distro to use and support. I've been a loyal purchaser
> of SuSE Linux Pro for the last 3 years. I've paid my $90 loyally, in
> part because I wanted money to actually go to someone working on OSS,
> but also because I thought it was a good bargain, to get a quality,
> tested distro for that cost.
> 
> The problem is that lately SuSE is sliding down the path towards being
> considered Fedora-like by Novell. So when I install SuSE I don't know if
> I'm going to get security updates next week or the week after. My $90
> may have just gone to be a 6-month or 1-year beta tester. I need more
> stability than that. 
> 
> So I'm considering CentOS based on some articles I've read lately, as my
> solution. What I'm looking for is a good solid distro that COULD do some
> multi-media if I go hunt down the RPMs or if there's a YUM repository
> (I'm familiar with Fedora), but mostly a solid distro where I can do
> Java work daily and where the distro is memory efficient, solid and
> stable. And also where if I decide to run it for a year or more I won't
> be forced to upgrade. Now I believe CentOS promises all of these. My
> concerns, in terms of it being a safe bet are...
> 
> #1 - Is there any reason to fear Red Hat bringing the hammer down and
> thus ruining the party? I'd love to see an FAQ or something to the
> effect that legally there's no way for Red Hat to block what CentOS is
> doing.

How?? the code is GPL, therefore if redhat don't supply the code, then 
they can't use it themselves.
They could make it harder by not supplying the source as rpms, but they 
can't stop releasing the code.  besides, trying to block centos would be 
huge bad press for them with the very community they want to stay 
friendly with so it's highly unlikely they'd even try.

Besides, centos is handy for RH, with Sun proclaiming that RH is not a 
real open source company, CentOS provides an opening where RH can say 
"of course we are an open source company, look at CentOS which is using 
all of our code......."
you get the idea.


> #2 - Is the community strong? I'm new to the community and when I look
> on distrowatch it's way down the list. But is this accurate or is CentOS
> picking up steam? I get the feeling it's picking up steam. The reason
> this is important is because I'd hate to pick it only to watch it wither
> and have to go distro-hopping again. Once again, looking for stability.
> 
> Any responses that can help me decide are appreciated. Thanks.
> 
> Preston

Personal experiance, CentOS is fairly new, so it doens't yet have the 
legs of something like Debian, but I can tell you from personal 
experiance that their are members on this list that are more helpful and 
more knowledgable then anyone I've ever met on a debian or mandrake list.

besides, CentOS is essentially RHEL, so the support community can 
include RHEL as well which makes it considerably bigger then you might 
otherwise think. There are a ton of resources for RHEL and you can make 
use of them as well as packages for RHEL.

I've been using Mandrake, Redhat and Debian for years, I recently 
decided to swap to CentOS and I've been very happy thus far.
I expect your experiances will be similiar.

Give it a go.

rgds

Franki



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