[CentOS] link to "commercial support" page isn't really helpful

Sorin Srbu sorin.srbu at orgfarm.uu.se
Mon Jun 22 11:06:04 UTC 2009


>-----Original Message-----
>From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
Behalf
>Of Robert P. J. Day
>Sent: Monday, June 22, 2009 12:05 PM
>To: CentOS mailing list
>Subject: Re: [CentOS] link to "commercial support" page isn't really
helpful
>
>p.s.  let me make it clear why i'm being so obnoxious at the moment
>about this. a local company currently supports their software suite on
>linux on suse only.  they're getting more call for RH support.  i'd
>like to suggest they consider centos because i might get some support
>business out of it.  as part of their consideration, they will
>undoubtedly go to centos.org and poke around, and i want them to be
>happy with what they read there, and not be scared off.  and maybe,
>out of the goodness of their hearts, they'll donate to centos because
>they like it so *everybody* wins.

FWIW, my understanding with community-driven projects like CentOS is that
commercial support is tricky. Only a few distros (to make an example) manage
to pull that one of, and those that do are "huge" companies compared to a
volunteer organization like CentOS. 
	Karanbir has earlier mentioned that money is currently no issue, but
rather the lack of manpower. As such, commercial support will be even *very*
tricky to implement. The best thing to do right now IMHO, is to write that
something "will happen in a near future" about the ongoing effort developing
this and actually invite 3rd party companies to deal with the commercial
support. They probably can and will have the incentive to actually build a
proper support-org. Let's be frank, support on a voluntary basis is not
going to get much farther than the wiki, the mailing list(s) and forums we
have today in a 1-2 year prediction. The devs et al would most probably want
to have a life outside the pet-OS. 8-)
	With that said, any commercial company needing a linux OS with paid
support and that likes CentOS, should go for RHEL as a first choice; CentOS
is after all a clone of RHEL.

On another track, CentOS is a very mature enterprise OS and puts other
similar distros to shame IMO. Overall, this is as good as it gets. Like it
or not.
-- 
/Sorin
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