[CentOS] Caught between a Red Hat and a CentOS

[ken]

On 10/18/2009 08:17 AM Kwan Lowe wrote:
>> I'm pretty sure most corporations will continue to pay to use Red Hat.
>> It's pretty tough to go the head of IT and tell them you want to use
>> an OS without a corporate support license. Support is a security
>> blanket, if nothing else -- and it's a place to lay blame if something
>> goes wrong. (Though there are some exceptions.)
> 
> If my company is in any way representative, then RedHat has nothing to
> fear from CentOS. Though a few of the engineers use CentOS as
> workstations or POC machines, our policy is that we have commercial
> support of our production software. We have run into issues with other
> applications that are no longer under support.
> 
> CentOS has actually played a large role in getting RedHat into our
> environment. Without the ability to demo POCs, I think it would be
> unlikely that we would have tried Linux.
> 
> (I of course am not speaking for my company in any way.)

I'm a contractor for an organization which has three linux servers, one
of which is a high-profile, highly mission-critical production machine,
the second of which is a development machine due to replace the first
within the month.  The third is an experimental development machine
which I built and alone am doing development on.  The first two run
Redhat, the third runs CentOS.

In the couple of months I've had the need to contact Redhat support on
just one issue and their "support" has been terrible, so far completely
useless and a waste of time.  I don't know what Redhat charges us for
support, but whatever it is, it hasn't been worth it.  I even went so
far as to express this to others in the department and have a private
conversation with the head of the department (my boss's boss),
expressing my disappointment with redhat support to him.

If my (admittedly brief) experience is any indication, if redhat's lead
in the linux world is based on their support, their position is very
tenuous.