On Sunday 03 April 2005 10:39 am, Collins Richey wrote:
I'm a home user of CentOS (a desktop and a laptop) because I like the I would like to know how those of you who use CentOS in commercial endeavors justify the decsion - ethics, community vs. vendor support, etc., etc. I've heard many comments to the effect that we CentOS users are just leaches, since RedHat does the major work.
Ethics? There's no decision to be made. As others have pointed out, RedHat based their business on open source software and they continue to play by the open source rules. One of those rules is they give back to the community for anyone else to use for any reason, as long as _we_, those other users, abide by the rules as well.
Community vs vendor support? That's a bit easier for us. In the years we've been using Red Hat Linux we've called Red Hat (the company) twice for support. One time they helped us; another time they said that help for that issue was beyond the scope of what they offered.
And that's twice over many years, lots of systems and lots of versions (the first support request was for version 6.2, the second for 7.2).
So it just made sense for us to use a community-supported alternative when it one became available that meets our specifications.
Jeff