On 5/28/05, Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org thebs413@earthlink.net wrote:
But remember, it's Red Hat's fault. ;->
That's unnecessary sarcasm. No one that I know would suggest that RedHat should ship code that is not properly licensed.
But, sarcasm or not, there's a grain of truth in that statement.
The essential truth underlying all of this angry discussion and others like it on other lists is this:
It is 100% true that RedHat has abandoned a large portion of their prior market for business reasons. They still offer a good product for the money, but they have scaled back their offering to support only the largest customers who are willing to accept the limitations of the new offering because of the SLA and because of continued rock solid (for the most part) releases. This leaves a great many shipwrecked souls on the coastline who in the past chose to run RedHat for solid support in a number of areas that have now been abandoned as unprofitable and/or not easily maintainable. Such ex customers are understandably bitter, You may consider their complaints to be ignorance, but many are merely expressing their natural concerns about being left behind.
It is unquestionably RedHat's fault that this (granted not especially profitable) portion of their prior customer base has been left high and dry. RedHat did it, and they would do it again tomorrow. Ignorance comes into play because those who are complaining have not yet realized the full extent of their abandonment. The RedHat that they knew and loved is gone never to return, but they keep wishing it back. The RedHat of today and tomorrow is a business enterprise with the bottom line firmly in sight, and only those customers with a lot of clout will be able to influence the roadmap. Please don't misinterpret: this is not to say that RedHat does not make a lot of worthwhile contributions to Linux in general, perhaps more than any other vendor.
It's just too bad that there is really nothing on offer for these former customers. Please don't suggest Fedora. The customers who are complaining the loudest are not interested in experimental versions.
None of this has really very much to do with CentOS. They are doing a damn good job maintaining a community version of the RedHat enterprise offering. Unfortunately, some of those abandoned customers appear to have believed that CentOS, as a community endeavor, might fill the gap, but that's a misunderstanding (ignorance as you would call it) of the CentOS mission.