ken wrote:
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.)
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.
My experience has been good and I have no negative feelings about their support offering. We had a critical issue once on a production server with 250 users, and that they solved for us very quickly. Other lower priority issues have been resolved in appropriate time frames.
From my perspective, its all good.
Ian