On Thu, 6 Aug 2009, Les Mikesell wrote:
But the hard fact is that CentOS has been, is, and will remain a reliable approach for millions of systems, not with an 'open anything goes' management, but with a conservative and careful one, based on observed and continued technical merit by dedicated insiders.
Leaving outsiders to wonder what happens if those few insiders have a bad day.
... and we took heat for going public as well. We have done what is right and accepted that not all will be pleased. Thanks for being in there, throwing rocks, Les
I had occasion to review the stats on how important our commo efforts are in the last few weeks. Some sysadmins, and some trade press watch; must simply do not care. I am astonished at how few people are on centos-announce ML to catch the important asynchronous security related announcements
I did not see a furor when I posted the following. The htp://planet.centos.org/ RSS feed consolidator carried it to a wide fanout. I know it had 35k distinct IP's access it from logfiles in the first week: http://orcorc.blogspot.com/2009/02/money-for-nothing-and-chicks-for-free.htm... and the followup: http://orcorc.blogspot.com/2009/03/nine-pregnant-gals-in-queue.html was even more widely read and picked up in the trade press
It was carefully drafted by me, and says up top in bold:
If you feel you need the facilities provided by the CentOS project sooner than it is provided, or that you need deterministic releases of support: Please go buy such from our upstream, or from a third party vendor who can sell you the expedited subset of services truly needed.
The point is, all the knowledge one needs to locally front run Centos for a subset of packages (updates and point releases, and even major releases as we com into the 6 timeframe) are long since out there. It is FOSS
The project under the familiar name ** might ** have moved, and the old domain left behind to wither away -- we now know that is not going to happen either. Thanks Lance, thanks letter co-signers, on the domain transfer
The end of that second post remains relevant as well
-- Russ herrold