On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 13:13 +0100, Tom Brown wrote:
Hi
I have used CentOS personally for 'ages' but i have some questions that i need answering from the wider audience. These are for management as i am proposing RHEL for our QA and Prd infrastructure and CentOS for dev. I would go CentOS for all areas but we need 'support' on our prd systems.
Can anyone tell me roughly how many cpu's are running centos? How widespread is it, does anyone really know?
We estimate that there are more than 1.5 million machines using CentOS. That is based on the fact that we have more than 1 million unique IPs that have downloaded updates from just the centos.org mirrors in the last 6 months. That does not include any updates performed from the external public mirrors (which is how we design the default update system). It also does not include any machines that are doing rsync or other connections, just yum or up2date updates.
CentOS was the 8th largest linux distro for Internet web servers in Nov 2005:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/strong_growth_for_debian.html
How many developers are helping with CentOS?
There are currently 13 developers for CentOS, and many more than that who help on IRC and with wiki.centos.org.
When did CentOS 'start' and how long will it be around for?
CentOS started in OCT 2003 (when RHEL-3 was released) and our first official release (CentOS-3.1) was in MAR 2004 (we had beta releases of CentOS-3 in December).
We will be around as long as there is RHEL.
I am trying to get an accurate answer to fend off the 'well it could disappear at any minute' argument.
Even if CentOS disappeared tomorrow, you could convert any CentOS boxes to RHEL in about 25 minutes (after buying new licenses for RHN).
You can also easily convert current RHEL boxes to CentOS in about the same amount of time.
Here is an article I wrote that explains why one should choose CentOS if looking for a free enterprise solution:
http://www.hughesjr.com/content/view/19/2/
Thanks, Johnny Hughes