[CentOS] Vote For CentOS :)

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2005-06-04 at 07:40, Lamar Owen wrote:

> Yes I do.  I remember the first time Red Hat 4 was a new Linux version.  Times 
> have changed, and the Fedora Project holds the position once held by the 
> 'regular' Red Hat Linux, other than the 'boxed set' angle. 

Well, no.  Fedora sort-of matches the X.0 Red Hat Releases that, after
one or a few trials, most system administrators knew to avoid in
production and wait for the usable X.2 version that developed
quickly because the bait of a free reliable version drew help
from a huge community in fixing the initial bugs that were always
pushed out.  But Fedora never gives you the fixed/usable release.

>  Red Hat being 
> able to stay in business to help support Open Source Software (which they do, 
> in spades) is a good enough reason for me for the current situation.  They 
> genuinely thought that this was the only way; people who are in the know have 
> stated that there are still warehouses full of boxed sets of Red Hat Linux 
> 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x.

I don't doubt that there were a lot of bad decisions made about the
quantity and pricing for those boxes - or even where to try to sell
them.  And if anyone is still storing a boxed copy in a warehouse they
are still making a mistake.  They didn't have to switch away from their
initial good ideas to drop the bad ones.

> With RHEL they sell fewer boxes, but sell more product, 
> driving the cost down and making it possible for them to employ some of the 
> best open source hackers around, like Ulrich Drepper, Alan Cox, Jacob 
> Jelinek, Tom Lane, and many others.  Maybe these fine folk would find 
> employment elsewhere, and maybe they wouldn't; fact is Red Hat pays them to 
> work on Open Source, and we benefit from their upstream work, funded in part 
> by Red Hat.

But what Red Hat claims to be selling is support, not product.  And
Centos as a free product actually makes that claim come true.  However,
it is more work for everyone and takes away any feeling of community
support behind Red Hat.  I do understand why they insist on removing
the trademarks on modified products but in the Centos case that
is the only reason the product is modified in the first place. 
It doesn't make any sense compared to continuing to allow free
distribution of an unmodified product without support.

> Why don't I use RHEL?  Too 
> expensive for my operation here at PARI.  If CentOS weren't around I'd be 
> doing a from source rebuild for myself.

Exactly - and how is anyone better off than they would be seeing
Red Hat trademarked products in all those places where the paid
support is unnecessary or overpriced and feeling like part of
a single community when they report a bug, recommend the product
or help someone else install it?  Ahh, nostagia - I fell for the
bait...

> One size does not fit all.

Right, but you probably no longer even recommend trying on that
badly-fitting model.   And since it now seems unrelated to anything
you use, you are probably much less motivated to test the upstream
side which, in case anyone forgets, is what actually makes this
stuff usable.  Dig up one of those prettily-boxed X.0 sets and try
to run it if you need help remembering what the developers push
out *before* they get the user feedback.  If you aren't using
Fedora now, who is going to supply the wide scale testing that will
make some future Centos better?  Hmmm, maybe Fedora will try to
re-claim the community now.  It will be interesting to see if they
use their new independence to re-institute point releases or some
similarly usable product as a reward for the pain of testing the
initial releases.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com