[CentOS] Arguments to continue using it

[Rodrigo Barbosa]

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Even tho many good answers were already provided, thera are a few
point I would like to comment on.

On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 09:08:25PM -0500, Alain Reguera wrote:
> This afternoon I received the new that my institution, in the main
> direction, is planning (for political reasons, I don't know which
> one??) migrate to Debian.

Then they are wrong from the state. No company should change the
software they run on their computers for political reasons. Technical,
yes. Economical, yes. Commercial, yes. Strategic, yes. But not political.

> I have a hotted conversation with my boss cause I've been working on
> CentOS during near a year and half. I explained it that both distros
> just implement the protocols that are standards, that could be
> installed a web server in a Debian Box or in a CentOS Box, both can
> use apache and generally the service will be stable in both, without a
> lot of differences. 

That is, at best, wishful thinking.

I have to seriously question Debian's stability on an enterprise
environment. You will see some serious version changes on updates
(not common, but they do happen), and some less-than-stable versions
on the distribution.

RHEL (as CentOS) is not a bleeding-edge distribution. Actually,
some software are so old that if you are will have trouble if you
are migrating from another distribution. As an example, I would
like to point out that Mutt on CentOS 4 is older than the one we
had on Conectiva Linux 9 (old, old). On the other hand, with RHEL
(and CentOS) you will have a rocksolid server, something I never
saw with any other distribution I had the (dis)pleasure of working
with. To name a few: RedHat Linux (pre-enterprise), Mandrake, Mandriva,
SuSE, Conectiva, Slackware and Debian.

The overall maintenance cost for a CentOS box is about 60% of what
I had with other distributions (85% compared to SuSE Enterprise).
I'm talking about technical personal time here.

> Also that the use of each one is indifferent, just
> a matter of user's comfort and that means, it will take a long time to
> change to other, because not only will be the time in planning
> services, but the time in learn a new way of do it too.

I can put a figure on that time. Namely, 3 to 6 months (depending on
how well documented your procedures are). Also, it is far from indifferent,
as I pointed earlier.

> Note: if I said something wrong correct me please.

I hope what I wrote above helped :)

> The arguments they gave to me were, what happen if redhat close the
> base packages, they don't have to release them, but just to the buyer,
> and we can't buy the distro, there are others distros like debian that
> is totally free, and without dependencies of proprietary industry.

Already answered by other in a far better way than I could do myself.

> I really struggle a little more to defend, CentOS and my comfort on it
> ;) , but have not solids arguments about that issue, I really never
> worried about it.
> 
> Would some of you explain me this issue, or point me somewhere to
> read?. I'll really appreciate that.

I went to a distribution change a some months ago. Since we are
a consulting company, I had to think not only about my company, but
also my clients. That triggered the change was the fact that
Mandrake Software bought Conectiva (Conectiva Linux was our
distro of choice).

Yes, we had a choice of starting to use Mandriva, but since it
was a change on itself, we decided to do a full analysis of the
avaliable distros to see which one was a better choice.

The first question one has to ask is the focus of the distribution.
On that, the first two we rulled out were Slackware and Debian.
Slackware is a hackers/learning focused distro, and Debian is
a politicaly focused distro. Fedora is a bleeding-edge distro,
so it was also ruled out, along with many others. Truthfuly,
just by applying this first filter (distro focus), we were
able to disqualify about 70 distros. That is a filter I recomend
anyone to apply when choosing what you will put on your company
servers.

I have changed distros before that. One thing I learned is that
choosing the correct distro will be much more cost effective,
even if you have to change it after 6 or 7 years, than sticking
to a distro for the wrong reasons (ie: non-business related).

Best Regards,

- -- 
Rodrigo Barbosa <rodrigob at suespammers.org>
"Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur"
"Be excellent to each other ..." - Bill & Ted (Wyld Stallyns)

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