[CentOS] 'Political' Questions on CentOS please

Mon Oct 16 12:37:57 UTC 2006
Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com>

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

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