On : Wed, 21 May 2008 16:57:37 -0400, "Ross S. W. Walker" <rwalker at medallion.com> wrote: > I would just buy the RH licenses for the project. CentOS may work well > for development and testing platform, but the production code should > be on fully supported RHEL. Having been on RHEL support, and having had occasion to use that support quite extensively, I have formed an opinion to the contrary. My experience did not lead me to the conclusion that licensed RHEL distributions, together with the highest available level of support offered by RedHat, provided any measurable benefit over CentOS and community support. In fact, my experiences with RedHat Support, which were not in the least bit negative, led me to abandon RedHat, first to WhiteBox and thence to CentOS. The practical matter is that RedHat Support is provided in layers, with minimally experienced person filtering support calls. This was, and I expect still is, the case regardless of what level of support is purchased. By the time a serious problem got to a person in RedHat who possessed anywhere near my own experience with the systems under consideration either I had already solved the issue (usually with help from Goole or project specific mailing lists), identified a satisfactory workaround, or had determined that the problem was unsolvable in the timeframe required with the resources available. RedHat support people were unfailingly polite and helpful, but the fact remains that the value for fee was not evident. Immediate support (which is really the only kind that matters to an organization, anything else is really a development project of some sort) for open source systems comes in two basic flavors, enlightenment and custom consulations. Enlightenment is provided by informed individuals who are willing to share their knowledge and experience with others who problems are products of their own ignorance. Members of this mailing list have provided enlightenment to me on many, many occasions. Custom work is either provided from ones own resources or is contracted out to people who really know the system you need fixed/enhanced within a minimal amount of time. I have engaged open source software authors to enhance their products with features that our firm desired on many occasions and in fact am doing so with one at the present time. I cannot perceive any measurable advantage to having a support contract for OSS, other than perhaps with the actual core team of the exact product you are using. RH is a packager, which is not to denigrate either the value of the integration work that they do, or its technical merit. Nonetheless, most OSS support problems are either resolved by re-reading the specific package documentation, having an obscure feature identified and explained by someone that knows about it, bypassing the impediment, or when all else fails writing and submitting your own patch. -- *** E-Mail is NOT a SECURE channel *** James B. Byrne mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca Harte & Lyne Limited http://www.harte-lyne.ca 9 Brockley Drive vox: +1 905 561 1241 Hamilton, Ontario fax: +1 905 561 0757 Canada L8E 3C3