On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Les Mikesell<lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > Ian Murray wrote: > >> >> Part of my professional work is risk assessing system upgrades. I have >> been doing so long now that everything I professionally do is considered >> from a risk perspective. Maybe those of us that have to assess risk on a >> daily basis understand what I am on about and the ones that don't.... don't. > > Exactly. I once built things on AT&T Unix and hardware. Nice big > company with plenty of resources, dedicated, bright developers, a > history of following through many releases, and then out of the blue it > was gone. Dell was the next choice since it was pretty much the same > code base as AT&T SysVr4 with some extra drivers. Then when Windows95 > came out, Dell dropped it and pretended they'd never heard of unix. (I > understood much later after reading their transcripts in the Microsoft > antitrust case...) Then there was Red Hat which didn't really work at > the time but had the redeeming features that bugs you reported sometimes > got fixed and you didn't have to count licenses - and then that went > away too. So yes, I'm paranoid. There aren't many survivors in this > business. Hmmm, I left out an interesting interlude with BSDI in there > somewhere but they were killed by a lawsuit. I look at CentOS' track record. The foundation has consistently put out a good, solid distribution with regular updates. When that changes, then I'll worry. But, as you've shown above, there are no absolute guarantees -- so, at some point you've got to go with your gut. Even if CentOS was shaky (which it's not) you still have Scientific Linux and Red Hat -- so it's not like you're putting all your eggs in one basket. From a "risk management" standpoint I think CentOS is a pretty good bet. -- RonB -- Using CentOS 5.3