[CentOS] link to "commercial support" page isn't really helpful

Mon Jun 22 02:44:35 UTC 2009
Bill Campbell <centos at celestial.com>

I would guess that listing commercial providers on the CentOS site could
expose them to legal liabilities given the litigious nature of the U.S. so
don't know if this is a consideration.

I can't speak for others, but I would guess that there are quite a few
people/organizations on this list who provide commercial support for CentOS
and other *nix distributions without being listed on CentOS's site or
other sites.

We have been providing support for a variety of Linux systems since 1997
staring with Caldera, then SuSE, and now most of our clients are running
CentOS on current systems.  We have been supporting a number of clients
since 1984 running various Unix systems including some old SCO OpenServer
5.0.x systems.

The critical issue for the client is that they have confidence in the
organization that does their support, not that the organization is a big
company such as Red Hat, IBM, etc.  I ran into our oldest client today in
town, a company that we have worked with since 1984, and is still running
applications on SCO OpenServer 5.0.6a.  We have other clients that we
started working with as far back as 1988 when they were running SCO Xenix,
and now have systems still running SuSE 9.0 Pro (it still runs liunx-abi to
run SCO OpenServer COFF binaries), and have a couple of CentOS 5.x systems
which are hosting the Caldera systems.

Bill
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But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the
law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other
persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at
the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without
committing a crime. -- Frederic Bastiat, The Law