[CentOS] Issues with CentOS in enterprise

[Brian Mathis]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 11:45 AM, Zdenek <zdenek.w at o2.pl> wrote:
> Hello all.
>
> Does anybody have experience with pushing CentOS in enterprise?
>
> I have the following situation. I tried to promote CentOS to local bank. They have now a couple of Gentoo-based systems and I tried to explain them that CentOS is much better option for enterprises.
>
> IT department is interested in stability of the system, so they are ready to give CentOS a try. But the problem came from management and information security division.
>
> That guys look much affected by FUD created by M$. They tell the story like "you can not rely on this open source, it is built by just few community geeks, you never know what will happen if the developer will be hit by bus tomorrow" and so on. They especially refer to the last year FUD story published at ZDNet (http://goo.gl/y0LBi). So, IT guys are allowed to use open source only if they can prove that it has stable community and transparent development and build process they can reproduce on their own if necessary.
>
> I guess, I'm not the first who encounter this issue. Could you share your experience how to deal with it? Are there any public resources that can be used as proofs of CentOS stability?
>
> --
> Zdenek


This sounds a lot more like a religious war from the people who think
that using Gentoo is the "right" way to do things because it's pure
from source, etc...  The fact that they already have Gentoo means they
are not opposed to Open Source per se, just that they seem to look at
Redhat as the "MS of the Linux world", and have some kind of prejudice
against that.

The only way to combat this view is to highlight all the problems of
maintaining things from source code, and to show the benefits of a
standard platform.  Be prepared for a high amount of dismissiveness,
attitude, and flat out accusations that "maintaining from source isn't
that hard and if you can't do it you're obviously not qualified for
the job".  This is a sure sign of an amateur sysadmin or someone who
thinks a sysadmin is just a person too dumb to be a programmer.  As
for the standard platform thing, just look at what all major vendors
support for Linux, and you can bet that Redhat is #1 on the list.

As for concerns about the community going away, it's quite easy to
point out that all commercial software also has this risk, and that
risk could actually be higher since they have to maintain profits.
And since when can you build any commercial software from source if
the company goes out of business?