[clug] In Praise of Red Hat

[Hal Ashburner]

Disclaimer: I don't work for RedHat, I don't have shares in them, I
don't even use  or support their distribution for any commercial
purposes and I'm not applying for a job there either. Yet IMHO they are
the benchmark for linux companies doing business the right way. Every
single line of code they ever paid for has been released under a Free
License and is available to all other distributions. They don't do
patent deals. I'd be happy for them to make money distributing any of my
released code (not that anyone could make money out of that ;p )

from centos.org

CentOS  Overview
"CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources
freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise
Linux vendor.  CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors
redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS
mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and
artwork.)  CentOS is free."

So here is Red Hat Enterprise Linux minus the branding. Why minus the
branding? So that other companies don't claim they are "Red Hat
Enterprise Support" and confuse Red Hat customers. Every company I can
think of protects it's brand and trademarks as this is their reputation.
If you use CentOS then later decide you do want Red Hat's support you
can ring them up and work out the contract you want. Or hire a third
party if you think its a better deal. You only become a customer of Red
Hat if you think their support is better than the alternative for the
same system. There is no vendor lock-in. In computing that's pretty
impressive.

Red Hat make me feel good as they're proof that a Free software company
can exist, make good money and do the "right" thing by the community. I
say this with even more feeling because I was so worried a few years
back about what I understood they were doing with their licensing when
they started their enterprise vs fedora split but I'm delighted to note
it turned out fine and was largely an issue of communication, my lack of
understanding or both.

There can obviously be no comparison to microsoft by anyone who has ever
rung microsoft for support when they've hit a critical bug. The
appropriate comparison for that is Dante.

If I am ever in the market for commercial linux support I will be
looking at Red Hat's offering first in my comparisons *because* they
have consistently been such an upstanding member of our community.  They
deserve the reputation credit they've earned. Other commercial Linux
distributions would do well to catch up.

Hal