[clug] In Praise of Red Hat

[Al MailingList]

Hey Hal,

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Hal Ashburner<hal.ashburner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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."
>

Unless I'm misled, I was under the impression CentOS had nothing to do
with Red Hat? i.e. it was just a bunch of people who took the Red Hat
source and rebuilt it?

> 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.

Fair enough. I personally just don't like the whole RHEL approach of
entering a serial number and making it hard to download isos (if I
recall correctly). I'd probably rather use whatever distribution takes
my fancy, and pay someone for support if and when I need it?

>
> Hal
>
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