[clug] In Praise of Red Hat

Paul Wayper paulway at mabula.net
Thu Jul 9 07:22:09 MDT 2009


On 09/07/09 20:19, Al MailingList wrote:
>
> 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?

Yes, it's not officially supported by Red Hat, nor does Red Hat spend money on 
its development.  (http://www.centos.org/modules/smartfaq/faq.php?faqid=13)

It's led by four guys who take the same packages as Red Hat and track what Red 
Hat does with them.  CentOS's main goal is to be the free version of RHEL, so 
it tries to track RHEL fairly closely.  So while CentOS is a separate 
distribution, if you know CentOS you also (mostly) know RHEL, minus the 
branding and the extra herbs and spices.

As an RHCE I can say that if you want to use RHEL but don't want to pay for 
the support, use CentOS.  The herbs and spices aren't really enough for anyone 
using less than, oh, a dozen machines, to make a difference.

> 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?

Sure.  Do that then.  No one, Red Hat least of all, is going to have a problem 
with that.

(IMO) it's for this reason that they only offer the ISOs on their site alone, 
and only if you're trying it or already a customer.  Because to them it's 
worth protecting the integrity of that package - making sure that you haven't 
got a rogue ISO that's been maliciously attacked.  Likewise, it reduces the 
number of morons trying to get support out of Red Hat after they've downloaded 
a hacked version of RHEL (or been sold one by a dodgy vendor).

It's important to come at all of this with an inclusion mindset.  Red Hat 
loses little from having CentOS around, and nothing that it cares to try and 
hold on to.  On the other hand, it gains a whole bunch of people (like myself) 
that started on CentOS and thought "you know, I can go and get my RHCE and 
work with Red Hat servers now that I've spent the time learning on CentOS". 
And Linux as a whole benefits too.  I had a rant in here about the 'exclusion' 
mindset but I think you can all sing along to that tune (as long as it's not 
copyrighted).

HTH,

Paul


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