doughnuts on a fish hook

[Jack Aboutboul]

On Tuesday, Aug 26, 2003, at 18:44 Asia/Jerusalem, Troy Dawson wrote:

I need to defend RH here and refute a few of the weaker points of your 
argument.

> Buying the Enterprise stuff is not an option.

This is o.k. You don't need the enterprise stuff if you don't want it. 
I'll concede this one to you. Although you will get a huge discount, 
I'm sure, on a bulk order.

> We were just starting work on alternatives when the RHL web page went 
> up.  All our work stopped and we started shifting over to maybe 
> working with the RedHat community.  But ... well as everyone knows, 
> that got pulled out.  A mailling list is not a community

Why not? You have direct contact with the developers. They will give 
back to you as much as you give to them and help the project.

> My management is not going to accept my answer that 'I read it from 
> some redhat guy on the mailling list' they want to see it on a web 
> page.  A policy isn't a policy if it's only on some mailling list.  (I 
> know that isn't entirely true, but think of it from managements 
> perspective)

Another valid point. PHB's like to see things in "official writing."

> So, we have basically turned and are looking for different 
> alternatives again.  That includes different distributions.  That's 
> not a threat, it's just something we have to look at because RedHat is 
> no longer (at least in appearance) giving us what we need.

Red Hat will give you as much as you want out of it. I say that instead 
of complaining, try and have fermilab pay for you to get an rhce and 
take some of the rh developer courses. This way you can use, extend and 
flex the rhl distro any way you like.  Basically the more you put in to 
it at this point; the more you help, the more help and time developers 
will put into helping you. I'd hate to see you use another platform, 
since I've been a developer on a few other distros, just for kicks, and 
nothing gets as good as rh. RH is a great distro, and it's not floating 
on air, it has corporate backing and wont have crazy developers forking 
the project every other week, because their patches are criticized. 
Stick with RH and RH will stick with you.  There's a lot more to be 
said here, but I'll leave it to the developers to address.

--Jack