What do you think of Centos

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 13:41 -0600, Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> On 2/23/06, Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> >
> > > is this, Les (and others): "I do not care what they do to be in the
> > > clear legally, I think they're in the moral wrong."
> > >
> > > I think dousing your wife in gasoline and setting her on fire when
> > > you're bored with her and want to marry someone else is morally wrong.
> >
> > Well, you're getting a little bit extreme, aren't you?
> >
> > :-)
> >
> > Oh, and now I see what you meant in your private e-mail!
> 
> Yeah, I'm just pointing out that people will disagree on moral issues
> and that's the only really extreme example I could think of that I
> knew everyone would "get", would "see the side of the person that
> believes it's wrong."  Like one guy earlier in the thread said, "just
> because something is legal doesn't make it right."
> 
> Anyway, yeah, Red Hat Software doesn't have a leg to stand on to
> prevent or even discourage the CentOS folks from doing what they do. 
> Legal or not, I think it's on shakey ethical ground and if they are
> adding enough "value" to be truly different, I might change my
> opinion, or at least feel less passionately about it.
> 
> Be that as it may, the only reason people consider CentOS an
> "Enterprise" Linux is because it's a spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
>  That's the only reason.  Debian is just as "Enterprise" than CentOS,
> in my opinion, but it's not considered an "Enterprise" Linux because
> it's not a copy of something produced by a commercial venture and
> marketed toward the datacenter user. It's like the thread, Mike, where
> we were discussing Linus Torvalds' opinion about KDE.   Someone asked,
> "why should Linus' opinion carry any weight anyway?"  Because he's
> Linus, that's why.  Even if he doesn't have a leg to stand on, he's
> Linus Torvals, famous guy, and people listen.  It's the same thing
> here.  CentOS is a spin of Red Hat "Enterprise" Linux, so it must be
> "Enterprise" too.  There are pleanty of alternatives to using CentOS
> but folks like that one guy discounting Debian, SuSE, et al said, they
> have to be "Enterprise" for him to consider them.  CentOS is only
> "Enterprise" because RHEL is "Enterprise."
> 
> I still think what they're doing is wrong and I won't use it or
> recommend it.  Obviously a fair lot of you think it's just peachy to
> get RHEL for free.  Cool, knock yourselves out.
----
there are some things that you aren't considering...

1 - Red Hat isn't required to put all their SRPM's on the net - free for
download, they only need to provide the SRPM's to purchasers and that
could be via other methods...it's simply the method that they are
choosing.

2 - 'Re-building' or 're-spinning' is not the piece of cake you seem to
think that it is...their are some packages that simply won't build on a
base system and special build environments are required. These build
environments very much differentiate CentOS from RHEL and is one of the
reasons that vendors are never going to 'officially' support a 're-spin'
of RHEL. RHEL is a known package and supported package.

3 - SLA's - the real point of RHEL is the SLA not the packages
themselves. The packages are as you note, GPL or compatible license. The
SLA is what Red Hat is actually selling. If it were the packages that
they were selling, they couldn't justify the same price on multiple
packages...it's the machine 'entitlement'...the SLA.

Craig