What do you think of Centos

[Jim Cornette]

linux.whiz at gmail.com wrote:
> On 2/22/06, *Fajar Priyanto* <fajarpri at cbn.net.id 
> <mailto:fajarpri at cbn.net.id>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi all,
>     I hope I'm not starting a flame war.
> 
>     Can someone pls tell me the ups and down between Centos and FC?
>     I'm familiar with FC4 and some things that I like from it:
>     1. The available packages are abundant. Very easy to find packages
>     for FC4.
>     2. The user list is very active and friendly too (I have subscribed
>     to Centos
>     list and seems like they're friendly too :)
> 
> 
> I personally think that the CentOS project and Whitebox and those 
> re-spins of RHEL are pretty much ripping off Red Hat.  Red Hat spends a 
> ton of money, time and effort in making their enterprise distro.  They 
> give the entire thing to the community via the Fedora project.  As 
> required by the terms of the GPL, they release everything for RHEL as 
> source RPMs.  Then the clone distros come along and respin them and give 
> them away.
> 

They have to recompile the source rpms. They do try to mirror the RHEL 
distributions. I think it would be interesting for one of the clones to 
come out with i686 optimized compilations. It might not improve 
performance a lot from the arguments presented from the RH side. It 
might add something for the community in showing two distros, one cloned 
  but optimized and another pretty much mirroring RHEL to the line.

They are not ripping off RH with their efforts. They are giving those 
that cannot afford the RHEL price scheme with a slow moving and reliable 
version of RHEL without phone support contracts and the like.

> While this is perfectly legal, I think it dilutes the value of what Red 
> Hat is doing.  "Legal" does not necessarily mean "right."  The respin 
> distros don't really innovate, they just leech off the work that Red Hat 
> has done. 

The reason they exist is because of a need that small businesses and 
those that cannot afford the price of RHEL to have a distro that has the 
feel and cautious integration that RHEL provides.

  IMHO, if you want the benefit of Red Hat's work, you should
> support them by either buying their products or using FC and 
> contributing back to the project.  Even if that contribution is just 
> filing bug reports or answering questions on the mailing lists/forums, 
> it is contributing back to Red Hat.

IMHO the RHEL prices are way too high. I am learning a lot from Fedora 
and do try to contribute to the project.
> 
> Let's not forget how much Red Hat is spending to give us FC - I think we 
> should reward them for that however we can, not leech off them.

RHEL has those that set the prices for the distribution. With more 
feasible pricing, more will buy, less will settle for the alternatives.

You need to consider bulk sales at reasonable pricing or less patrons at 
a higher price. I believe the ones who decide all of the internals 
decided their pricing level with consideration for more sales at a lower 
price.

Jim

> 
> LW
> 


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