What do you think of Centos

[Jim Cornette]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Jim Cornette wrote:
>> linux.whiz at gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
> That is how Mandrake was started - they optimized for the i586 while
> RH was still optimized for i386...

I tried Mandrake 5.3 and a few of the 6.x releases where you could 
install a Redhat system and upgrade it to Mandrake. I was attracted by 
the KDE addition that I guess was not new but was not distributed by 
Redhat distributions because of a dispute regarding the qt license at 
the time.
Other than KDE addition and Mandrake providing iso images of their 
distribution, I almost switched over to the distro.
Redhat soon followed the iso availability for the Rh distro and caught 
up in other areas where Mandrake was excelling in value added features.
I did not realize that Mandrake was ahead in the optimization game. With 
a distribution that pretty much requires a hefty computer and i386 
legacy is pretty much not a factor for modern distributions, i586 sounds 
like it would make better sense.

> 
>> 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.
>>
> I have to agree - they are providing a product and support in a
> market that RH moved away from. RH decided that it was not
> profitable to support this market. So others are filling the
> gap. If anything, it tends broaden the base of RH compatible
> systems out there, making it more attractive to market products
> for RH systems. In the long run, it will probably increase RH's
> sales as some users migrate to RH as their support needs grow.
> After all, that is really what RH is selling.

I felt comfortable maintaining a cloned distribution. I was bored with 
the more primitive look and feel of the RHEL clone and only experimented 
for a short while on the distro, Centos for reference.
With other posts on this thread, I think that Centos providing a direct 
clone and also a value added repository would work in all directions to 
improve the products at both upstream and downstream levels.

Jim

> 
> Mikkel