It took Red Hat 16 months to produce the newest version of its premium Linux product, which went on sale in February for as much as $2,499 per computer per year. It took a group of programmers less than two weeks to release a free clone. But the move could help Red Hat as much as it appears to hurt it.
Programmers bypass Red Hat Linux fees
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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And I don’t disagree with this either but this was not the reason of why I posted back to those who continue to bash Gentoo. Just because it doesn’t have certification doesn’t mean its not ready for the corporate environment. A Gentoo box can quite easily sit in the corner and not have major updates other than security/bug fixes just like RHEL. Getting certification for an OS is not an overnight process and takes many years…yes “MANY” years to be able to achieve. Just ask RedHat how long it took them. Gentoo is a relatively new distro and it will take quite a while, perhaps never, to get certification but that doesn’t mean it can’t play the same role as any RHEL machine. Sure, many businesses may not want to introduce Gentoo because of this very reason (and I’m not argueing this) but does that honestly mean it’s not ready for the corporate environment? I think not.
“so you are now claiming that enterprise systems running critical operations should have complete in house expertise on all products that deploy and should not rely on commercial support? ”
Yes unless the application was a vendor specific application developed by them. And if this is the case then you would contact the vendor and NOT redhat support. Please don’t tell me RedHat support have experts for every application.
“in other words speculation which amounts to nothing”
Well prove to me that OEM support is critical. Give me some real life examples of RHEL OEM support…not just one or two. You must know many eh? Sorry I’m speculating again!
“just understood that you have none.”
Yep, as much as you.
“meanwhile there are other benefits like RHN Aand redhat gfs which you cannot get from gentoo> btw rhn is different from up2DATE”
Oh please….. spare me.
Who cares if people are copying Redhat? I myself learnt linux using Redhat 5,6,7,7.1,8 and 9 … I used it freely. I purchased only 7.1 packages. Now Redhat is costing quite a lot. Infact they are moving like a MS. I really didnt like the day made RH paid one and stopped free downloads.
After using the other distros, I have come down to the conclusion I dont need RH Linux, Fedora sponsered by RH is good but not at all stable cannot use it on my servers. What I really like is Mandreak Linux and Novell. If i have to pay for my linux I’ll rather go for Novel linux than RH. Specially after using RH and Novell I found Novell has edge on RH in customer support, the way package is shipped and ease of use and the easy recovery!
Ultimately, companies using Oracle and other RH certified apps will buy RHEL. But for other purposes like simple web server, multiple mail servers and intranet applications, CentOS will do the job.
This place is getting worse than slashdot.
We ran a couple of servers using gentoo, one was an FTP server and one ran a custom application. Kept them up to date and everything was going great until one day both boxes completely inexplicably crashed leaving no trace of what happened, no useful log messages, nothing at all. We were given 4 hours to find out what happened, after forum and mailing list searches and some wonderfully helpful “thats too bad” comments from the community that was the end of our gentoo boxes, as decided by management. We are running centos on all boxes except for our oracle boxes which are running rhas. None of them have ever caused any problem whatsoever.
Late in the game here, I know.
How many people here touting RedHat support have ever had to use it? We run RHEL where I work, and I do think that it is a very good distro, and think it is making strides towards what an enterprise linux should be. However, anytime I have had to call in for tech support, I have spoken with someone with no, or very little unix/linux background, reading from a script. Their upper tiers of support are very good, but 9 times out of 10, if I need to call them, it is about something related to compatibility, etc, and I need a quick and competent yes or now, not hemming and hawing, and lots of “Um, hold on please” while they page through a binder. Calling and asking if they compile a particular module into their latest home-brew kernel should not be an unanswerable question. I actually had to download and install Centos4, and look for myself to get an answer to that one. I was less than pleased. Yes, I’m sure that I could have gotten that same answer on a redhat mailing list, but we don’t pay for a support contract so I can spend my day hunting down answers to easy questions online.
So my .02 is good (great?) distro, but lousy basic support.
Well, you’re wrong. Here’s just a very small sample of what got spit out when I did an ’emerge sync’:
deleting x11-wm/ion3/ion3-20050102.ebuild
deleting x11-wm/ion3/ion3-20041104.ebuild
As I said, stuff disappears from the portage tree all the time.
Anyway, even if I was wrong, or even if you can set it up so that things don’t disappear, you’re still missing the whole point. Gentoo doesn’t backport security fixes. Red Hat does. With Gentoo you’re forced to upgrade to get security and bug fixes. With Red Hat you’re not. Simple as that.
And as someone else mentioned, maybe the postgresql server isn’t such a good example from a developer point of view, but from an admin point of view I think the point still stands.
Oops, screwed up my name on that above post there. =)