Red Hat CEO: Bring On the Clones

An anonymous reader writes "Best Buy and Barnes and Noble have a problem with showrooming — shoppers checking out the merchandise in their stores and then proceeding to order the goods at a discounted prices online. And Red Hat might have a similar problem with people (not just college kids and software professionals boning up on their skills at home, either) using the free-as-in-beer CentOS rather than licensing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and paying support fees. But according to CEO Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's competitive position may actually be helped by CentOS in the same way that counterfeit Windows products sold on the streets in the Far East may have helped Microsoft — by cementing their position as the technology standard, in a marketplace that also includes entrants from SuSE, Debian, Oracle, and Ubuntu, just among Linux-based entrants. Who does Whitehurst consider to be Red Hat's most direct threat? VMWare."

Comments

Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat's business model depends on them being the go-to people to support Linux installations. So they are happy about other Linux distros making better Linux admins who won't need their services?

Re: Doesn't make sense

[turbidostato]

Admins never needed vendor support, managers do. That means that CentOS trains the admins on Red Hat and then managers pay for the supported thingie.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[kthreadd]

They are happy that a lot of people learn how their system work so that they are more likely to choose Red Hat once they're in a position where they want to pay for Red Hat's services.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[alen]

When you have servers labeled production, that generate revenue and downtime means lost revenue, then you pay for support since its cheaper than losing revenue and customers

Re: Doesn't make sense

[h4rr4r]

This.
I have never used their support, but we pay for it on any server running commercial software since their license always requires it.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[operagost]

WOW... Linux has no bugs? The documentation-- haha, man pages-- is 100% correct?

Re:Doesn't make sense

[cbhacking]

Also, if people (not managers, but hobbyists, students, and bored IT folks on their own time) learn RHEL-like distros, then that means there are more people who are familiar with the environment. That in turn means more software targeting that environment, a bigger talent pool for companies to hire from, and greater mindshare.

Better for RedHat to 50% of enterprise Linux and 40% of those users paying than 100% of the users of a distro with only 10% of the enterprise Linux market. More marketshare is pretty much always good.

One can easily imagine a scenario where some startup hires a bunch of guys who "know RedHat" and set up servers using Cent. As they grow and start needing additional support and enterprise-targeted features, though, who are they going to turn to? Switching to RHEL is going to be less disruptive than pretty much any other option at that point, right?

Re: Doesn't make sense

[eric_herm]

Sure, and admins do not need to make sure the OS is properly funded, cause everything come for free and most of them have so much time to contribute.

And of course, admins do not need any training, do not need to have certified hardware cause they can perfectly guess what is working just by looking on specifications. And of course, none of them never read the documentation, nor call the support for complex problems, because all admins are experts in every possible domain.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would support cause less downtime? Maybe I am just not familiar enough with Red Hat support, but I am not sure what it would do to prevent downtime.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[alen]

something comes up, you don't know how to solve it off the top of your head. quick research yields nothing. your company is losing revenue. you don't have time to post a question on a forum and wait a day or so for a solution. for that system you pay the 4 hour or less support costs so that if you need it, you call the vendor and get someone on the phone NOW.

where i work we pay Cisco and other vendors for support for this reason and the fact that with a lot of vendors you need to pay to get patches and updates

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Baloroth]

The support helps you fix whatever is causing the downtime faster, and patch the problem so it doesn't cause downtime in the future. They can also help with configuration, installs, etc. that all help you get a system online faster in the first place.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[erroneus]

Yes it does. Because this approach is an open and inclusive approach as opposed to one which is exclusive. Microsoft's market share stats once included "pirated copies" and still might as far as I know.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

There are audit and compliance issues, that will prevent some workloads from EVER going into production, without support for accredited or validated configurations.

Just PCI-DSS is tough enough - if you need to walk a QSA through your homebrew hosts.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Another item are FIPS, Common Criteria, EAL, and other certifications. Yes, CentOS and RedHat are functionally identical, but the FIPS certification on RedHat makes the auditors happy that the IT staff is doing "due diligence" with regards to various regulations.

Without it, auditors start asking very pointed questions looking for someone that they can fire.

I'm glad RedHat has these certs on their OS. In the past, businesses were forced to go with MS products exclusively because of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[unixisc]

Admins never needed vendor support, managers do. That means that CentOS trains the admins on Red Hat and then managers pay for the supported thingie.

Does CentOS actually do that? I thought that the only thing they did was provide - for no cost - the CDs or downloads of RHEL rebranded, and then let the 'customer' handle it on his own. Which would imply that the Admins presumably already had whatever expertise is needed.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[alen]

and lots of support software, like say backup software is only supported on official software like red hat or windows

if something doesn't work and you call them for support and you're running an unsupported config, they will tell you to get lost and solve it yourself

Re:Doesn't make sense

[1s44c]

The only people who pay significant money for linux support are multinationals, they buy RHEL licenses by the thousand. If everyone else uses CentOS instead of Debian or Ubuntu it's just more people who could use RHEL if they ever got a job at a multinational.

My company uses CentOS. There is no way I'm paying for something that I can get for free when I barely have enough budget to keep the hardware running.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[bobbied]

It doesn't prevent down time.. It prevents unemployment time.

Situation: Server down due to OS security hole - revenue being lost .... Cut to executive management office

CTO: What's up with the server!? We can't sell our widgets and the CFO is saying we are in danger of not making our numbers now. We got to fix this NOW or we are all toast!

Middle Manager: Well, sir, we've contacted our OS vendor who is looking into the problem and as soon as they have a fix, we will get it installed.

OR would you rather say...

MM: Well sir, we've been on Google all day looking for the kernel developer who inserted the security bug to no avail.

I'm guessing the first one is better.. Lets you blame somebody else and keep your job. Actual down time is not prevented, in fact it's likely longer using Red Hat over competent local admins.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Just PCI-DSS is tough enough - if you need to walk a QSA through your homebrew hosts.

Baaahhhh, PCI-DSS isn't tough at all. It only gets tough with credit card data, and even then the requirements aren't all that difficult.
The biggest butthurt we had was the DMZ communication requirements. We were doing software pulls from the webservers, and had to move to pushing software to them - but that is neither here not there for PCI-DSS, it's just the issue that impacted our existing setup.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[1s44c]

Unless you have the very top level of support it's really rare to find a problem that support can fix faster than one smart dedicated admin who is working on it as top priority.

Support is mostly useful if you don't have good admins, if they are overloaded to the point they can't help, or to reassure PHB types. Plus if you have the budget spare you might want to support open source with it by supporting Red Hat.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[gbjbaanb]

I think he meant that anyone can get a copy of CentOS and train themselves to acquire the necessary skills, so when they need a paid-for, licensed and supported linux, they go with RHEL.

Its a bit like how Microsoft sells technet subscriptions for next to nothing, so people can play with all the toys like active directory and exchange and learn how they work with some hands-on experience. Oh wait... like how Microsoft *used* to do that, dumbasses.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[1s44c]

I worked at a company that had that level of support from Microsoft. It cost millions. When things crashed it still took days to weeks to fix the root cause, by that time it had been worked around somehow. You can spend a fortune on support to buy nothing but a good feeling and when things fall apart and you need a fix fast you are often on your own.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot! What the fuck are you? A fucking troll?!?! Linux is perfect. Anyone who says otherwise is a troll and will lose their mod points for being honest about it.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't do actual server support in a place that relies on those servers running for revenue, do you?

Re: Doesn't make sense

[amorsen]

where i work we pay Cisco and other vendors for support for this reason and the fact that with a lot of vendors you need to pay to get patches and updates

Paying the vendors for that reason is all well and good, but when did you actually get a solution from a major vendor for a critical problem within a day or so?

I have been in the IT business for a while, and I have never seen it happen. Yes, failed hardware can be replaced within 4 hours (although even that can be problematic enough to achieve in practice) but anything that is not just a case of escaping blue smoke?

The rolling support system where they shift the case around time zones to keep working on it 24 hours a day gets tedious as well, when you have to explain everything all over again every 7-8 hours.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[unrtst]

Admins never needed vendor support, managers do. That means that CentOS trains the admins on Red Hat and then managers pay for the supported thingie.

Does CentOS actually do that? I thought that the only thing they did was provide - for no cost - the CDs or downloads of RHEL rebranded, and then let the 'customer' handle it on his own. Which would imply that the Admins presumably already had whatever expertise is needed.

You're simply not ready the GP correctly (and/or he wrote it ambiguously). The comparison is right in TFS.

Red Hat's competitive position may actually be helped by CentOS in the same way that counterfeit Windows products sold on the streets in the Far East may have helped Microsoft — by cementing their position as the technology standard...

IE. admins cut their teeth on CentOS, or get introduced to it in various environments where they're not paying for Redhat support... effectively, they train themselves on it simply due to exposure. It gets it into places where it wouldn't otherwise be feasible, might eat some profit in the grey areas (dev boxes and cheap clusters), but allows for a migration path to RHEL. To be honest, I don't know why Redhat ever split fedora off on its own. They had a large install base of desktops and such, and that free distro fed right into their bread and butter RHEL. Now it's a bit backwards.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[1s44c]

WOW... Linux has no bugs? The documentation-- haha, man pages-- is 100% correct?

Not everyone needs to pay for support to fix things. All the Red Hat fixes end up in CentOS anyway.

Plus the people Red Hat get the software from are normally receptive to sensible suggestions and patches.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[rahvin112]

Why do you assume Microsoft represents the industry?

From my understanding Redhat Support buys you direct access to not only kernel programmers but the distribution people. I've heard of situations where high dollar customers got Redhat to troubleshoot a problem and provide them a custom kernel to fix the problem and then rolled the changes into the main kernel.

Microsoft's business is selling licenses. RedHats business is selling support.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[plover]

I saw a trouble ticket last year that had this line in it (I think it was after Sandy):

[date/time] Site router still down. Technician not en route, no ETA. Escalated to GiantTelCo 8th level support.

I don't care how stupid a manager is, at some point even the dumbest is going to recognize "8th level support" is bullshit. Then they finally might start asking "what are we paying for, exactly?"

Re: Doesn't make sense

[turbidostato]

"When you have servers labeled production, that generate revenue and downtime means lost revenue, then you pay for support since its cheaper than losing revenue and customers"

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ainnns...

Are you kidding, ain't you?

When downtime means revenue and you really want to do the proper thing you architect your systems so there's no downtime and you don't hire bottom-of-the-barrel technical staff for peanuts. No, sir, vendor support is not to avoid downtime but for the manager's CYA policy.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[turbidostato]

"for that system you pay the 4 hour or less support costs so that if you need it, you call the vendor and get someone on the phone NOW."

Having someone on the phone by itself only gives you two things: somebody on the phone and the ability to deflect blame to the one on the phone.

But then, your "troubleshooting techniques" shows the kind of professional you are: in your book the answer has to come from somebody else.

Protip: you go to the sources and you debug the problem yourself (I've done it: I've debugged Adaptec's SCSI kernel drivers, for instance). What else do you think your payed support is going to do? One thing is certain: the one on the phone is not going to go to the source to debug the problem... because he's on the phone, not triggering his editor pointing to the sources.

But there's another certain thing: Red Hat is very clever and perfectly knows the managerial mentality and so, they know they are risking nothing "allowing" others access to their sources; no manager will take support for Red Hat from anyone else but Red Hat, no matter what the third party credentials might be.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[1s44c]

Why do you assume Microsoft represents the industry?

Oh I don't. I think I gave you the wrong impression there, but the top tier of Microsoft support does get you fast access to their programmers too.

Just support often doesn't work fast enough for serious situations. I've dealt with Red Hat support and they put your ticket in a queue and if it's really serious get back to you within an hour. By that time I've normally fixed or know how to fix or at least work around the problem.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[turbidostato]

"To be honest, I don't know why Redhat ever split fedora off on its own."

For the very same reason Linus abandoned the odd/even versioning for the kernel: to gain exposure for their "beta code".

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Zak3056]

I saw a trouble ticket last year that had this line in it (I think it was after Sandy):

[date/time] Site router still down. Technician not en route, no ETA. Escalated to GiantTelCo 8th level support.

I don't care how stupid a manager is, at some point even the dumbest is going to recognize "8th level support" is bullshit. Then they finally might start asking "what are we paying for, exactly?"

I don't see a problem with the above. Obviously, the operations managers over at GientTelCo were fervently praying to whatever supreme being they believed in--because that was the only way the situation was going to get resolved in a timely manner. Given that level 1 is front line, level 2 is escalated support, level 3 is your subject matter expert, and level 4 is usually the engineer who designed the thing to begin with, level 8 is obviously almighty god. Had the guy working the ticket provided more complete information, you would not now be thinking that he was a dumb ass. :)

Re: Doesn't make sense

[mbkennel]

"you architect your systems so there's no downtime"

I think you have TomorrowLand mixed up with FantasyLand and NeverNeverLand.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[HockeyPuck]

Ok...

So how many people on your staff understand the complete source to your linux distribution?

Kernel Developers?
RAID adapter or HBA driver developers?
Filesystem developers?
database developers (if you use an open source db)
Network driver developers?

If your company does, then you must have quite a few of these people in case you have a problem and the one developer on your staff that understands the FCoE driver stack is on vacation...

Unless your core business is developing OSes, you'll save yourself quite a bit of money and time paying for support rather than hiring your own linux distribution development staff.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[turbidostato]

"admins do not need any training"

They do. What they don't need is "payed vendor certifications" except for their manager.

"do not need to have certified hardware cause they can perfectly guess what is working just by looking on specifications"

Of course they do. Why they shouldn't? But even then, right now we are entering the 10th damn month! with heavy performance problems on a solution deployed by a big name vendor on a fully certified stack, or just few weeks ago we needed to update the full firmware on some chassis and blades because they weren't even able to power on. There your "certified hardware" goes.

Admins need working hardware, not certified hardware; for the most part a sysadmin worth his salt can figure his way out of the specs and if not, it's just a matter of testing it; if it doesn't work, you return it.

"because all admins are experts in every possible domain."

Of course not. But a competent admin, and moreso a competent admin team are experts in those domains relevant for their business and, much more important, provided proper means, are experts in becoming experts on them, usually at a price tag and with better results than a vendor "gold" support contract.

Caveat: we are talking open source here, since this news is about Red Hat and open source variants taking or not a portion on Red Hat business. Of course, closed source is a different issue and decision takers should pay attention on those differences and the respective value they bring to the table long term.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[undeadbill]

Provided that RedHat will actually support it. We have sent people to the training, set up equipment to the standard *their certified instructors taught* us, and then had support hang up on us because our disk setup wasn't according to RHEL support's standard- which apparently has nothing to do with what you learn in their certified classes. WTF?

Cisco doesn't do this. Even EMC doesn't do this. But RedHat did do this, several times. RedHat support also did a lot of the whole "it must be the hardware vendor" routine. That is why we moved off of RHEL to CentOS- better patch support, more packages, and no bill for support that we haven't been able to use. I haven't run into an issue on CentOS that I couldn't solve or work around with access to their bugtracker. Same can't be said for my experience with RHEL.

If I were to pay for RHEL or CentOS support, I would sooner pay SuSE https://www.suse.com/products/expandedsupport/frequently-asked-questions/#faq21

Re: Doesn't make sense

[HiThere]

If you have to go to a source code you haven't previously looked at to find the solution, it's likely to take you quite awhile. A good support desk is likely to have already encountered the problem, and already know what the answer is. That's LOTS faster.

OTOH, there are lots of problems that they don't already understand, and in those cases, a local diagnosis has LOTS of advantages. E.g., you can run your tests quickly, and you don't need to keep repeating them everytime someone new is added to the phone line.

P.S.: One of the most frustrating problems I ever encountered, that I had worked on for DAYS before calling tech support, was solved quickly. Tech support told me to try hitting the caps-lock key.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[UltraZelda64]

Don't like the documentation? Don't use the software if all you can do is complain about it and its documentation. The manual pages seem good enough for me 95% of the time, while the remaining 5% is trying to use some much more complex program and honestly, there is much better documentation to be found elsewhere, including a quick Google search. Like, say... the project's own web site. You might laugh at the man pages, but at least they're available.

DOS sure as hell didn't have that luxury, and Windows' help system was always a joke--you're literally better off just doing a web search if you have any fancy questions, because even if you do did find the subject you're looking for, it is most likely completely inadequate and devoid of relevancy. It seems like Microsoft's "help" pages contain less actual relevant content than they do questions like "was this article useful? Did it help? How would you rate it?"

I'm sorry, but I'll take those "haha, man pages" any day.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[PixetaledPikachu]

Last year, something happened to our exchange install that caused the IIS entirely gone from the box. Microsoft's premiere support contract provides support and our exchange box was up within hours

Re: Doesn't make sense

[plover]

I always thought almighty god was zeroth level support. As in "You turn this sucker on and I'll pray to god that it works this time!"

From there, it's not good. You pick up the phone and descend to to the first circle of limbo, reserved for call center operators doomed to read from scripts. Next is the second level, where the phones are answered by system support groups, pummeled eternally by threats full of hot air to call their managers. The third level is a noisy, cold, icy machine room where system administrators are berated every time they take a call. The fourth level is where engineers are forced to joust with managers to keep their jobs while their phones ring endlessly. The fifth circle is where the VPs are tormented by joyless CEOs, members of the board, and majority stockholders in status meetings. The sixth circle is reserved for the salesmen who lied about their company's products, where they are surrounded by stacks of flaming four color glossy brochures touting features their systems never supported. The seventh circle is where the CFO sits in a rain of fiery charts of accounts and charges of embezzlement. The eighth circle of callbacks is where the company lawyer sits in a tarpit, where judges and prosecuters jab him with pitchforks full of product liability lawsuits. And the ninth circle is where the CEO is strangled and choked by a rack full of ethernet cables and fiber optic pipes, never understanding why none of them can ever hook up his iPhone to his PC no matter how hard he tries, and is bludgeoned by passing stockholders throwing dead batteries at him.

At least that's how we do support.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[WuphonsReach]

Does CentOS actually do that? I thought that the only thing they did was provide - for no cost - the CDs or downloads of RHEL rebranded, and then let the 'customer' handle it on his own. Which would imply that the Admins presumably already had whatever expertise is needed.

We moved to CentOS for one reason: It's basically the same environment as RHEL, which means that if we ever need to move up to the paid support model, we already know the quirks of the environment.

There's only like (4) possible choices for Linux server distros, Debian (Stable), SuSE, RHEL/CentOS, and maybe Mandrake. Just about everyone who does paid work on Linux knows either Debian or RHEL. There are dozens and dozens of books out there covering those two distros, but you'd be hard pressed to find a dozen books on the other distros (unless they're a clone of one of the big ones).

Which also means that I'm very likely to turn up an answer via Google, or be able to find the answer on my bookshelf, when I run into an operating system issue.

The only real downside to RHEL/CentOS is that they are slow to change and have multi-year release cycles. Which means if you want a later version of Postfix or something, you either need to bring it in from a 3rd party repository (using the includepkgs= line in your repository definition, or compile it from source. So installing XYZ can be a bit of an adventure at figuring out what packages need to be added to the "includepkgs=" line.

(But using includepkgs= and only pulling in the absolute minimum from 3rd party repositories makes for a much more stable server. So it's worth the trouble.)

Re: Doesn't make sense

[turbidostato]

"If you have to go to a source code you haven't previously looked at to find the solution, it's likely to take you quite awhile."

Truly yes -or you can be lucky, it happened to me once, but you can't count on it.

"A good support desk is likely to have already encountered the problem"

Yes. But if that's the case, a reputable company would have worked on the underlying problem and then it would be already patched/known, so no need to resort to helpdesk.

In the end, I'm not against support, of course it can save you a lot of time. But that's not what paying "vendor support" is for. I -or anyone, can eventually outperform Red Hat with regards to support and you can find little companies all over the world that give good support to local little companies. But you won't find "the" company that offers better support than Red Hat for big companies. Because no IT manager of a big company would ever buy support for X to Y. And this also explains why, for instance, Debian has no place in corporate-world: there's no Debian Corp. to buy support from and such unexistant Debian Corp. can't reach agreements with other software vendor to "certify" against it.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[PPH]

Red Hat is a viable support solution for larger companies. Small shops are better off relying on local Linux talent, either in house or small shops. People that wouldn't be likely to buy RH services anyway. So RH figures that if any of these small enterprises grow to be big and wealthy enough to afford them, its better if they are already in the Linux ecosystem. Even better if they are used to a distro that does things the Redhat way.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

When you have servers labeled production, that generate revenue and downtime means lost revenue, then you pay for support since its cheaper than losing revenue and customers

For the SERVER, because it has replaceable parts. A single RedHat subscription gets you access to all the security fixes and their bugzilla, that's all the admins really need.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't use Debian (or Ubuntu) even if there were Debian Corp. The way they randomly patch software to introduce bugs or change it's behavior so it doesn't match the upstream implementation is totally unacceptable. Likewise the way it automatically enables services in a default (read useless) config is totally unacceptable. The package management that totally breaks and requires a reinstall to upgrade from one release to the next is also unacceptable.

I don't have much respect for Redhat or CentOS, I would rather run Slackware or LFS (for specific workloads I can build the entire server software base in a couple of hours and have a limited and easily audited attack surface), but at least their shit works, even if their package management does create headaches at times. I can gladly work with RH/Centos if company policy requires it, if they're running Debian/Ubuntu there are unsolvable management issues at play.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[saleenS281]

I hate to break it to you, but Microsoft does the same thing. The only difference being they don't roll the patches into a kernel that's open source. If you're a large customer, you get custom patches within hours to days from MS that eventually get rolled into a larger monthly update or service pack on a regular basis. Open source isn't the reason that happens, spending lots of money with the vendor is the reason that happens.

By the same token, if you own exactly one RHEL license, you aren't getting the guy who wrote the code 30 minutes into your support call. You're getting a call back when some 3rd level technician gets around to searching an internal KB repository.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you elaborate on the disk setup issue? I've never heard of this before and can't readily think up any disk config that would leave you in an unsupported situation.

I've rarely had to call RH, but when I did, it was to report a bug in the software. They gathered appropriate info, admitted it was a bug (something other companies are amazingly hesitant to do, maybe for legal reasons, who knows), and a patch was available in about a week. It wasn't a damning issue for us, mostly an annoyance, so waiting a week was no big deal in our case.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu fuckups aren't debians problem.
Written from a box dist-upgraded from potato to wheezy.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[turbidostato]

You are absolutly ignorant about what you are talking about, so you'd better shouldn't comment on this, or you are just trolling.

Anyway, and just for the record, nothiing you say is either true or makes sense.

Debian modifies sources in two ways:
1) in order to stick to Linux Filesystem standard policies and in order to stick to Debian's own conventions.
2) in order to backport security fixes on Stable.
Anyway, is more conservative than, say, Red Hat.

Debian only activates services if this can be done in a safe and working way.

Debian is the distribution most easily and problemless to upgrade that I know of, certainly well over Red Hat, Slackware or LFS.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[M1FCJ]

Never ever had such a problem with RedHat. Not saying no one else did either but RedHat's support is not very responsive.
As stated, the support agreement is there to keep the beancounters happy. It is still an excellent enterprise distro.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a paying Red Hat Support customer since before the Halloween Documents were published.

Access to their high-end people is generally being monopolized by the biggest customers at any given moment. If you have a problem, and IBM has a problem, and Dell has a problem... you're at the end of the line for access to Alan Cox. You'll probably have to settle for Nalin Dahyabhai, who has even more rudimentary social skills than Alan does.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC as I cannot sign in at my new employer due to firewall/browser configurations ...

I used to be the tech for MS who was sent to customer locations - and I can tell you there are varying levels of problems that customers have. I don't know your specific example, but I never had a problem fixing a problem quickly when it was something that MS wrote. The issue was actually re-producing the results so that we can figure out what the root-cause was. 95% of the time the customer was slowing us down because they wanted to be "safe". When you are talking some 16-bit accounting software that has been jerry rigged into a windows 2003 server and it keeps throwing kernel errors and blue screening, yeah those take time to fix. A majority of my calls were from customers who had some app and it would not work right, and caused issues. Getting those app support people to 1) admit they were at fault was the first problem and 2) getting them to fix the app was always the hard part.

To each their own, I always tried to provide the best service I could, and when I am there at 3 am fixing stuff while the customer has gone, they don't see all the stuff that is going on as well, they just want it fixed now.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[neurovish]

At least, no true scots-admin needs vendor support.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[neurovish]

If I were to pay for RHEL or CentOS support, I would sooner pay SuSE https://www.suse.com/products/expandedsupport/frequently-asked-questions/#faq21

Oh jeez. Granted it's been a few years, but I had "personal support person"-level support for SLES. They could barely spell Linux, and their "support" was essentially, "let me google that for you". Their solutions were seriously taken straight from OpenSuSE forums. Any moderately complicated support query would take weeks at-best, and a couple took months. Their entire support infrastructure was built around hand-holding NetWare and Windows admins through common tasks.

Never really had a problem with RHEL though. They usually came back within a day or two with a correct or acceptable response. We never had any "your disk setup is unapproved" kind of responses. What kind of disk setup did you have to get that kind of response anyways?

Re: Doesn't make sense

[module0000]

If your production assets are directly tied to revenue, is there a sane reason you don't employ one or more administrators that exceed the level of expertise available from RHEL support? EG: Hire an RHCSA, RHCE, or ideally an RHCSS or RHCSA

Those individuals will dwarf the usefulness of support since (a) They encompass 100% of the knowledge any "support engineer" will possess, and (b) they are familiar with the production assets and workflows that need support.

Just my 2 cents.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[X0563511]

Huh, imagine that. The Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standards are only difficult to comply with... when you handle payment card data.

I never would have guessed.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard of situations where high dollar customers got Redhat to troubleshoot a problem and provide them a custom kernel to fix the problem and then rolled the changes into the main kernel.

Doesn't have to be high dollar for the general response, actually, just the time. I had a not terribly critical RHEL 5 box with bare minimum support level (and we had maybe two RHEL licences in the office, both low level). Filled out the web ticket, got a call back in half a business day or so (i.e. within the SLA for my support level), sent the guy what he wanted, he got back to me in a few hours that it was a kernel bug and he offered to send me a patched kernel RPM or it'd be in the repos in a few days. Uptime didn't matter on that system at that time since the project that used it was over and no one else had started using it yet, so I told him I was ok waiting and I pulled an updated kernel to fix my problem from yum next time I checked a week later.

Also, on the previous topic of why any good admin would bother with RHEL, if you are in a situation where you need a C&A (such as a company that deals with US Federal gov data, not just DoD, as the requirement comes from OPM), I've found that some DAA's are much happier to approve software where there's a company behind it that could be sued and not just a random group of people who would be a pain to track down and are likely in multiple countries. In those sorts of environments you're wasting a lot more dollars in man hours dealing with C&A garbage to justify CentOS or Scientific Linux than the cost of RHEL support (not to mention the irritation). I've also had DAA's that are fine with FOSS (and I didn't bother with RHEL for those, though I'd consider RHEL for production servers in those environments).

Re: Doesn't make sense

[undeadbill]

Admin had built an application server using the basic dimension guidelines set out in the class he had taken. Notably, the issue had nothing to do with the disk whatsoever. This was about five years ago.

RHEL support got onto the system, did a df, saw the disk dimensions and stated to him that the drive layout wasn't in a supportable layout according to their installation specifications. Call back once it is. *click*. No feedback on what would be an acceptable layout, or anything else. Another admin called in, got the same response, plus they said it must be an issue with the hardware vendor. Called a third time, with both admins on the line, and the same response. RHEL simply didn't want to help out, give useful information, or anything else.

Turned out it was an init script error. I could have seen RHEL support punting at that point, but they never even looked that far into it.

The problem I have with RHEL's (and many other vendors' support, SuSE included) is that they do very well when the issue is clearly defined, they can follow a simple call script in a binder, and you never deviate from that. The problem is that our admins never have to call for those issues. How I rate whether support is any good is when the support doesn't come from a binder.

And I wasn't giving SuSE props for having outstanding support. Their saving grace is that you can pay them to say that CentOS is "supported", because some clients require OS vendor support contracts even if you don't use them. RHEL doesn't "support" CentOS, period. I find that a bit of a detractor, considering there is about 1 line of one file in /etc separating the two distributions from binary compatible operation. It is their choice, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it.

For the record, I personally haven't called vendor support for a linux issue in over a decade. I've submitted bugs, or additional documentation on bugs, on several occasions but that isn't a support issue. That is me doing their QA work for them, and I won't pay for the privilege of doing that. Prior to that, I'd never gotten a fix for issues I submitted, just an advisement to "wait for the next major release, it might be fixed then". Maybe RHEL has stepped it up in the past couple of years, but I've gone beyond depending up on them or any other Linux OS vendor.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[whitroth]

Sorry, you don't know what you're talking about. I had a few month contract some years ago with one of the root CA's, and sitting near me for most of the contract was one of their call-handlers who dealt specifically with that. 60+ questions to answer and meet the requirements of for the *lowest* level of processing. For full-blown credit card ability, you needed an IT department who could answer and meet the requirements of something like 220 or 240 questions. All that included things like, if data was being transferred just between two computers in-house, it needed to be encrypted for transmission.

                  mark

Re: Doesn't make sense

[cthulhu11]

My experience has been that RH support primarily gets one offshored robots. Me: Foo is broken Them: We cannot be fixing that because that would be FORKING TEH_DISTRIBUTION More than once the offshored frontline droids have given me answers that were demonstrably wrong and even dangerous. A few times with repeated insistence I've been passed along to an engineer on-continent who was able to at least understand the problem. We're looking at CentOS to avoid the licensing altogether for some systems, but I wonder about the CentOS lag: there have been a couple of times when something broke, notably the kernel, and RedHat got a fix out reasonably quickly. With CentOS, would I have to wait months for such fixes to filter down, so that I could make my systems bootable again? This would be slightly less of a concern if there were any way to revert updates. I really miss Solaris' Live Upgrade.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[HiThere]

A reputable company with test things for awhile before they push a patch on people who haven't been bothered by the problem the patch is supposed to fix.

OTOH, their help desk should know about what the patches in the works are supposed to fix. (Granted "should" isn't "will".)

Re: Doesn't make sense

[evilviper]

something comes up, you don't know how to solve it off the top of your head. quick research yields nothing. your company is losing revenue. you don't have time to post a question on a forum and wait a day or so for a solution.

If you're deploying software that you really don't understand, you've already lost. If you run into a problem, you can track it down to a very fine level with lovely tools like strace. Unlike proprietary OSes, if you're getting some cryptic error message, you can go through the source code and find EXACTLY what causes it to be printed. In general, I find support contracts to sap money that would have been better spent on more or higher-paid IT staff, or redundant equipment.

for that system you pay the 4 hour or less support costs so that if you need it, you call the vendor and get someone on the phone NOW.

...so that the 3rd level tech can scratch his head, and eventually struggle to remotely debug the problem like any Linux admin would, except without the benefit of context and years working in the environment that salaried staff have...

where i work we pay Cisco and other vendors for support for this reason

I've resorted to Cisco support a number of times, and every time they've been a huge drain on my time, instead of helping at all. It's a lot like hiring a part-time, Jr Network Admin with poor English skills, on a short-term contract. You spend a lot of time getting them up to speed, and telling them you've already tried the basic methods they keep suggesting.

And that's the GOOD PART. The bad part is when it's easy for them to quickly close your case by saying the hardware isn't capable of doing anything more than the most basic operations. And yet, being a moron that works for Cisco gives their idiotic statements much more weight than yours. Something of a logical fallacy about being willing to put a stranger up on a pedestal, and assume they're infallible, while knowing the imperfections of your local staff all too well...

Re:Doesn't make sense

[bbsalem]

Tine was, ten years ago, that Sun Microsystems was happy about Linux being available and free because it provided access to the mindset and demand for Solaris servers, especially to take way from Microsoft. In part this was a destraction for Open Source advocates in its engineering groups. Sun wanted Solaris to win on big data models, but also hoped that it would succeed like Apple eventually did with OS-X on the desktop. That would not happen. SPARC was too expensive and Sun muffed it big on X86, losing eventually to Apple to port BSD to inexpensive processors.

Re: Doesn't make sense

[nobaloney]

Redhat Support buys you direct access to not only kernel programmers but the distribution people

We happily use CentOS and do our own support. Several years ago we looked into buying RedHat Enterprise Linux and their included support. I nexed the idea when I was told that Red Hat supported only the software installed from RPMs from their own repositories. In otherwords, a stock Red Hat environment.

Since we needed customization of our hosting stack, that wouldn't work for us. So we continue using CentOS.

I suppose there are a lot of stock Red Hat installations out there.

That's funny

[CrazySpence]

VMware for some of its major products like vCloud only support Redhat and not the clones as the installed OS for the cell, so they're putting Money in your pocket not taking it. Silly CEOs always running around being threatened by people paying them.

Re:That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly CEOs always running around being threatened by people paying them.

Protip: RedHat is heavily involved in competing virtualization technologies.

Re:That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware for some of its major products like vCloud only support Redhat and not the clones as the installed OS for the cell, so they're putting Money in your pocket not taking it.

Silly CEOs always running around being threatened by people paying them.

.... http://www.redhat.com/products/cloud-computing/virtualization/ ....

Re:That's funny

[CrazySpence]

That's silly, all open source visualization is shit. no need to be threatened when you already suck.

Re:That's funny

[DuckDodgers]

The virtualization itself is awesome - to my knowledge nothing proprietary beats the stability and performance of KVM. The weakness is the fancy tools around managing your virtual infrastructure. But Red Hat, OpenSUSE, and others are working very hard to make the tools built around KVM, VirtualBox, Xen, etc... better so they can compete with the best VMWare has to offer head-on.

Re:That's funny

[1s44c]

That's silly, all open source visualization is shit. no need to be threatened when you already suck.

No it isn't. Xen and KVM are both at least as capable as anything vmware has.

Amazon web services is based on xen.
Rackspace cloud uses xen too.
Linode uses xen.
Digital Ocean uses kvm.

Any of them could have used vmware if they thought it was better.

Re:That's funny

[unixisc]

But VMware's USP is that they support Windows VMs as well - something that's not true about KVM or Xen (not sure about VirtualBox). VMware is not a threat to Red Hat - they own the market, while Red Hat is trying to challenge them. But the biggest obstacle for Red Hat is that VMware supports Windows - another competitor to Red Hat, but in the OS space. If the only VMs that were needed were Linux VMs, Red Hat would probably have had the edge, but that's not the case. Therefore, it's indeed silly of Whitehurst to consider them his biggest threat.

If one asked me, I'd say his biggest threat was not CentOS, but Oracle ! They take RHEL, rebrand it and work out any chinks in the support of Oracle software on OEL, and then offer it, and RHEL's customers who use Oracle abandon them so that there is 'one throat to strangle' if things go wrong. That's a far greater threat to Red Hat than VMware owning its own market, or even CentOS giving away rebranded RHEL packages.

Re:That's funny

[Ubi_NL]

You can run windows inside kvm just fine

Re: That's funny

[ceoyoyo]

What he's saying is that Red Hat doesn't really care who uses Red Hat, even if its called CentOS, because they make most of their money on support contracts, NOT licensing. So the threat is not that you might pay someone else for the CDs (or get them free) but that you might pay someone else for support.

Buying from VMWare might give Red Hat the price of a license but VMWare gets the lucrative support contract.

It's kind of like how MS practically gives away windows to OEMs because then you're likely to buy Office from them.

Re:That's funny

[DuckDodgers]

KVM and VirtualBox on Linux both run Windows VMs flawlessly. KVM was originally created by engineers at Qumranet for the specific purpose of running Windows guests in virtualization on Linux hosts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qumranet

Re:That's funny

[armanox]

I think you need to check your data again. Others say Windows runs fine under KVM (I don't have much experience there), and I can attest to quite a number of Windows server (2003 - 2012) installs under Xen without so much as a hicup.

Re:That's funny

[Zaelath]

If you don't mind the attrocious IO.

Re:That's funny

[Radworker]

I suspect you haven't really worked with the technology much. Correctly configured KVM runs a Win200X server just fine. Hint - use LVM for storage instead of a container file if I/O is high on the machine. Also use virtio drivers for best performance. Most people don't go for LVM because of the added complexity moving VMs from one host to another.

Re:That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

What a fucking tool...Vizualization? can I have some of what you're smoking?

VirtualBox, while not FOSS is the fucking shit. Without it, I would have a job.

Re:That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I don\t do windows visualization, but afaik you got widows VM kernel modules just to specifically improve IO, something Microsoft engineers submitted to Linus quite some time ago. So no...
Oh Irony, MS submitting GPL2 patches to Linux Kernel...

Re:That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry I'm drunk as well

Without VirtualBox I would NOT have a job...or a house...or wife or kids etc etc

Re:That's funny

[module0000]

You get atrocious IO if you don't read the docs. Otherwise you would have read the HUGE WARNING that says using anything other than the `virtio` drivers will provide poor(their word not mine) IO performance.

It's almost like the docs of something you administer are worth reading, eh?

Re:That's funny

[1s44c]

DUH what? CrazySpence was saying linux virtualization sucked and I gave 4 examples of companies that could have used vmware if they thought it was better.

I'm not sure if you are for or against linux virtualization. If you have any point at all you failed to express it.

Re:That's funny

[Zaelath]

Done both your and the other poster's suggestions, still horrible. (admittedly this was 6 months ago, but it was claimed to work then too)

Certainly the virtio drivers made the performance go from "completely unusable" to "poor", but not even close to the performance of Linux guests on KVM hosts, or Windows on VMWare. But you know, preach on brother.

It's not like I don't want this stuff to work, my primary OS is Linux...

Why pay Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux dudes,

With all the Linux geeks running around, why does anyone pay for RedHat's service?

Aren't there plenty of Linux folks around the World where you can get anything RedHat provides cheaper?

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[kthreadd]

How many of these "Linux geeks" can support an entire OS stack for the same money?

Re: Why pay Red Hat

[turbidostato]

Because it is not geeks that pay for Red Hat but their bosses.

Re: Why pay Red Hat

[turbidostato]

A lot. I've seen enough "enterprise-grade" services contracts from RedHat to know it.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to go wrong with RedHat. From a management perspective, it's a lower risk to just shell out for RHEL vice even thinking about something like CentOS. It's the "no one ever got fired for..." thing at work.

And as far as a company to give money too, you could do a lot worse than RedHat. They contribute a lot of stuff we don't think about.

Also support is one of those things that's undervalued by the technically minded. Yes, there is a great community around linux, and yes, a technical guy can probably find enough resources for free to solve just about any problem.. but there is something to be said about having a phone number you can call and someone is literally being paid to give you an answer.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[DuckDodgers]

If I had dozens or hundreds of servers and every minute of downtime could cost the company thousands or millions of dollars, I would want support professionals I trusted available at a moment's notice to fix things when they break.

My first inclination would just be to hire competent people on my own - if I'm the one paying their paycheck directly, and I treat them with respect, I would hope that a sense of loyalty and a desire to keep from collapsing the company that issues their paycheck.

But if I truly believed Red Hat, Microsoft, Canonical, HP, Dell, Oracle, or anybody else had genuinely first class support staff, I would consider having a smaller number of my own staff and relying upon the vendor as needed. My own inclination is to support Red Hat, because just about everything they do is open source. Canonical would come second, with the rest following behind and Oracle last. But that's my personal favoritism towards open source, if I was running a business it would just be a cost-benefit analysis including heavy research into the support experiences other companies have had with each vendor.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[eric_herm]

I guess there is not enough Linux geeks for every company, I guess even experts do not know everything, and as long as you can do everything, we just ask you to do more for the same price.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[robmv]

Why a company outsource security (watchmen) to a 3rd party, or office cleaning services?. Because they don't want the overhead of having to schedule people times, vacations, salary payments, hardware they need, training. Instead of tha,t they contract some service that do that for them. You take care of the people you need for your core service or product, let the rest to others

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[HornWumpus]

Geeks are very hard for non-geeks to hire and manage. They don't really understand us.

Companies often hire incompetents. Usually it goes something along the lines of: 'I'll hire just 1 HR drone, to handle only paperwork etc. I'll stay in charge of all hiring decisions'. 2 years later...air thieves are everywhere and dice has a new, regular customer.

For almost all cases getting you to hire an incompetent is a double win for HR/staffing companies. They get paid and you'll be back...

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[HornWumpus]

No. Not unless you like locking up everything in every office, every night.

You hire a competent office manager, he manages all the cleaning and support staff.

The cleaning services are _all_ bottom feeders. At what they pay and who they hire, supplementing income with anything not tied down is 100% expected and tolerated. Once the cops arrest the cleaner, the service might accept they _had_ a problem. Not having thieves in your offices nightly is part of taking care of your people. It sucks to have personal things stolen from your office/cube.

Security is tougher to bring in house, unless you're big enough to fill a whole building. Network security is another question completely.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[bobbied]

With all the Linux geeks running around, why does anyone pay for RedHat's service?

Because Red Hat keeps a stable of well equipped Linux Geeks on staff to answer the questions from Linux Newbies (and geeks) might ask. They also have SLA's so you have assurances that an answer will come in a known time. It is also WAY cheaper to pay Red Hat for a year's worth of support for those 10 servers than to have a 24x7x365 staff of Linux Geeks of your own.

Cheaper, plus the added benefit of having somebody else to blame when the CTO comes gunning for blood because the CEO is on his case for the server being down... There are reasons to pay Red Hat. Personally, I don't, but I can see reasons.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[gbjbaanb]

not just favouritism towards open source. If you, as a company, made your money doing nothing except support... your support will be damn good.

Microsoft, Oracle etc, might (do) have some great 3rd line support engineers... but you have to get past the army of call centre drones and basically beg for help.

So it shouldn't be just because you like the idea. RH, Canonical will just be significantly better.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[unixisc]

There is also the reason that the bulk of the reason that Linux is where it is today is b'cos of Red Hat. Oracle never got into maintaining their own fork - they just take every RHEL version, rebrand it and then tweak it to work w/ their software. CentOS wouldn't exist w/o Red Hat. Also, applications that previously used to run on Sun or HP workstations - the CAD packages, for instance - have all migrated to Lintel, and they're not there on all distros like Firefox is. They are supported on only one - Red Hat. I wonder whether they'd even entertain people wanting support on a variant such as CentOS, OEL, Scientific Linux or Mageia.

Re: Why pay Red Hat

[tygt]

I've never had anything go missing overnight at the office - and that includes wallets with cash and cell phones. Personally, I trust cleaning staff more than the typical office drone...

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[DuckDodgers]

If you buy an enterprise support package from Microsoft, which costs - of course - quite a bit of money on top of what you're already paying for your software licenses, I understand that their support teams are excellent.

But I agree with your point - Red Hat and Canonical make almost all of their revenue from support, so if they get that wrong they're screwed. They have a bigger interest than Microsoft in getting it right.

Re: Why pay Red Hat

[HornWumpus]

You leave your wallet in your office overnight? I'm going to call bullshit on you. You're just a class warrior, trying to make some point.

Re: Why pay Red Hat

[tygt]

Not on purpose but I've been forgetful a number of times in the past.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

If *I* had dozens or hundreds of servers and every minute of downtime could cost the company thousands or millions of dollars, I would build them all exactly the same with a lightweight workload and cluster manager built from scratch with Linux and Xen.

Oh, wait. I did, and it kicked the shit out of every commercial or OSS offering.

Of course I also had to support a large number of thin client desktops, for that I ran Fedora and Windows 2008 R2 in Xen domains, but for most everything else I had an awesome LFS setup.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

Mostly they've migrated to Windows.

See Catia, PTC, etc.

Re: Why pay Red Hat

[mydn]

My Galaxy SIII is sitting on my desk at the office right now. I forgot it when I left early for the Elder Scrolls Online beta stress test that started at 3pm my local time. I cincerely hope that the alarm clock does not go off before I get in tomorrow.

Re: Why pay Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

Some coworkers and I, as a test, left cash in a few places in and around our desks.

Like phones, laptops and everything else, nothing has gone missing.

Re:Why pay Red Hat

[neurovish]

CentOS is still largely dependent on a small group of individual contributors. I have do not qualms about its stability or performance, but if I need 100% reliable updates and bug fixes and my revenue generated by these servers is in the 7+ digits, then I'll pay the $150 for RHEL. I don't need the phone somebody support, just an OS with the backing of a company that has billions on the line since I am not entirely comfortable trusting my millions to 6 guys who are largely volunteers.

I'll certainly trust development and testing to CentOS though.

Pirating Windows?

[barlevg]

Downloading CentOS isn't at all like pirating a copy of Windows--Red Hat consists almost entirely of open source code. People pay for Red Hat for the support. I've actually worked on a cluster where we paid for one copy of Red Hat for the head node, then loaded 15 copies of CentOS onto the remaining nodes. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Re:Pirating Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody was claiming that CentOS isn't legit.

The point is that MS did pretty well out of windows piracy, because it got lots of people used to windows before they could afford it. Most people stick with what they know, so when they are in a position where they are actually wanting support & buying software that's what they get.

Same with CentOS. If you work for a company who want linux, and want to pay for support then all the people who are already used to the RH way are going to pick something close to the distro they already use.

Re:Pirating Windows?

[LVSlushdat]

THIS!!
The company I worked for a few years ago had a compute cluster for engineering/modeling with over 100 nodes. They were originally running RHEL3, which of course was coming up to EOL in a few months. The suits wanted to buy licenses for RHEL to upgrade the nodes, the IT staff wanted to use CentOS. Research was done on pricing for over 100 RHEL licenses, and after a while, the suits decided to go with IT's choice of CentOS for the compute nodes and use *one* RHEL install for the master node. I wasn't involved with the pricing discussions, but I heard that RH sales were stuck on nearly full pricing for all 100+ licenses.

Re:Pirating Windows?

[gbjbaanb]

The suits wanted to buy licenses for RHEL to upgrade the nodes, the IT staff wanted to use CentOS

so the IT staff didn't want to use RHEL, they wanted something identical to RHEL instead.... stupid.

If it was just down to some anti-corporate kind of dumb thinking, then surely said IT staff should be handing back their salaries.. or do you think that by not paying RedHat did anything other than give your CEO a bigger bonus?

(but sure, RH should offer some bulk discounts, idiot salespeople)

Re:Pirating Windows?

[NatasRevol]

Why wouldn't you buy their unlimited guests license at $2k/yr, for your nodes?

http://www.redhat.com/resourcelibrary/articles/articles-red-hat-enterprise-linux-purchasing-guide

Re:Pirating Windows?

[DF5JT]

That is actually incorrect. The CentOS part of your installation invalidates your support contract/subscription for the RHEL part of the cluster.

Red Hat does not offer you the option of a mixed anvironment. It's either all Red Hat, supported, or mixed and completely unsupported.

I am with Red Hat on this one, actually.

Re:Pirating Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like nonsense.

So what if I have an OpenBSD firewall in front of my all RHEL cluster, I guess I don't get support? no, I still get support for the products I paid for.

What if it was instead SuSE on my firewall? no support? no, I still get support for the products I paid for.

What if I run CentOS on my firewall? no support? no, I still get what I paid for.

Ok, so there's two issues, I guess, one is you are using some cluster management protocol (BTW, Redhat's cluster management protocol blows, I had to invent my own, because every available HA system for Linux sucks), then they can say they won't support it if it is clustered against machines not running RHEL, but they can't possibly say they won't support the rest of the system.

What if the cluster is not Redhat HA Cluster, but the clustering provided by the FEA tool? Then they have to support the machine you bought a license for. They don't make the thirdparty FEA tool or it's cluster service so they can't and won't support it anyway, but they have to support the OS that they sold a license and support for.

Of course if you have a problem on one of the other machines, you have to reproduce the problem on the RHEL machine before they will give you any support, this makes sense.

There is no way they can say they don't support RHEL if it is connected to a network of non-RHEL machines whether those non-RHEL machines are running CentOS or not.

Re:Pirating Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

He means you can't have a "supported" 3 (or whatever number) node cluster where one of the nodes is RHEL and two are CentOS. Systems outside the HA or HPC cluster like firewalls/load balancers/routers/etc aren't relevant to this.

Re:Pirating Windows?

[Builder]

Because they'd need a license for each physical computer ? My understanding here is that they had a cluster of many computers. So they bought RHEL for the head node (1 computer) and used CentOS on all of the others.

Re:Pirating Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with saying fuck you.

We have a mix of red hat, debian, ubuntu, windows, solaris and aix.

and we download the patches we want/need.

we fire idiots like you.

MS

[dnadoc]

counterfeit Windows products sold on the streets in the Far East may have helped Microsoft â" by cementing their position as the technology standard

This is highly debateable. Why not use Photoshop as an example.

Re:MS

[Anonymous Coward]

Up to Win 7, adding a SLIC table to BIOS with a corresponding key and cert got you PERMANENT (OEM) offline activation. Many Asian markets used the method. They'd build a machine with whatever parts were on hand and sell it for cheap. As for the copies on the street they likely used a pre loaded enterprise key.

Photoshop for years has required online activation which doesn't result in permanent activation. BIG DIFFERENCE.

Windows 8 brought online activation for OEM. It's not talked about much but I believe it's part of the reason WIn 8 worldwide adoption is so low. Bill Gates said something to the affect of "I'd rather people pirate Windows than use an alternative". Apparently, Ballmer disagrees.

Given that offline SLIC activation still works with Win Server 2012, the latest trend is to convert it to a workstation

Re:MS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is highly debateable. Why not use Photoshop as an example.

Or a car?

Do people still show room?

[alen]

Other than blu rays, most things seem to be the same price at best buy and amazon or newegg

Re:Do people still show room?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried to shop at Barnes and Noble... Can't compete with $40-60 books at B&N that are $25-35 on Amazon...

Re:Do people still show room?

[alen]

yeah, but who show rooms at B&N? you always go to amazon first.

lately i've noticed electronics are about the same price at best buy as amazon. blu ray's generally cost $5 more. and some itunes movies are now cheaper than the blu ray

Re:Do people still show room?

[timeOday]

Wow, even little stuff like cables and toner? Last time I bought a cable at a store the price was shocking.

Re: Do people still show room?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to flip through books at brick and mortar stores; I know Amazon is cheaper but with a "real" store I can hold the book, read a bit, then decide if I want to buy it from Amazon right there with my handy app.

It's kind of dirty I guess...

Re:Do people still show room?

[anubi]

Yeh, I was in there and saw a couple of books on Arduino I took a liking to.

The salesperson wanted so bad to get me onto their loyalty card. Offered a big discount if I would sign up today.

So, given that they are offering discounts, I asked if they had a Senior Citizen discount, I am old enough for that. No. Cash discount? No. Then I asked about the Amazon discount - they did not know what I was talking about. At that point I was a bit exasperated about the membership hoops I was going to have to jump through to get the discount and indicated I was quite aware that I was already paying about double what I could get the books online for just for the sake of getting them NOW.

I wondered how much B&N is paying the marketing exec who dreamed up asking their sales reps to nail prospective customers for a discount if they would comply with rules, then watch them walk out the door with no purchase.

They made it rather clear to me that if I would comply with rules over discount cards, they would have me as a customer, otherwise shoo over to Amazon.

As far as I am concerned, they sent me the same signal as I give the waitress when she comes over with the coffee pot to refill my cup, and I place my hand over the cup: "I do not want any more, thank you." I folded my wallet back up and left.

No discount. No sale. I ordered the books a few hours later from Amazon.

Re:Do people still show room?

[jelizondo]

Entirely your fault, you should always disconnect cables before handling them; otherwise there is a risk of shock...

Redhat needs packages

[Hatta]

The only way I can get by using my IT mandated RedHat box is by installing CentOS packages on it. RedHat simply doesn't keep the packages I need up to date. If CentOS didn't exist, I wouldn't use RedHat at all, which would entail a huge fight with IT. Thanks CentOS!

Re:Redhat needs packages

[kthreadd]

Which packages would that be? Since CentOS is a clone of RHEL you would get the same packages as in RHEL by doing that.

Re:Redhat needs packages

[Hatta]

Freenx and R & Bioconductor. I eventually found that R and Bioconductor still lagged on centos, so I compile them myself now.

Re:Redhat needs packages

[idontgno]

It's one of the dirty little secrets: RH lags the various products by a bit, at least on a release-by-release basis. And then CentOS lags RH, sometimes famously.

Re:Redhat needs packages

[xaoslaad]

I have no idea whatsoever why this is modded insightful. Maybe you can shed some light on what newer packages does centos have that rhel doesn't? Looking at http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6/ and http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories centosplus, contrib, and extras barely have more than a handful of packages together. Even testing is mostly just autocorr and libreoffice...

Re:Redhat needs packages

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I'm forced to use RHEL 6.4 at work but it drives me insane that I can't find python-pandas and I'm sure there are other packages as well. Even with epel, it's just not there. If I had the choice, I would use a Debian based system without any hesitation over red hat.

Re:Redhat needs packages

[neurovish]

Freenx and R & Bioconductor. I eventually found that R and Bioconductor still lagged on centos, so I compile them myself now.

That is pretty normal then. Red Hat maintains the base distro, they don't maintain every piece of software you need. It is expected that you will be installing 3rd-party software on top of Red Hat.

Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn

[fnj]

CentOS, which is COMPLETELY legal and above board, has absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with counterfeit Windows products.

CentOS:
1) Violates NO copyrights
2) Is not passing itself off as something else
3) Has never been treated by Redhat as anything but completely welcome.
4) Is produced by completely building from (libre!) source, not disk copying the install media.
5) Is careful to remove Redhat branding where trademarks are involved.

Jim Whitehurst never uttered the silly parallel as far as I can see, nor implied it. He just made the obvious point that CentOS does not hurt Redhat but may well help it.

Re:Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn

[geoffrobinson]

You are focusing on the differences but ignoring the similarities which Whitehurst was concerned about.

CentOS doesn't put money in Red Hat's pocket directly, but it helps cement Red Hat as a standard for enterprise Linux distributions.

Re:Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn

[Anonymous Coward]

As several commenters have already pointed out - legality is not the point. The point is that Red Hat gains popularity through the popularity of similar CentOS, just as genuine MSWindows gains popularity through the popularity of similar pirated Windows.

I don't see how the comparison isn't valid.

Re:Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn

[rtfa-troll]

CentOS, which is COMPLETELY legal and above board, has absolutely nothing whatsoever in common with counterfeit Windows products.

Exactly

CentOS) Costs Nothing
Counterfeit Windows) Costs Nothing.

Exactly nothing in common.

Re:Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn

[Anonymous Coward]

I think RedHat's current position is probably correct - there are people for whom RedHat support is not necessary. Those people will go get a free Linux distro. It is to RedHat's benefit if those people go get CentOS because it increases the installed base of Linux systems that conform to RedHat's distro, which encourages development of RedHat-specific applications over other for-pay distros. As MSDOS and Windows have demonstrated, the O/S that has the largest number of apps, wins.

What is amusing is that this is a reversal of RedHat's prior position. RedHat actually went to a great deal of effort with RedHat 6 to make it hard for CentOS to emulate it.

And yes, the article's comment that implicitly compared CentOS to pirated copies of Windows is simply ignorant. Deploy the common-sense filters and ignore it.

Re:Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn

[bobbied]

3) Has never been treated by Redhat as anything but completely welcome.

Well, not really. Red Hat obviously cannot stop CentOs but it seems clear that Red Hat does guard their copyrighted material. They have made it clear that CentOS cannot refer to Red Hat in any part of their distribution that is not covered by GPL. CentOs *always* refers to the "up-line Linux vendor" (or some other vague reference) for a reason.

No Cent OS is tolerated by Red Hat as long as they don't step on copyrights or trademarks. They are not welcomed with open arms, but there is nothing they can do to stop Cent OS.

Re:Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, point four isn't completely true. As with many distributions, the kernel contains non-free (or at least potentially non-free) firmware blobs, a list of which can be found here.

Re:Stupidest damn parallel ever drawn

[Anonymous Coward]

No Cent OS is tolerated by Red Hat as long as they don't step on copyrights or trademarks. They are not welcomed with open arms, but there is nothing they can do to stop Cent OS.

I don't know that there's that sort of bad blood. From my understanding of the way trademark law works in the U.S., allowing another entity to use your trademark weakens the trademark and your ability to enforce it later. There was a genuinely classy Jack Daniels response to a book cover about that on Slashdot a while ago.

I'm not sure what I think about the way U.S. trademark law works (i.e. I haven't tried to sit down and think of implications to what seems more sane at first glance), but RedHat not allowing CentOS or Scientific Linux to use their trademark is just following a business world best practice and doesn't strike me as a sign of animosity.

best buy high presser sales made it to showrooming

[Joe_Dragon]

best buy high presser sales made it to showrooming place

When no one copies your software you're in trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

No one copying it - legally or illegally - means no one wants it.

Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

I can't say I enjoy working with RHEL (or its derivatives); I'm known for making a sour face whenever RHEL or CentOS are even mentioned. I can see why it's so popular (extensively validated rock-stable code), but these very same attributes make it very poorly suited for our needs (scientific computing - often using bleeding-edge software features and needing to squeeze the last bit of power out of bleeding-edge hardware).

But ask me about the company Red Hat? I'm a big fan of them. They have a relatively pure Open Source business model, and are showing the world that good money can be made out of it too. Not to mention their attitude. "Wanna clone our operating system? Be our guest, you'll only make us stronger."

On a more serious note, they're probably right about CentOS cementing their position. See also this very insightful post.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[kthreadd]

Nothing says that you can't use RHEL as a stable core OS and install any additional software that you need outside of that. It's very simple to do nowdays with Software Collections.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[Anonymous Coward]

---- quote ----
scientific computing - often using bleeding-edge software features and needing to squeeze the last bit of power out of bleeding-edge hardware
---- end quote ---

I would have to disagree with that .
I would NEVER run ISIS 3 ( http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/ ) nor ASP ( http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/ngt/stereo/ )
on Fedora 19
fedora is just WAY too new and has WAY too short a lifespan 13 months VS 7 to 10 YEARS

RHEL 6.4 ( i use ScientificLinux 6.4 ) is the best OS to run this on

Re:Great company - crappy product

[Ubi_NL]

What bullshit, its not a crappy product, its just aproduct not suited for your specific needs.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

At some point, we got a ~20% speedup on one of our clusters by installing new compilers and recompiling key libraries and software. And another ~15% speedup by upgrading our kernel to a new version. (Before you start calling me a ricer, on the scale of a medium-size computing cluster, these speedups represent 10000s USD worth of hardware each.) While I'm sure all this can also be done under RHEL/CentOS, it's much easier on many levels to install a distro that keeps things more up-to-date in the first place.

Plus switching distro got us an rsync version with which one can pull data from multiple source directories on a remote machine, a tar version with baked-in xz support,... Life's to short to bother installing all these things, but they're really nice to have, so there are definite advantages to the less conservative distros.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[kthreadd]

I'm no disagreeing. If you want newer and/or more optimized software then stock RHEL is not really for you. The key point with RHEL is that it provides a stable ABI, and that makes it more conservative on certain things.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

Just exercising my journalism skills by putting an eye-catching headline on top of a moderate post to lure people into reading it. These days, everyone seems to do it (especially the Slashdot editors/submitters). It seemed to work, too. Though I was kinda wondering if someone would call me out on it ;)

Re:Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

If you think RHEL and Fedora are the only distros in the universe, then this will blow your mind. I happened to be talking something *gasp* debian-based that happens to have a life span of many years. Also, if you're OK with less-that-optimal performance, good for you. We aren't.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[unixisc]

Scientific computing? Have you found a better alternative to RHEL based Scientific Linux?

Re:Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

Probably I should mention that performance-wise, I'm talking in the context of multiple-week number-crunching jobs running on a medium-size computing cluster. Though neither image processing nor astronomy are my field, the tools you're linking to appear to be rather lightweight, and suitable for desktop use. Also note that I never saw a big supercomputer running Scientific Linux. Wouldn't you think there might be a reason for that?

Re:Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

Scientific Linux seems to be a popular desktop OS with people who are more into science than into system administration. For our medium-sized computing cluster, it seems to be poorly suited. See also this post.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[Anonymous Coward]

What bullshit, its not a crappy product, its just a product not suited for your specific needs.

No, it is a crappy P.O.S. product held together with bailing wire and bubble gum. Linux/GNU are what you make of them, you can build a distribution an infinite number of ways, and all forms of it I have seen today are just shit thrown together with no direction.

Datacenters need something better. You can use most of the parts of a GNU/Linux system, just put them together better and replace the cruft. Look at Android, compared to a traditional Linux system for example.

Things like clean configuration management (love puppet but it has to bend over backwards to do what it does), backup integration (standard OS interface to - change journals, IO quiescing, volume snapshots), Formula One level performance metrics (LOL @ watch "cat /proc/interrupts"), and there's no reason it can't have a good remote management interface... not SSH, but I suppose that could be used as the transport in a pinch. /sigh

Re:Great company - crappy product

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you should be running Slackware.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[Anonymous Coward]

Our clusters for scientific computing run Rocks 6.0 (CentOS 6.2). I'm no admin, just a user.. anyway, these things fucking work :)

Re:Great company - crappy product

[Anonymous Coward]

scientific computing - often using bleeding-edge software features and needing to squeeze the last bit of power out of bleeding-edge hardware

Ugh. Yes, this attitude is a serious problem. Much of the modelling code I need to support requires bleeding-edge barely out of beta libraries. There's no reason for using the libraries, except the scientists producing it run Ubuntu. We do that on desktops too, but for servers we run something more reliable. When doing lots of serious modelling, we don't want our server going down or switching to unreliable crap with some sudden update. Not enough scientists understand that squeezing the last 1% of processing speed is not worth even a single crash.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[neurovish]

I can't say I enjoy working with RHEL (or its derivatives); I'm known for making a sour face whenever RHEL or CentOS are even mentioned. I can see why it's so popular (extensively validated rock-stable code), but these very same attributes make it very poorly suited for our needs (scientific computing - often using bleeding-edge software features and needing to squeeze the last bit of power out of bleeding-edge hardware).

It's not a crappy product, it just isn't viable for what you do. It's like you're complaining about a freightliner semi because it gets horrible gas mileage, won't fit in your garage, and is impossible to parallel park downtown. If I want bleeding edge, then I'll go with Gentoo, but I'm not going to use it for an Oracle server.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

With that attitude, you might want to consider switching to a job that doesn't involve supporting scientists. Science is by definition bleeding-edge, so it sounds like scientists are gonna be a an eternal blight on your existence.

Also, seems like we're blessed with a more competent sysadmin than you are. Although the relentless requests for new libraries do from time to time get on his nerves as well, he does succeed to keep 100s of nodes with bleeding-edge kernels and libraries running stable for years (if you don't count hardware problems).

Re:Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

Rocks is the very worst. RHEL is already very far behind the bleeding edge due to their obsession with testing and stability. Then RHEL is adapted by CentOS, introducing more lag. By the time CentOS is adapted by Rocks, it looks like you're running a stoneage kernel and system libraries (maybe that's why they call it Rocks, hur hur hur). Rocks is clusters for people who can't do clusters. Or as the Rocks "About" page puts it: "We have been driven by one goal: make clusters easy."

Here's our experience. The scientists had been complaining about Rocks' antiquated userspace for a long time. When we discovered we could make our workload run an unbelievable ~35% faster by moving to a more up-to-date distro (jumping several years ahead in the kernel, libraries and compiler versions), the decision was taken to move off Rocks. This was a lot of cursing and a huge learning experience for our sysadmin because he had to configure a whole lot of things himself that Rocks otherwise takes care of, but in the end, even he is happy we made the move because he feels more in control and the scientists are not nearly bugging him as much anymore.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[OneAhead]

Oh yeah, and it's usually more than 1%. By more than an order of magnitude in many cases.

Re:Great company - crappy product

[evilviper]

I can see why it's so popular (extensively validated rock-stable code), but these very same attributes make it very poorly suited for our needs (scientific computing - often using bleeding-edge software features and needing to squeeze the last bit of power out of bleeding-edge hardware).

If you want bleeding-edge, use Fedora instead... I can't think of anything that bleeds more than Fedora Rawhide. Then you're still staying RHEL compatible, just ahead of the curve.

But personally, I recommend a much more reliable strategy of using the latest RHEL, and only for the few applications where you need bleeding edge, recompiling the Fedora Rawhide SRPMs for RHEL. It works quite well for most everything, from the kernel to userland X11 apps. Yum/RPM is smart about not obliterating your changes, and will just pick up and install your new RPMs if you drop them in your local yum repo. Yet with fewer components bleeding, you'll get a much more stable system out of it.

Re:best buy high presser sales made it to showroom

[Anonymous Coward]

best buy high presser sales made it to showrooming place

Oh Joe, you were doing so well for a while there!

Now you're back to your same old habit of putting your text in the subject field.

Such a shame that I'm going to have to go back to berating you endlessly again isn't it?

Uh... lacking data

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

The suits wanted to buy licenses for RHEL to upgrade the nodes, the IT staff wanted to use CentOS

so the IT staff didn't want to use RHEL, they wanted something identical to RHEL instead.... stupid.

If it was just down to some anti-corporate kind of dumb thinking, then surely said IT staff should be handing back their salaries..

Or.... It could be that the IT budget was fixed, so they had to make a choice between spending on line-of-business issues vs. (what is in effect) an expensive support contract so the FEA guy can run his simulations faster. Frankly, we just don't know all the facts to second guess their decision.

Re:Uh... lacking data

[gbjbaanb]

as he said - "the suits wanted to buy", and the suits generally have the budget, which looks true when he also says they engaged with redhat salesmen who didn't have a flexible licencing for bulk purchases.

Ultimately its a story of redhat business models being less than perfect, but it still confuses me why someone would make the distinction between RHEL and CentOS in any way other than price, which is what he was suggesting - that IT staff somehow value the free version over the paid version for no more than idealogical reasons. If he had said "the suits wanted to buy Windows, the IT staff wanted Linux" then I'd be all with that, but not between RHEL and rebranded RHEL.

Entrant

[Anonymous Coward]

So Oracle, Debian and Ubuntu are entrants? According to who? These all seem like mature products to me? Not to mention the fact the Oracle Enterprise Linux has been cross compatible with Red Hat for years.

Its The Enterprise (Stupid)

[its a trappist!]

RedHat's success is based on knowing who their real customers are: enterprise and government. Enterprise users can't take the risk of using an unsupported solution, so they are ALWAYS willing to pay the relatively reasonable subscription fees. Same applies to government. CentOS plays well with the rest of the world - those willing to risk running an unsupported operating system. RedHat don't care: those guys are not their customer. CentOS and Fedora both are great training grounds and test beds, but it will be cold day in hell before a Fortune 500 CIO bets the farm on either.

In that case, why would devs support Linux?

[unixisc]

Linux dudes,

With all the Linux geeks running around, why does anyone pay for RedHat's service?

Aren't there plenty of Linux folks around the World where you can get anything RedHat provides cheaper?

With that attitude, it's no wonder that plenty of people would be disincentivized to write Linux applications, or package Linux distros. Why do it, when the bulk of the people interested in it are freeloaders not willing to finance their work? And please don't give us the service aspect - not every developer wants a career in supporting services - they'd rather either market or build product.

The reason Linux is seriously considered at all in business is Red Hat - if a company wants to base either its products or IT infrastructure on Linux, the only reason for them to seriously do it is Red Hat. Do you seriously think anybody would build their IT infrastructure on Knoppix, Fedora, Sabayon, Manjaro, Salix, gNewSense or the hundreds of other distros out there? While some might consider things like Debian or Gentoo or the BSDs, the only other distros that businesses would seriously consider are those that have corporate backing out there - Red Hat, OEL, SUSE, Mandriva, FreeBSD (iXsystems) and so on.

Re:In that case, why would devs support Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux dudes,

With all the Linux geeks running around, why does anyone pay for RedHat's service?

Aren't there plenty of Linux folks around the World where you can get anything RedHat provides cheaper?

With that attitude, it's no wonder that plenty of people would be disincentivized to write Linux applications, or package Linux distros. Why do it, when the bulk of the people interested in it are freeloaders not willing to finance their work? And please don't give us the service aspect - not every developer wants a career in supporting services - they'd rather either market or build product.

The reason Linux is seriously considered at all in business is Red Hat - if a company wants to base either its products or IT infrastructure on Linux, the only reason for them to seriously do it is Red Hat. Do you seriously think anybody would build their IT infrastructure on Knoppix, Fedora, Sabayon, Manjaro, Salix, gNewSense or the hundreds of other distros out there? While some might consider things like Debian or Gentoo or the BSDs, the only other distros that businesses would seriously consider are those that have corporate backing out there - Red Hat, OEL, SUSE, Mandriva, FreeBSD (iXsystems) and so on.

If VMware offered a generic Linux layer to shove between your applications and their virtualization product, extending their management tools down one more level, nobody would bat an eye at RedHat.

Re:In that case, why would devs support Linux?

[unixisc]

If? Can't ESX do that as well? But that would again be a corporate Linux, like Red Hat, OEL, SUSE, et al. Yeah, Red Hat does lose share to the likes of OEL or SUSE, and would to VMware as well. But it doesn't dovetail w/ the GP's assertion that no-name Linuxes that cost $0 are better.

Re:best buy high presser sales made it to showroom

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of those words are English, but I have no fucking idea what you just said.

If you're trying out for Slashdot editor, I think you just nailed it.

Marketshare v. Mindshare

[Larry_Dillon]

What you want as a software vendor:

1. Paying customer (gives you marketshare)
2. Non-paying users (gives you mindshare)
3. Users using competitor's products for free (loss of mindshare)
4. Users paging for competitor's product (loss of marketshare)

The above is only true in a market that has meaningful competition.

can we please stop saying free-as-in-beer!?

[Anonymous Coward]

last time I checked, beer is not free in any sense of the word.
you sound like an idiot when you say that

Re:can we please stop saying free-as-in-beer!?

[greg1104]

If someone offers you a "free beer", that's getting something most people expect to pay for, but for free. That's what "free as in beer" is alluding to. You shouldn't call other people idiots just because you don't understand what they are saying.

Redhat doesn't create RPMs fast enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

CentOS doesn't have the resources to build RPMs for anything other than what's current at the time of their release. I've been forced to build OpenSSH from source in order to get needed functionality for customers using CentOS. ... I call bullshit.

Sophistry

[bill_mcgonigle]

Go back and read the centos-devel list from the CentOS 6 build period if you don't believe me, but EL6 was not self-building. The CentOS 6 guys (much kudos) spent vast amounts of time fiddling with building this library with this compiler on this host with this version of this build library, to find the exact build combinations that would make CentOS6 a binary-compatible EL6. Hence, it was over a year behind. It was thought that this was done to frustrate Oracle, like the giant-kernel-patch-blob issue, but really, Oracle can hire a dozen guys to get it done in a month while CentOS is harmed for over a year.

Maybe the CEO has changed his thinking, or perhaps the same ethos does not pervade the company. I guess we'll see when EL7 rolls around.

P.S. - he's right, many customers upgrade from CentOS to RHEL for deployment-time support. Others stay with 3rd-party support which can be more comprehensive.