On Fri, 2005-05-13 at 14:15 -0700, Erik Bixby wrote:
> To clarify, the reason I switched from Red Hat to SuSE:
> http://fedora.redhat.com/about/#support
> Fedora is not supported, SuSE is.  For some organizations that's an
> issue.  For organizations I figured I'd be working for, I figured that
> would be an issue.  I like that with SuSE I can download the actual
> code that a potential client organization might well be running.  With
> Fedora/RHEL this is not the case.  Fedora is similar to RHEL, as is
> CentOS.  But, they are not the compiled-by-Red-Hat-real-deal binaries.
>  And, I just don't like how they built their business making the
> distro easily available to people, and then changed the rules in the
> middle of the game.
> 
> At any rate, that is why I made my personal choice to switch from Red
> Hat 9 to SuSE.  I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who are
> very happy with Fedora and CentOS.  :)
----
I think that this represents a misunderstanding of what the various Red
Hat offerings represent.

RHL - the basic Red Hat product prior to Fedora was somewhat of an all
things to all people and didn't have an identifiable purpose. Their RHEL
product is clearly the most commercially successful Linux distribution
at this point in time and was originally an off-shoot of the RHL
product. By selling both RHL and RHEL, the product offerings lacked
clarity of purpose.

The shift to Fedora was far more than a name change - the purpose was to
have a frequently released, frequently 'unstable' package releases and
be the development and testing product for what might ultimately be
packaged as RHEL. Thus Fedora is indeed unsupported since it is often
using 'unstable' packages and is attempting to push the envelope in
releases and packaging. Obviously RHEL is supported.

CentOS is but one of several RHEL clone products which are compiled from
the SRPM's of the RHEL product and whether the binaries are compiled by
Red Hat or by others has proven to be of little consequence and has been
rapidly fixed when a problem is identified. There are no issues that I
am aware of between using an RHEL clone or the official RHEL product and
I am maintaining several systems of both categories.

As for the appropriateness of switching a business model (RHL -> Fedora)
- or changing the rules of the game as you see it...this is a
competitive market and if you don't adapt, you suffer the consequences.
This business model switch offers all of the best of Linux...

Freely distributed, widely enhanced, pretty much bleeding edge Fedora
which seems to offer a Linux state of the art desktop platform.

Restricted distribution, completely supported by Red Hat, ISV's,
Software Packagers, etc. RHEL.

Freely distributed, somewhat enhanced RHEL re-spin.

Thus it is no problem running the same software at home as you have at
work. In fact, using RHEL at the office and an RHEL clone is virtually
identical. Considering the continuity of the 3 above listed offerings,
there is incredible leverage between the 3 and it's not a problem to
move confidently among them.

Now I am not gonna disparage SuSE or any other distribution as it is
clear that they all have their relative strengths and weaknesses but if
history is any indication, Novell completely ran Word Perfect into the
ground as well as their Netware product line and totally lost their
Groupwise market share to Exchange Server so when I consider the impact
of their purchases of Ximian and SuSE, I can only hope that they not
suffer from similar fate. Judging by their efforts thus far with
Evolution and the breadth of their Linux based offerings, it seems that
they are hopelessly entrenched in forever trying to be all things to all
people.

Craig

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