Red Hat Enterprise Linux software sources?

[R P Herrold]

On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, der.hans wrote:

>> Cool!  Red Hat sells an "Application Stack" which includes

> Is the application stack the only way to officially get LAMP 
> from RHEL?

Nope -- CentOS packages the 'Application Stack' in binary 
form, to the extent that the sources, and updates are 
available from upstream (it took some digging, and effort from 
Max Spevak <?>, Fedora project leader) to get access to all of 
it, and the CentOS project gratefully acknowledges his help

> Remind your $boss that your company also sells support ( at 
> least I believe it does ) and would like customers to buy 
> support contracts.

and indeed, so do I through Owl River for CentOS and more, 
through Owl River
 	http://www.owlriver.com/support/centos/ and
 	http://www.owlriver.com/wings/
right off the top of my head, I can think of four people 
in the Valley we would sub in for 'on site response' to the 
extent needed.

> I believe you can just move to getting updates from CentOS.

Yes, but that said, Red Hat conveys great value with the SLA, 
the implicit engineering behind their continuation of 
stabilization of the sources written by the community over lo, 
these many years, and to a lesser extent the updates mirror 
system. I assume you made a purchase with an 'included' RHEL 
license, as is common with manufacturer or channel distributor 
hardware sales.

> If I'm remembering correctly[0]

so modest -- ;)

> how Russ Herrold[1]

yup -- I was there at the start
   http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2006-July/066808.html

> put it when he was at the west side meeting, CentOS is a 
> recompilation and repackaging of the RHEL sources[2].

[and I always add] ... with the upstream's trademark 
restricted content elided, and replaced with artwork of 
CentOS' creation

> I believe there is a high degree of compatability between 
> CentOS updates and RHEL. But, maybe you should just move to 
> CentOS as others have already suggested.

Complete API and ABI compatibility to an extreme degree.  ;)

Actually, if you are not going to use it, CentOS would really 
LOVE to have that specialized 'Application Stack' binary 
entitlement, as we do NOT have a set of those binaries to do 
ldd and the relates binary API 'inendicalness' comparisons 
against.  Please contact me off list if this is 'doable'

> Some of us might suggest another distro :).

Enterprise Linux choices are pretty limited, if your PHB wants 
to be sure she or he can find a successor when you get hired 
away ;)  ... and I really cannot see risking Novell's 
distribution in front of the GPLv3 release at the end of the 
month, and seeing how this is going to shake out.  I think 
SuSE has a really tough row to hoe, of they need to fork and 
maintain ALL of the FSF/Gnu toolchain to keep maintaining 
their distributions.  I know that in a project which I run, 
and which I showed briefly at the westside meeting,
 	http://www.trading-shim.org/
we are going to GPLv3 as soon as it issues, assuming it is 
substantially similar to the Last Call draft out there at the 
moment.  Canonical's effort in Debian space is noble, but I do 
not see much traction in the market.

> Does anyone sell commercial support for CentOS?

Yes, as above. Additionally, we can arrange for embeded, 
remote, cluster, and consulting services by members of the 
core CentOS developers and known persons of high competence 
in the next CentOS tiers, with experience at the National 
Labs, and in .mil space.

> [0] which I probably am not

smile

> [1] he's a CentOS developer and announced the just released 
> version of CentOS at the meeting. I think he also said he's 
> one of the founders of the CentOS project, but I haven't 
> been able to find documention verifying that

We at CentOS are not so much about ranks and titles, being a 
typical sysadmin geek meritocracy ;)  but yes as to being 
there at the founding; see as to the core team,
 	http://www.centos.org/
title bar: Information | The CentOS Team | Members
 	and you'll see that I have really succedded in getting 
the best and the brightest in RPM / RH derived distribution 
space, including Dag, whom I number as a good friend.

> [2] "based on Red Hat's commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 
> (RHEL) product. This rebuild project strives to be 100% 
> binary compatible with the upstream product and, within its 
> mainline and updates, not to vary from that goal."[3]

> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centos

smile -- check the changelog -- I have to go in and clean it 
up from time to time as people try to put 'slants' on the 
information there.

-- Russ Herrold
 	614 488 6954 (o)