Looking back at 2004

Looking back at 2004

Posted Dec 23, 2004 17:09 UTC (Thu) by tmattox (subscriber, #4169)
Parent article: Looking back at 2004

That is a great article, except for this statement:

> But many of the projects which aim to undercut the
> enterprise Linux business model - CaOS, Whitebox
> Linux, UserLinux, etc. - appear to have made
> little progress over the last year.

I take exception to this statement on several points.

The cAos Foundation (not CaOS) does not aim to
undercut the enterprise Linux business model. IMO the
enterprise Linux business model is one of supplying an
active and extensive support system, such as the Red
Hat Network. One of the Foundation's project areas is a
series of CentOS Linux distributions which are
trademark free rebuilds from the Source RPMs of the
various RedHat Enterprise Linux distributions. These
CentOS Linux distributions are for those who want the
free and open source software (FOSS), but who do not
feel they need to pay for external support services.
When people come in to the IRC/mailing lists asking for
a free replacement for Red Hat Network, we send them
back to RedHat, since that is a service that is not
FOSS, and is outside the scope of CentOS and the cAos
Foundation.

As for making "little progress" over the year, I am not
sure how you measure that. From my perspective, the
CentOS distributions have shown they have wide
community support, with a growing and global mirror
system, and a repeatable history of rapid passthrough
of security fixes (see the CentOS mailing list
archives to do your own date comparisons).

As for progress on other fronts, the cAos Foundation
has made considerable progress in filling the void of a
stable and free RPM based Linux distribution. The
cAos-1 Linux distribution was released as a prototype
and demonstration of a system for a self hosting RPM
based distribution built from the source files pulled
from each individual FOSS project. The community of
developers that formed around cAos-1 has been making
great progress refining the build system, and support
infrastructure and applying "lessons learned" to the
next major release, cAos-2. The cAos-2 Linux
distribution has just entered alpha stage and has a
very nice modern set of packages:
http://caos.caosity.org/features.html
Sure, cAos-2 feels like it is taking longer than it
should, but what software project doesn't? ;-)

Disclaimer: I'm only one of the many people in the cAos
Foundation, so I can't speak for everyone else, but I
could not sit back and let that overly broad and
unsupported claim go without comment. I've been a
happy LWN reader for many years, and think LWN is
and continues to be the premier source of Linux News
condensed to into a weekly format. (For that matter,
the best in any format, weekly or otherwise.)

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