CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 4, 2009 3:55 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (guest, #45668)
Parent article: CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

> Its users get the benefit of the massive team of developers that Red Hat
> has working on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product without having to pay
> for any of it.

> A Linux user who feels the need for contractually-assured service backed
> up by a well-funded support operation and faster security updates would be
> well advised to consider purchasing support from one of the companies
> operating in that area.

Honest to god Corbet, have you figured out a new revenue stream or what? The shilling in this article is so bald-faced it's embarrassing.

I don't use REHL. I had to use Fedora for a while and that experience still has me waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats. So I have a little bit of trouble seeing what the "massive team of developers" at Red Had provides, besides drama like Dreppering and failing to maintain RPM -- not to mention mysterious outages and apparent security breaches that get muffled.

I've known a few people in the hosting space who use CentOS. From what they've said they use it because:

* They have enough in-house expertise that they don't need the corporate security blanket of a shrinkwraped support agreement.

* But proprietary "enterprise" tools (in the web-hosting space, cPanel, mostly) have standardized on REHL, so you need either REHL or a work-alike like CentOS no matter how much your workers would rather be deploying Debian.

Red Hat has muscled itself into the S&P by becoming "The Linux Company" in the heads of corporate types. Certainly this helps them land contracts with companies who need a support agreement because they don't have sufficient IT on their own, and I imagine Red Hat probably adds value in those relationships (I haven't heard nearly as many bad things about them as I've heard of other such companies, like IBM Global Services).

Another side to that, though, is that whenever a proprietary developer decides to "target Linux," there's no question which distro they're going to pick. They're going to go with REHL. Without groups like CentOS, companies like cPanel would be doing a lot of sales work for Red Hat. In fact, they likely are anyway, but at least those groups with sufficient technical competence can use CentOS to avoid paying a "Red Hat Tax" for a decision made by one of their vendors.

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Did he touch a nerve?

Posted Aug 4, 2009 5:23 UTC (Tue) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (2 responses)

Such a rabid response over perfectly natural commentary! Did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed or what?

I can't remember ANY response as off base as yours. Shilling is a bizarre complaint in the first place, to consistently mistype "RHEL" doesn't help your cause, and then to just ramble on without saying anything.

You need some coffee or time off or *something*.

Did he touch a nerve?

Posted Aug 4, 2009 18:05 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

It needed to be said, but it could have been said much more gently, to better effect.

My employer uses CentOS, too, for precisely the same reasons. Companies like Oracle for which no equivalent to CentOS exist, or can, have been obliged to offer low-cost licenses to third-party developers for similar reasons. Red Hat has no need for this because CentOS provides that service.

Security Fix Delays

Posted Aug 5, 2009 3:45 UTC (Wed) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

I should note, further, that in my employer's typical use of CentOS, delays in delivery of security updates rarely affect them. That is the nature of third-party development: it just has to work well enough to compile against. It doesn't have to be fast or secure, or to run on modern hardware. The only iron law is that it needs to be link-compatible with the (mutual) customers' RHEL installations.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 4, 2009 9:46 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I don't use REHL. I had to use Fedora for a while and that experience still has me waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats.

This seems a bit unfair; you do realize that the two distributions have different goals? Perhaps you think that Fedora is so terrible that nobody associated with it could ever be capable of making a reasonable enterprise distribution, but to me that is like thinking that a bad tennis player would automatically be bad at rowing. I would suggest you can't judge the quality of RHEL except by trying it, or at least trying CentOS. (I happen to think Fedora is pretty good at what it does.)

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 4, 2009 9:55 UTC (Tue) by bvdm (guest, #42755) [Link] (8 responses)

RHAT is pretty well regarded and is in fact the posterboy for being a good open-source corporate citizen. So I don't see what your beef with them is. CentOS will logically also disappear if RHAT ever fails, so what's wrong with ppl paying their dues?

Also, Corbet's observations are entirely valid, whatever minute benefit they may have for RHAT here on LWN.

Sorry, but I don't see how your post is helpful to other readers. Which is kinda the point of posting, right?

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 4, 2009 14:46 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (7 responses)

There is still some lingering resentment over Redhat deciding to eliminate free-as-beer ISO image downloads years ago. People thinking that Redhat screwed over it's users and other such nonsense.

I've seen it here and there. The above comment is probably a example of it.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 5, 2009 19:31 UTC (Wed) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (6 responses)

The "free as in beer" Red Hat downloads got replaced by Fedora, mostly a name change at first. The problem is that what "enterprise" users want is radically different from what "hobby" users demand. Trying to please both just gets you into a bind, and infuriates everybody. Current state of affairs is near optimal, AFAICS: For personal use, you have Fedora (rapid development, always the latest gizmo ready to try/use); for non-critical servers you can run CentOS or Scientific Linux (Red Hat goes out of its way to make sure that building a clone distribution is easy by segregating branded stuff into a few easily replaced packages, they distribute full source even where they aren't forced to do so by the packages' license, most stuff developed in-house or even bought from third parties has been GPLed by them); if you need solid support you pay for it via Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 6, 2009 9:29 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (5 responses)

FWIW, I run Fedora on a server and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't need the OS to be 'certified' for Oracle or SAP or other expensive proprietary software. Every six months it takes about a day of my time to upgrade it, mostly spent in testing and in rebuilding any locally modified packages. If I had more than one server to maintain then of course I would need to spend some effort to automate and centralize the administration.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 7, 2009 1:28 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (4 responses)

We used to have Fedora on servers too, but the update timing became all wrong for us (smack in the most busy time in the term), so...

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 8, 2009 11:41 UTC (Sat) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (3 responses)

Even the Fedora project in the FC3 era understood that running their own infrastructure on Fedora was taking more resources than they could spend. That's when they moved to CentOS for their infrastructure instead.

Lots of Fedora developers also admit using CentOS for everything where they need stability or simply don't want to update every X months. There is no controversy anymore. It's the same codebase with a different deployment target (for the same audience).

Within companies you can also see companies mix CentOS and RHEL, depending on the support needs they have for different systems. Business or mission-critical solutions running on RHEL, and testing or development systems running on CentOS.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 8, 2009 20:30 UTC (Sat) by nirik (subscriber, #71) [Link] (2 responses)

I could be wrong, but I don't think Fedora infrastructure uses CentOS anywhere, they use
mostly RHEL and a few Fedora machines that need to be fedora for composes, etc.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 9, 2009 15:13 UTC (Sun) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (1 responses)

It doesn't matter, my point is still valid.

I said they moved from Fedora to CentOS in the FC3 era. It's possible they moved to RHEL. The point is that the Fedora project is not using Fedora for their servers. Whether it is CentOS or RHEL now is not relevant.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 9, 2009 20:01 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Actually, Fedora Project was just using external infrastructure which happened to be running something else at that point but yes, Fedora doesn't claim to be for everyone either.

Massive team of developers

Posted Aug 4, 2009 15:08 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

So I have a little bit of trouble seeing what the "massive team of developers" at Red Had provides

For a start, Red Hat is the biggest employer of kernel developers. For example in 2.6.30: 11% of the changesets and 5% of the lines come from it, not to speak of 42% of signed-off lines.

But as others have pointed out Red Hat is mostly known as the source of CentOS packages and security fixes. It also publishes almost all its work as free software and is a model company in the area. I am a Debian user and prefer it to Red Hat, but there is a lot of value in having a corporate provider. There are a lot of repackagers so nobody is forced to pay Red Hat for support; people do it because they want to. What is your problem?

Massive team of developers

Posted Aug 4, 2009 16:21 UTC (Tue) by eparis123 (guest, #59739) [Link]

It's not only the kernel. They have smart engineers in each level of the OS stack.

Kernel, SELinux, gcc, glibc, DBUS, gnome, pulseaudio, *kit stuff, ...

No one matches them in this, not even Novell.

CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 5, 2009 12:12 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> In fact, they likely are anyway, but at least those groups with sufficient
> technical competence can use CentOS to avoid paying a "Red Hat Tax" for a
> decision made by one of their vendors.

You can use Centos without Red Hat but you can not create a Centos-like system without someone paying a Red Hat. So the "Red Hat Tax" moniker is stupid. Anyone is free to try to build another distro for ISVs to standardise on (and in fact many tried and continue trying). ISVs do not particularly like Red Hat (some like Oracle and IBM have been hostile to it many times in the past). They chose RHEL as supported platform because they don't want or can not convince their customers a better job could be done more cheaply another way.

In fact, the day customers like you convince ISVs they're ready to manage the OS directly, without passing the cost to ISVs another way (such as requiring them to support XX badly defined Gentoo or Debian versions without increasing their own software prices, or complaining their Linux does not support latest hardware now there is no Red Hat-paid developper to write drivers for it), ISVs will happily dump Red Hat.

People want Oracle or Symantec or insert-isv-name-here to use something else than RHEL, without paying ISVs more, and without explaining how the numerous engineers Red Hat pays to enhance Linux and do support will be replaced. ISVs wisely decide not to embark on this lunacy. TANSTAAFL.