CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

Posted Aug 5, 2009 12:12 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs by jordanb
Parent article: CentOS turbulence and enterprise Linux tradeoffs

> 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.