KS2012: Distributions and upstream

Posted Sep 6, 2012 22:33 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: KS2012: Distributions and upstream by rahulsundaram
Parent article: KS2012: Distributions and upstream

when you are paying as much as RHEL charges for support for hundreds or thousands of servers, taking the attitude of "user our stock everything or you are on your own" is a very proprietary software way of looking at it.

I understand that this is easier for Red Hat to provide support for, but this is a pretty strict straightjacket that defeats many of the benefits of FOSS software.

KS2012: Distributions and upstream

Posted Sep 7, 2012 3:02 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Singling out RHEL seems strange since I don't think SUSE or Canonical or Oracle is any different in this regard. If you are using something compiled on your own, you can't really expect a vendor to support it. Especially for the kernel, considering the enormous number of experimental options, flaky drivers, random third party patches etc, it would be a nightmare.

KS2012: Distributions and upstream

Posted Sep 7, 2012 11:24 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. Note that if you have some module that you rely on that you need to use even when doing bug reproduction, but that is not included in the distro kernel, you can often take the distro config and kernel source and enable and compile that module, then load the module atop the distro kernel. This will usually work (modulo only those strange cases where enabling a module will also change code in the core kernel). (It's probably best to mention that you did this to the support people you're talking to, just in case it did break something, but I doubt that this approach will rouse too many hackles.)

KS2012: Distributions and upstream

Posted Sep 7, 2012 18:35 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

RHEL is the leader in the "enterprise Linux" market, and as such, to a large extent their example drives that segment of the market.

That's why I specifically mentioned them, even though Suse and Oracle have the same policies (I don't know about Canonical)