On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Jeffrey Watts jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com wrote:
I appreciate your position, but you have to realize that if you're using CentOS, you're not using it for the GPLed parts. You're using it because Red Hat built and regression tested an extremely stable distribution. You're using it because Red Hat spent the time and money to make third party apps like Oracle run well on it. You're using it because they took the time to integrate things like SELinux.
If making a stable enterprise OS were trivial, there wouldn't be a CentOS project - folks would just use something else. Every person that uses CentOS because it's "cheaper" are taking dollars away from Red Hat. Like or dislike them, they are probably the single largest contributers of code to the Linux community (though I believe IBM is a close second now). The dollars that folks spend to buy RHEL fund the Linux community directly.
Sure, it's legal to re-apportion GPLed code, and Red Hat certainly doesn't stop the CentOS folks from taking their work. But it's uncool. Free Software is not about free beer. If folks want an enterprise quality distribution they ought to support the company that worked hard to provide it. If you want to use RHEL and don't want to pay for it, I would recommend that you use Fedora.
As I said before, this is my opinion. One can certainly do what they want, as it's certainly legal. But I for one believe in investing in the Linux community with my wallet.
Jeffrey.
It's a fair opinion. And I agree with it overall, even the "taking dollars away from Red Hat" as that is more or less a fact.
However RedHat's pricing, while fair, is beyond the reach of some. It would be good to see them provide a cheaper version with less/lower priority support. Doing so would probably get them a piece of Centos' pie as well.