[Gllug] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 01:07:34PM +0100, Amias Channer wrote:
> I belive if you want to use oracle on redhat you are locked to certain
> distro versions and possibly even kernel version , also if you want to
> deploy perl applications on a production system you can only use the
> modules that they have rpm'ed or risk having to fight rpm with cpan
> and make your system hard to audit or re-create.
> 
> This ammounts to a lockin because moving to another distro becomes
> difficult the more you develop your system.

This is not lock-in.

Red Hat are saying simply that they will only support a particular
version of the kernel and system, patched to a particular level.
You are still free to move to:

(a) the exact same version of RHEL, supported by yourself or someone else

(b) another version of Linux

(c) a modified version of RHEL, supported by yourself or someone else

Compare this to the Microsoft situation, which is lock-in.  If
Microsoft declare that they are no longer going to support (say)
Windows 98, then the choices you have are:

(a) continue with unpatched, unsupported Windows 98

(b) move to a later supported version of Windows

The choice you *do not* have is:

(c) continue support with a modified version of Windows 98 supported
by another vendor

... because no other vendor has access to the source and, even less,
is allowed to modify Win98.

Rich.

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