[Gllug] Cost of RedHat vs Ubuntu desktop support

[Joel Bernstein]

On 7 Jul 2009, at 12:51, John Edwards wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 12:27:12PM +0100, Joel Bernstein wrote:
>> On 7 Jul 2009, at 12:19, Hari Sekhon wrote:
>>> IMHO, CentOS and Redhat can be used interchangeably and I do.
>>
>> What's the benefit in running CentOS? Presumably one would only  
>> select
>> a RHEL-type distro with a very limited set of available packages if
>> one needed to deploy commercial applications which were only  
>> certified
>> on it? Surely Oracle and so on don't certify on CentOS too?
>
> After a few seconds of thinking I came up with:
>
> 1) Learning RedHat.
>
> 2) Development systems.
>
> 3) Running non-free software built specifically for RedHat.
>
> There may be other cases as well, such as organisations that had
> existing know-how or software running on the old Redhat Linux and
> did not want to move to the short life Fedora or a different disto.

#1 has no place in a company environment really .. if you want to test  
or evaluate RHEL, contact RH sales and ask for eval licences.
#2 makes sense, I accept this one
#3 doesn't apply. Companies who sell apps with support for RHEL don't  
support them on CentOS AFAIK.

CentOS for development server for a dev team whose work is released  
onto RHEL appservers, I can understand. Still a nagging worry that  
it's different enough that you're at risk of compat issues but it's  
probably close enough to production not to matter in most cases.

>> Is there another use case which I'm missing, where your sysadmins
>> don't spend all day building RPMs from source because you use a cut-
>> down backport-based distro with a tiny number of packages available,
>> and where using an OS whose only rationale is its support contract
>> without a support contract isn't batshit insane?
>
> CentOS supply binary RPMs through yum in a similar way to Fedora,
> so no need to spend any time compiling source.

Is that an intentional missing of the point?

You need to compile from source anything which isn't distributed as a  
RHEL-blessed package. Obviously this applies to every distro, but to  
see why it matters for CentOS users, just compare the package counts  
of RHEL and Debian Stable. Consider the maintenance cost of building  
your own packages of things the distro doesn't see fit to include  
because it would be tricky to maintain hacky backports to them. The  
TCO of server ownership seems to have a MAJOR component which is  
sysadmin time to build/maintain the OS. Anything which adds to that  
seems a false economy.

/joel
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