[clue] CentOS new user experience.

David L. Anselmi anselmi at anselmi.us
Wed Dec 23 13:09:28 MST 2015


Charles Burton wrote:
> Red Hat actually does have a vested interest in keeping CentOS around.  It
> keeps people using a RHEL clone without having to pay for support and
> whatnot on it meaning they maintain that mindshare of people.

Sure, I understand that.  But I'm skeptical that CentOS needs RH support.  10 years ago people were 
talking about creating the CentOS approach in response to RHEL because they couldn't afford the new 
licensing model (and had religious objections to not RH).  So even if CentOS quit I think others 
would do the job.

It is nice that RH makes it easy to replace their trademarks though (which aren't Free).

> Then, when you need support you pay Red Hat and convert your unsupported CentOS installs over to
> RHEL.

Has anyone ever gotten meaningful support from paying RH?  I suppose it happens but the admins at 
the last RHEL shop I worked in wouldn't have bothered to ask for help.  "Well, that sucks, let's see 
how we work around this..."  Perhaps they would have asked the hardware vendors for help if it had 
been hardware related.

I found, documented, and submitted a bug to Oracle once upon a time.  The answer was "the fix will 
be in the next release."  That wasn't very helpful because a) the next release wasn't out, and b) we 
weren't going to switch to it any time soon.  And we were paying Oracle a lot more than we would 
have been paying RH.

So I'm curious to add a contra-anecdote to my collection.

Dave


More information about the clue mailing list