[clue] CentOS new user experience

[Mike]

On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 12:00 PM, <clue-request at cluedenver.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
So, I've got a couple comments about this point you made. I am biased (I
will explain down below, above my signature), however, I will state, that
many times before, working large contracts for my government employer, we
did call on RH support, for unclassified issues, and they were able to help
us remedy them. Back in my government days, I'd say 50% of the issues
revolved around security flaws/problems, and 50% other technical problems,
and once we got our shop more secure, we moved to 25% security related
issues, to 75% technical problems. So, to contradict what was said, as
quoted above, yes, I got meaningful support from paying RH. I also worked
with Red Hat on several occasions in the public space, when I worked for an
extremely large hosting provider (anyone remember Savvis?), and they helped
me with several technical issues. I have yet to run into the problem
described above, with all my dealings, I've ever had with Red Hat.



> 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
>


So, to report on my bias, as of very recently (less than 1 month), I began
employment with Red Hat.

-- 
Mike
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