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Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

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Re: Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

#21

Post by toomuchtodo »

samarudge wrote: post #6
dandrews wrote: post #3

Redhat puts a lot of effort into building its enterprise distro. Yeah, it's mostly out of FOSS parts, I get that, but distros are nontrivial and costly undertakings. I've always had a bit of a problem with Centos, which as I understand takes Redhat's work, removes the proprietary parts, and redistributes for free-as-in-beer - perhaps depriving Redhat of a sale or two. It's not exactly theft, but not sporting either.…

RedHat loves CentOS. To quote their CEO > CentOS is one of the reasons that the RHEL ecosystem is the default. It helps to give us an ubiquity that RHEL might otherwise not have if we forced everyone to pay to use Linux. So, in a micro sense we lose some revenue, but in a broader sense, CentOS plays a very valuable role in helping to make Red Hat the de facto Linux.[0] [0] http://readwrite.com/2013/08/13/red-hat-ceo-…

Somewhat why Adobe didn't care if you pirated Photoshop. If you weren't making money with it, they'd rather you know it than something else (maybe gimp?). Having mindshare (uggh, I hate that word) definitely helps when it comes time to get the credit card out for tools you'll need for a paying project.

Re: Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

#22

Post by toomuchtodo »

angersock wrote: post #14
dandrews wrote: post #3

Redhat puts a lot of effort into building its enterprise distro. Yeah, it's mostly out of FOSS parts, I get that, but distros are nontrivial and costly undertakings. I've always had a bit of a problem with Centos, which as I understand takes Redhat's work, removes the proprietary parts, and redistributes for free-as-in-beer - perhaps depriving Redhat of a sale or two. It's not exactly theft, but not sporting either.…

It seems that Centos is almost an embrace-and-extinguish play--you get folks familiar with the Centos (read: RHEL) way of doing things, and then when things get professional it is a no-brainer to pick up a normal RHEL license. It's a pretty good thing, actually.

I wouldn't call it an embrace-and-extenguish play. Its just an upgrade path. No one forces me to take my car in for an oil change, but I'd rather pay someone else than get under the car in my condo parking lot and wrestle with the oil filter, etc for 30-60 minutes.

Re: Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

#25

Post by redhat-reallyp »

This is a content-free article. It boils down to "we've committed to CentOS, so that's what we prefer to use."

The claim that "in our experience, [Debian/Ubuntu] are not nearly as stable or trouble-free as RHEL/CentOS" says more about their lesser experience with those systems than it does about Debian or Ubuntu.

Re: Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

#26

Post by luikore »

"Stable" sometimes means people are more familiar with the bugs than bug-fixes... Conservative tech choices: I'm only familiar with X so I don't choose Y like you guys who are familiar with both. -- This is OK because the benefit of better tech doesn't matter so much for their business.

Re: Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

#27

Post by omtinez »

luikore wrote: post #26

"Stable" sometimes means people are more familiar with the bugs than bug-fixes... Conservative tech choices: I'm only familiar with X so I don't choose Y like you guys who are familiar with both. -- This is OK because the benefit of better tech doesn't matter so much for their business.

For a second there I thought that you were gonna start another Wayland flamewar...

Re: Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

#28

Post by mercurial »

SwellJoe wrote: post #18
languagehacker wrote: post #10

I see no discussion of package management in here, which is kind of a bummer. My experience with yum has been pretty crummy and I don't think it's improved over the last several years. That alone should drive someone developing software away from working on that platform. Centos & Red Hat are great if you have a single package you need to deploy to a machine and all the dependencies are already there or easy to pull…

Just a counter point: I love yum. It is, by far, my favorite package management option. Managing yum repos is a breeze vs every other option (the toolchain is one command, vs a half dozen commands and hours of manual labor to setup a new repo for Debian/Ubuntu). I also prefer it from the end user perspective. apt-get is fine, and I wouldn't be at all unhappy with servers running Debian, but yum is my preference.

As a Debian user, I agree that you can't beat the ease of setting up a repo on RHEL/CentOS. On the other hand, I'm not fond of the .spec format and working with yum is not particularly pleasant. Not to mention that Debian ships with a lot more packages.

Re: Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

#29

Post by krakensden »

dandrews wrote: post #3

Redhat puts a lot of effort into building its enterprise distro. Yeah, it's mostly out of FOSS parts, I get that, but distros are nontrivial and costly undertakings. I've always had a bit of a problem with Centos, which as I understand takes Redhat's work, removes the proprietary parts, and redistributes for free-as-in-beer - perhaps depriving Redhat of a sale or two. It's not exactly theft, but not sporting either.…

CentOS users are primarily deadweight loss- they couldn't afford to pay RedHat if it didn't exist. On the other hand, its existence, popularity, and the fact that it's identical to RHEL except for the logos means that people make sure their programs work on RHEL.

I have never worked at RedHat, but it was founded by and is run by Linux and GPL enthusiasts. Unencumbered redistribution of the software is the goddamn point.

Re: Tech Choices - Why we use Centos instead of Debian / Ubuntu

#30

Post by krakensden »

nsmartt wrote: post #2

> [W]e need reliability and predictability over a large variety of systems over many years. We need strong support by most of the world's software vendors and open source project. We need documentation, tools, and global resources for the most commonly used systems. In which of these does Debain fall short?

Redhat has more documentation than Debian, and their ability to maintain older kernels is second to none.

Debian has a much bigger packaging ecosystem, and Ubuntu's popularity means that more and more things just never get tested on RH-derivatives.

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