Views from an Red Hat -> Ubuntu -> Fedora migrator

Digimer lists-5ZoueyuiTZiw5LPnMra/2Q at public.gmane.org
Tue Oct 23 16:35:10 UTC 2012


On 10/23/2012 12:30 PM, William Muriithi wrote:
>>>> That matches my experience as well and also demonstrates nicely why
>>>> the redhat model works.  They're a value add making money selling a
>>>> "free" product.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately a lot of companies think RHEL is the only linux
> distribution
>>> and hence won't even talk to you if you try to run their software on
>>> anything else.
>>
>> Yes, this is a shame, I agree.  The world (I was going to say
>> "computing world" but I think it extends beyond that) owes Debian a
>> huge debt and it's not always or even often recognized.  It is quite
>> frustrating to get .tar.gz or .rpm downloads but rarely a .deb.  I(t's
>> also frustrating when the .rpm is for some ancient RHEL version too.
>> :( )
>>
> May be we should blame the network effect but sometimes its even more weird.
> 
> Case in point, Cisco SSL vpn client is Java based yet they made it RedHat
> specific. I thought Java is platform independent.
> 
> Other cases that have left me flabbergasted,  Vertica, Oracle or even Dell
> will not support their application on Scientific Linux despite them being
> the same binaries as RHEL.

This is incorrect. SL does not strive for binary compatibility with
RHEL. So far as I know, only CentOS strives for this. It's a major
reason why SL was able to push out v6.0 months before CentOS was able
to. The CentOS folks needed to effectively reverse-engineer the Red Hat
build environment.

I am not one to defend either Oracle, Dell or Cisco (quite the
contrary), but in this case I can understand their reasoning. You don't
know what corner-case bugs might slip in with RHEL derivatives that are
not 100% binary compatible. So to support distros like SL, they would
have to spend a fair bit of time and money to test against them (and
repeat for every update). Why bother when there is a compatible, free
alternative in CentOS?

As for Debian support, I suspect it's more a question of market share.
If you're selling a product aimed at enterprise, and if the bulk of your
potential client base runs OS A, why spend a lot of money to support the
smaller OS B option? These are fairly simple business decisions and do
not reflect on the quality of OS B.

-- 
Digimer
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