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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 12:35:10PM -0400, Digimer wrote:
> 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.

I guess a big problem for Debian users is that no one knows how many
Debian systems are out there.  Redhat knows exactly how many support
contracts are active.

It is quite possible there are more Debian systems, but no one will
ever know.  I suppose it is also possible those running Debian wouldn't
be nearly as interested in such proprietary addons anyhow.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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