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

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Digimer <lists-5ZoueyuiTZiw5LPnMra/2Q at public.gmane.org>

| It's not that companies feel that RHEL is the only Linux distro. It's
| that Red Hat the support company is the best at providing support to
| large businesses. Companies pay Red Hat for access to timely updates and
| for their support infrastructure.
| 
| Those who don't need or don't want to pay for that can use CentOS and
| get 100% the same software without paying any money.

True.

I have found that there is some Red Hat support for CentOS!  We CentOS
users can file bugzilla reports and they do get addressed.  Of course
the service level isn't guaranteed.

For example, I found a RHEL 5 kind-of-bug in the kernel.  It
apparently (by the number of bug reports) only hit me.  It appeared
that Red Hat would have patched their kernel to fix it but I suggested
that it was unnecessary and unwise since the bug fix might break more
than one system and I already knew how to (un)patch the kernel to fix my 
problem.

(The cause of the bug was that Red Hat selectively backports kernel 
patches.  One caused the kernel to ignore one of the ACPI tables on my 
computer as nonsense.  That's because it expected another patch (not 
backported) to filter the entries.)

Note: Red Hat did not figure out the problem.  I did, and involved an 
Intel ACPI maintainer (my fault: I reported it as a upstream kernel bug 
when it was not).  But 20 years ago I spent a small fortune on Sun support 
and got less (Sun ignored a bug report in which I even told them where the 
serial driver had to be fixed).
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