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

[Digimer]

On 10/23/2012 07:47 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> | 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).

I've filed many bugs on rhbz from centos systems and they were addressed
most of the time, too (feel free to search rhbz for "digimer" to see
many examples, if you care to).

>From my discussions with various Red Hat people, I hear repeatedly that
they like CentOS. CentOS users today might become Red Hat customers
tomorrow.

Like you said though, priority always goes to paying customers and
rightly so.

-- 
Digimer
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