And just like the antitrust against AT&T, after going around the block for a few years we are back at the start, did that AT&T thing work out well in your opinion?
The only reason I ended up on RH was that I bought a book about Linux at Chapters and RH-5.something was included on a CD-ROM.
We were an HP-UX (10.x) and HP-MPE/iX shop at the time and the cost of support from HP was getting horrendous. Not to mention that every little tool just cost and cost and cost. I remember buying the C++ compiler from HP for just over $4k. And that could only be used on one server. Anything remotely like Subversion or Git was priced at $10s of K. If I recall correctly, you even had to pay for their pre-built versions of Sendmail and NCSA web server. I might be wrong on these two. They may not have been available from HP at any price.
RH looked like an inexpensive alternative and, all things considered, it proved to be exactly that. It ran on i86 hardware and it was dirt cheap, as in free.
I think that since we ditched the HP9000s and cancelled our last HP service contract in 2001 we have saved about $450k in support costs with HP alone and another $200k or so to third parties. Does not quite pay for me, but as I would be here anyway it is all gravy.
I cannot imagine having the stomach to even ask for a quote for something like Asterisk and FreePBX from a major vendor. Much less for a price on the entire contents of our virtualised and fully duplicated stack running our internal email, fax, edi and on-line business applications, all of which are either open source or in-house built.
I do not believe that the cycle of RH to RHEL via the rebuilders is quite the same thing as the breakup of the telephone company. CentOS is unlikely to ever be ‘priced’ as its community has, through its very existence, expressed a considerable aversion to direct expenses relating to software. As to what it might mean in other ways, I have no clue.
I Agree.
What do you mean exactly with “last time I looked this non-CentOS based distro is based on 2.6 but Debian has used 3.2 for three years now”?
You were speaking about Linux Kernel, right?
I always thought that “back-porting habit” (if any) solved (at least partially) the fact that CentOS (or other similar Linux distributions) still runs on 2.6 Kernels.
Isn’t it?
Where one to compare the .config file of the any two kernels one would see the changes/additions.