On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 12:22:28PM -0500, Brian Mathis wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 11:45 AM, Zdenek <zdenek.w@xxxxx> wrote:
> > Hello all.
> >
> > Does anybody have experience with pushing CentOS in enterprise?
> >
> > I have the following situation. I tried to promote CentOS to local
> > bank. They have now a couple of Gentoo-based systems and I tried to
> > explain them that CentOS is much better option for enterprises.
> >
> > IT department is interested in stability of the system, so they are
> > ready to give CentOS a try. But the problem came from management
> > and information security division.
> >
> > That guys look much affected by FUD created by M$. They tell the
> > story like "you can not rely on this open source, it is built by
> > just few community geeks, you never know what will happen if the
> > developer will be hit by bus tomorrow" and so on. They especially
> > refer to the last year FUD story published at ZDNet
> > (http://goo.gl/y0LBi). So, IT guys are allowed to use open source
> > only if they can prove that it has stable community and transparent
> > development and build process they can reproduce on their own if
> > necessary.
> >
> > I guess, I'm not the first who encounter this issue. Could you
> > share your experience how to deal with it? Are there any public
> > resources that can be used as proofs of CentOS stability?
> >
> > -- Zdenek
>
>
> This sounds a lot more like a religious war from the people who think
> that using Gentoo is the "right" way to do things because it's pure
> from source, etc... The fact that they already have Gentoo means
> they are not opposed to Open Source per se, just that they seem to
> look at Redhat as the "MS of the Linux world", and have some kind of
> prejudice against that.
>
> The only way to combat this view is to highlight all the problems of
> maintaining things from source code, and to show the benefits of a
> standard platform. Be prepared for a high amount of dismissiveness,
> attitude, and flat out accusations that "maintaining from source
> isn't that hard and if you can't do it you're obviously not qualified
> for the job". This is a sure sign of an amateur sysadmin or someone
> who thinks a sysadmin is just a person too dumb to be a programmer.
> As for the standard platform thing, just look at what all major
> vendors support for Linux, and you can bet that Redhat is #1 on the
> list.
>
> As for concerns about the community going away, it's quite easy to
> point out that all commercial software also has this risk, and that
> risk could actually be higher since they have to maintain profits.
> And since when can you build any commercial software from source if
> the company goes out of business?
Anyone who advocates maintaining from source has simply never
administered more than a handful of machines at a time.
Great way to learn, but impractical for hundreds to thousands of
machines.
Ray
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