On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 20:08, Alain Reguera wrote:
> The arguments they gave to me were, what happen if redhat close the
> base packages, they don't have to release them, but just to the buyer,
> and we can't buy the distro, there are others distros like debian that
> is totally free, and without dependencies of proprietary industry.
>
I looked briefly at Debian when RH dropped support for their older
products. Things in Debian were different enough to be a fairly
significan re-learning experience for me that I did not really want to
face the change.
I also found Debian Stable a bit too long in the tooth as far as
software packages ... it felt like I was migrating from RHL 7.3 to 6.2.
Thankfully Whitebox appeared about the time I was thinking I really had
to make a decision and that worked out quite well and upgrading that to
CentOS once it looked like Whitebox was starting to have troubles was
easy.
On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 21:44 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Redhat has has been fanatical about observing the GPL on upstream
> packages, applying it to their own their own code and making
> source available in RPM form even for packages with licenses
> that don't require it. While it is always good practice to
> have a 'plan B' to cover the possibility of a preferred product
> becoming unavailable, there is no reason to expect things
> to change and not much point in switching to a different
> version ahead of time.
I would agree that with this ... unless you are about to embark on
implementing dozens/hundreds of new systems where it may make some sense
to switch gears, it does not make sense to switch at this point.
Frankly fedora core and legacy updates would probably be a better fall-
back position if you are not interested in a commercial distro and you
are used to the way Redhat distros work. I've been satisfied with using
Fedora Legacy to keep a couple RHL 7.3 boxes updated that I have not
seen the need to upgrade to something else.
If your running Centos 4 FC 3 would be an easier migration than anything
else I can think of. The downside is FC 3 is it will never come with
newer boot disks to install on the latest hardware (neither will Debian
stable) unless you make a custom installer disk. Also FC3 was recently
handed off to Legacy and it takes a couple weeks before they have things
in place to start pushing out updates.
Regards,
Paul Berger
