On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Les Mikesell<lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Ian Murray wrote:
>
>>
>> Part of my professional work is risk assessing system upgrades. I have
>> been doing so long now that everything I professionally do is considered
>> from a risk perspective. Maybe those of us that have to assess risk on a
>> daily basis understand what I am on about and the ones that don't.... don't.
>
> Exactly. I once built things on AT&T Unix and hardware. Nice big
> company with plenty of resources, dedicated, bright developers, a
> history of following through many releases, and then out of the blue it
> was gone. Dell was the next choice since it was pretty much the same
> code base as AT&T SysVr4 with some extra drivers. Then when Windows95
> came out, Dell dropped it and pretended they'd never heard of unix. (I
> understood much later after reading their transcripts in the Microsoft
> antitrust case...) Then there was Red Hat which didn't really work at
> the time but had the redeeming features that bugs you reported sometimes
> got fixed and you didn't have to count licenses - and then that went
> away too. So yes, I'm paranoid. There aren't many survivors in this
> business. Hmmm, I left out an interesting interlude with BSDI in there
> somewhere but they were killed by a lawsuit.
I look at CentOS' track record. The foundation has consistently put
out a good, solid distribution with regular updates. When that
changes, then I'll worry.
But, as you've shown above, there are no absolute guarantees -- so, at
some point you've got to go with your gut. Even if CentOS was shaky
(which it's not) you still have Scientific Linux and Red Hat -- so
it's not like you're putting all your eggs in one basket. From a "risk
management" standpoint I think CentOS is a pretty good bet.
--
RonB -- Using CentOS 5.3
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