[ Sorry for the delay in replying; as I've said elsewhere, I've been busy... ]
On Sat, 3 Apr 2004, at 4:18am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I've been a fan of Redhat in the past because it was A) fairly current, B) > easy to download, C) easy to keep up to date and D) well supported by 3rd > party vendors. [...] > RHEL fails with B. I also feel that Redhat isn't going to fix this ... ... especially as Red Hat Software considers it a feature, not a bug. > WBEL can fail by not being as complete as RHEL ... Well, as long as RHS keeps to their pledge to be fully Open Source whenever they have the ability to do so, WBEL should be an almost exact clone of RHEL. The only things missing should be the Red Hat trademarks. Of course, if RHS does a complete switch-a-roo and starts shipping major amounts of non-free software (in the FSF sense) in RHEL, that would change things. My crystal ball is still in the shop, so I cannot predict if RHS will be doing that, or what the reaction would be if they did. > ... and D as most 3rd party vendors won't support it Well, it depends on the vendor, and what level of "support" you want. Many vendors don't really care about Free Software or not, or what you run, so long as they can work with it. Vendors like RHEL because they can work with it. It's got a nice, long release cycle; a reasonable "standard" configuration; and a company (RHS) which they can lean on. All this stuff matters for development, QA, SCM, and that sort of thing. That sort of thing doesn't care if your /etc/issue banner says "Red Hat" or "White Box". So, if your vendor just wants to get things done, WBEL should work just fine. OTOH, if your vendor is the type to make an issue out of WBEL vs RHEL, just because they can, that's an issue. In general, I don't like vendors who pull stunts like that, so my stance is to explain to said vendor that if they keep it up, I will be finding another vendor. If that's not an option, that means you're already being held hostage by your vendor, so you should be used to IT extortion. Pony up for the RHEL subscription, in that case. :-) -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do | | not represent the views or policy of any other person or organization. | | All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
