Fedora vs RHEL

[Craig White]

On Mon, 2013-04-15 at 17:12 +0100, Tethys wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 3:22 AM, Thomas Cameron
> <thomas.cameron at camerontech.com> wrote:
> 
> >> The annoying thing is, I'd *gladly* pay Red Hat for support, if they'd
> >> charge me a sensible amount
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > Horse feathers.
> >
> > You can get a personal, developer subscription for $99:
> >
> > https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/developers/rhel_developer_suite.html
> >
> > Alternatively, you can get a self-support subscription for commercial use
> > for $349:
> 
> You appear to have not read my message. I want support. The developer
> subscription explicitly states "No support is provided with this
> product subscription". Not that I'd have been able to find it on the
> web site in the first place, had you not pointed me at it. Equally,
> the $349 suscription also comes without support. For me, those two
> options provide precisely zero benefit over CentOS.
> 
> > RHEL does not start at thousands of dollars, that's just false.
> 
> You do appear to be correct on that. I'm sure that when I last looked,
> it was going to cost me 4 figures to get support. But it does look
> like I can do so for $799/year. My point still stands. That's more
> than I, as an individual, and also most small businesses can justify.
----
There have been some items already offered but I would like to add a few
more considerations.

1. The access to get day of release packages. This means that security
updates don't wait for someone down the line to rebuild packages. This
means that a new release doesn't take weeks or months before it becomes
available (remembering that CentOS 6.0 release was about 8 months behind
the RHEL 6.0 release - in fact, RHEL 6.1 was released before CentOS 6
was available.

2. Real binary compatibility - it is after all, the genuine product. I
applaud CentOS and others for all their efforts to generate packages as
close as possible to binary compatibility but the first time you find
out that some 3rd party software package says installation on CentOS is
not supported, you then realize that there is a difference, even if it
is seemingly arbitrary. 

3. $799 a year for support is more than a small business can justify? As
a consultant, I wouldn't want a customer unwilling to pay $800 a year
for support - enough said.

4. It supports the ecosystem. There is a cost to developing and
packaging Linux and Red Hat is a public company and does have a
responsibility to its stockholders to earn a profit. It seems reasonable
to support those efforts.

Yes, I would agree that if you can function within the self-help arena
of Fedora or CentOS or Scientific Linux or ?? then the free options seem
to have achieved equity but only if you choose to ignore the 4 issues I
laid out above.

Craig


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