[TriLUG] Redhat's Success Under New Model

[Magnus]

On Thursday, November 6, 2003, at 05:29  PM, Scott Chilcote wrote:

> I wonder if most geeks have moved on to some other distribution(s) in 
> a year or two, whether there will still be a strong following for 
> Redhat in corporate circles.  Their boxed set was visible in 
> bookstores and software stores, too, often by itself with no other 
> distributions present.

The many changes in Red Hat's model over the last year or so have 
caused enough confusion among my superiors that I'm looking for 
something more predictable, like Debian, but with the great enterprise 
tools that Red Hat brings to bear.

For companies that *want* external support, they may be very happy with 
the RHEL model.  More power to them.  It's caused enough damage to the 
credibility of Linux in the last two companies I've worked for that I'm 
actively working on a fork of RHEL ( http://www.caosity.org ) and when 
that fork is complete I'll either stick with that project or spin my 
own distro off of it, keeping only the packages I care about and 
dropping the rest.  There is enough demand for this now that I don't 
think I'll have trouble finding people who are interested in helping 
(I've already heard privately from a few folks here and this is just 
one small group of Linux admins).  I know there are some other projects 
attempting to do the same thing, but cAos is almost definitely going to 
release a Free fork of RHEL 2.1 *and* RHEL 3.0 this month, so I figure 
it's best to collaborate with them on that short-term goal and see 
where it goes from there.

cAos1-el:  RHEL 2.1 minus non-free packages or Red Hat trademarked 
artwork/logos
cAos1-gp:  cAos1-el at its core, plus up to date versions of all the 
packages (and then some).
cAos2-el:  RHEL 3 minus non-free packages or Red Hat trademarked 
artwork/logos
cAos2-gp:  cAos2-el at its core, plus up to date versions of all the 
packages, 2.6 kernel, and then some.

The version 1 & version 2 branches are being developed in tandem.  The 
first three of four items listed are *very* close to releasing ISO's.  
cAos2-gp is much further out.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink 
what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain