> > > If you're running a production system, I wouldn't do it on a > > > semi-supported distro. This isn't really meant as a dig, but the truth > > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > I will have to very strongly disagree here, calling a community supported > distro semi supported would be greatly inaccurate. It would also degrade > the open-source community's ability in regard to producing code and > supporting it. Redhat relies a great deal on the community to provide what > they provide for you (the end user) as support, however, the community is > also open (very open) for requests from you, the end user. Redhat does not > own the community, you can use it too.
What I mean is that FC is Red Hat's entry level software. Even Red Hat sees it like that. It's meant for people who can't/won't afford (or don't need) their retail distro. It isn't community supported in the way Debian or Gentoo are, it wants to be, but it isn't, can't, and won't be. But it also isn't a retail product in the same way that Red Hat Advanced Server or SLES (or even other versions of Suse) are. Personally, I'd be nervous of the no-man's land that it's in. For evidence of this, just look at it's history. It exists simply because Red Hat couldn't make a go of it as a retail product. It would be pretty hard to argue that it isn't a Red Hat product - albiet arms length. And as such, it exists for the sole purpose of feeding customers to Red Hat. Otherwise Red Hat wouldn't associate themselves with it. They wouldn't have promoted it, nor would they use it (eventually) for their retail products. The most honest way to see FC is as a Red Hat beta. That's not bad, and it's certainly also true with Suse pro compared to SLES, but the difference is that Suse will stand behind Suse Pro, whereas Red Hat will not stand behind FC. It simply means that FC is unique in that it lives in a no-man's-land, somewhere between being a debian community supported distro, and being a Suse corporately supported distro. So FC can't really control it's own destiny (Dump RPM, Replace Gnome with KDE, Switch to YAST, etc) because it exists to feed Red Hat, and therefore it will, by necessity, align itself with Red Hat's corporate goals. In my view, this limits the freedoms of FC, and therefore, limits the level of support it will ever attain. And that is inherent in it's design. I'm not saying that it's no good. I'm saying that it will never have full community support (because it doesn't aspire to be a community driven distro), and it will never have real corporate support (because the corporation driving it has no interest in supporting it -- as evidenced by the fact that it was dropped as a product.) So building a company on it is, in my opinion, risky. And I'd further back that up by pointing out that he's already having problems with this distro, and the solutions he now has in place are workarounds -- at best. I'm not slagging the community, I use Gentoo corporately, and have relied on community support historically. Ditto for IPcop. But in both cases, the community drives development of the distro. That is not the case with FC. Community support is important, but the community only has partial control over FC, so there's FAR less desire for the community to support it. That's just my 2 cents, and I've been historically open about my biases. But I don't think any of this is unfair, misleading, or dishonest. Kev. _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
