This might seem like an odd question, but I'd like to hear your opinions
on the following if you've experienced something similar.

I'm a graduate student at a research university, and I also serve as the
de facto system admin of my lab because I'm the geekiest of the bunch
when it comes to to this sort of thing. Over a year ago, I moved most of
our heterogeneous collection of systems (running older RedHat and Fedora
Core releases) over to a common SL release, because it was easier on me
to administer them this way; plus code compiled on one machine could be
thrown into another and "just work", with no niggling issues.

All was (very) well. So far.

Recently, the computer support people at the department have been
drafting a security policy for what OSs they allow running on
departmental computers, and long story short, they list the upstream
vendor's product[1]---and not SL---as an allowed Linux based OS. I tried
explaining to them the binary and source equivalence of SL and this
product, but they are not familiar with GNU/Linux, and I haven't gotten
very far.

They are offering to obtain licenses from the upstream vendor (at very
reasonable academic prices) for all the machines, but this isn't about
the money. I am not keen on taking working, fine-tuned machines and
wiping them out to install what is essentially identical software all
over again.

I was hoping if someone around had experienced anything like this and
had advice on how I could better make my case.

Harish


[1] The reason, I assume, is that the upstream vendor's product is a
recognised brand.