On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 13:21, John A. Goebel wrote:
> Well, I don't think that the corperate model is a great development
> environment. It's too centralized and your at the control/whim of someone
> else's decisions that might not always be based on good technical criteria. As
> I said in a the previous mail, the time to a fix is long, the feedback loop
> from RH is confused (I can list a number of instances to you directly if you
> wish), and I believe that RH isn't working on some other levels.

It sounds like you should take a look at the Debian distribution:
http://www.debian.org

They are very non-corporate, and are the closest to being Open Source
purists of any organization that I know of.  They have a nice product,
even if the testing that they do on the stable version takes about 3
years.  Apt-get is one of the finest package-management tools I've used.

I use Red Hat and it's derivatives, though, because the releases come
faster and because the big expensive applications that we buy can be set
up on RH with less work on my part.  I get paid to support my users,
though, and the only time that I get worry about who is providing my
tools is when they don't fit my users' needs.

> Desired outcomes:
> 
> 1. Consideration of a patch repository that we could contribute fixes for
> consideration by Fermi. They will differ from RHEL often, but they will address
> specific problems.

I don't speak for the SL folks, but I can say that in their shoes I
would be reluctant to do very much of this because it's a lot of extra
work.

The first goal of many of the RHEL clones is compatibility when RHEL --
because we often run applications that cost thousands of dollars per
year.  When you have an application like that, you buy hardware and
software to match the application -- not the other way around.

Redhat has a nice tool for communicating with the community about bugs:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com
Sure, it's not a perfect system, but it seems to match my users' needs
and my own needs very well.


So, if you're feeling anti-corporate, I highly recommend Debian.  If
you're running an expensive application that requires RHEL, buy RHEL. 
If you need something like RHEL with a the usual Linux cost ($0) and
support (this listserv), SL and WBEL have been great for me so far.

-Luke

-- 
Luke Scharf, Systems Administrator
Virginia Tech Aerospace and Ocean Engineering