A vendor professional systems person whom I know has been requested to 

install SL 6 on a system that is being configured for us.  In a 

discussion with him, he gave me the opinion that his (vendor's) 

experience with SL is that it is "buggier" than CentOS, and CentOS often 

"fixes" RHEL bugs.  I did not understand this in that the base 

distribution without extensions of both CentOS and SL is RHEL with only 

the artwork being changed in the sense that all RedHat logos or use of 

RedHat licensed-for-fee binary distribution repositories have been 

removed, replaced by the appropriate entities for the distribution in 

question.  Red Hat is required to release full source from which the 

entire distribution can be built for personal use -- but not 

redistributed without removal of the RedHat copyrighted logos, etc. -- 

under the GPL, Linux licenses, etc.



Nonetheless, he is of the opinion that CentOS does the best job of 

testing the distribution in pre-CentOS release -- although both start 

from the RHEL sources.  I commented that SL is professionally supported 

by a joint Fermilab-CERN effort with paid professionals doing the work, 

not the more or less volunteer organization of CentOS, just as the Red 

Hat source is developed by paid professionals.  Although the future is 

unclear for Fermilab with the imminent decommissioning of the Fermilab 

accelerator, this professional status currently is correct.



I fully understand that individuals may disagree with the opinion, and 

that specific organizations may have official statements that disagree 

with the opinion -- I only am interested in the "facts".  For anyone on 

this list who is familiar with the post-RH release handling and 

qualification/testing procedures of RHEL source by either or both 

organizations, or by the Princeton University distribution of RHEL, 

direct comments would be appreciated.  Is there any factual data, 

including procedural differences, to support the opinion that I have 

been given?



Yasha Karant