I am posting the item below not to start any "flame wars" nor to be any
mythological creature from Middle Earth or anywhere else, but rather to
put forward what I have found from one "professional" analysis of the
RHEL situation -- and not an analysis for which I have sufficient data
to support. In the article below, the conclusion "push" seems to mean
that either RHEL clone is the same. Rather than simply including a URL,
I am posting the entire article for any later historical archiving --
unlike academic journals and articles that exist for posterity, much of
the commentary of the computer technology areas seems very ephemeral.
Nonetheless, when RHEL 7 and its clones come about, there may be
interest in examining the historical commentaries, just as there is in
discussing any evolving technology (e.g., HEP detectors). For my
personal choice for X86-64 systems that need to support 64 bit
operations, I have switched to SL 6 ; for systems that can live with
IA-32 operations (e.g., my laptop and other work computers), I am
staying with CentOS 5.x for now -- when these switch to RHEL 6.x, I
suspect I will be switching to SL 6 simply because I do not want to
support multiple environments for production.
From URL:
http://lostinopensource.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/the-clone-wars-centos-vs-scientific-linux/
The Clone Wars – CentOS vs. Scientific Linux
2011/07/13 jduncan
With Linux in the Enterprise, RHEL is king. Sure there are people who
love and use Debian, or Suse. I would imagine that if you looked hard
enough you could likely find somebody who’s using Slackware or Gentoo in
a business somewhere. But I think it can safely be said that RHEL is
currently the dominant enterprise Linux distribution. Then, of course,
there are the clones. If you so choose, you can forgo Shadowman’s
Support team and either compile the freely available Redhat Source RPMs,
or choose to use a community-supported RHEL clone. Currently, the two
most popular of those clone distributions are CEntOS (Community
Enterprise Operating System) and Scientific Linux (SL).
So if you have decided to not utilize Redhat support, which of these
downstream clones is the better choice? With the recent (much delayed)
release of CentOS 6.0 in the past week, many companies are looking to
move up to the RHEL 6.0 family of operating systems. But is CentOS still
the right choice? Being a primarily CentOS shop, and being more than a
little OCD myself, I decided to compare the two in as practical as a
manner as I could. Below are the results.
Maturity:
When it’s running on production, you don’t have time to wait on a tiny
community to figure out how to backport in some obscure cross-site
scripting vulnerability in an even more obscure module in your favorite
language, even if you’re part of that community. An enterprise operating
system needs to have an active and robust community to support itself,
paid or not.
CentOS has been around for a long time and has a huge following. There
have been murmurs of late about the core contributors getting tired, and
the delay in CentOS 6.0 was the evidence. I don’t believe that fully,
but I do believe the project could do with some fresh blood and possibly
some new ideas. But I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon.
Scientific Linux hasn’t been around nearly as long, at least on the
scale that it is currently enjoying. The community, however, is vibrant,
and is backed by several large research labs such as CERN and Fermilab.
Big plusses.
Advantage: Push
Workflow:
In Open Source software, the process is often times as important as the
product. While I don’t believe there is anything massively different in
how these 2 projects are doing what the do, SL is certainly better at
talking about it and making the community aware of how it’s working.
This presentation(PDF) is a pretty great one, even if it’s a little
dated. SL Community, I’d love to see an update, for the record.
Advantage: Scientific Linux
RHEL Compatability:
This used to be a much larger difference, as late as version 5.x.
Scientific made some pretty large changes to the RHEL repository
structure, and added in some packages of their own. CentOS has always
been as faithful a clone as was possible at the time. This is largely
cleaned up in version 6.0, with the extra SL packages moving out to
external repos, but much like the workflow advantage above, perception
is still a strong influence.
Why is this important? Well, like lots of people, we’re a mixed
RHEL/CentOS shop. It just makes life SO MUCH EASIER.
Advantage: CentOS
Mirror Speed and Availability:
I couldn’t find any perceivable difference in this category. Both
networks are robust and highly available.
Advantage: Push
Community Support:
This is one of the most important factors when adopting a distribution,
and sadly the one answer I’m not able to fully answer. I utilize CentOS
support all the time, via the web, forums, and IRC. I’ve only
occasionally sought support for SL, and this was way back in version
5.2. So I’m not really qualified to answer this one fully right now.
However, I see active forums off of their home page and a 10 minute
visit to the IRC channel on freenode saw plenty of conversation for a
Tuesday night. I don’t think SL would have grown so much without good
community support.
Advantage: Push
Lifecycle Support:
This was the one that surprised me.
As expected, CentOS mirrors the RHEL lifecycles. RHEL/CentOS 5.x will be
supported through 2014. They haven’t updated their wiki yet, but I’m
sure 6.x will be the same, with a full 7-year lifecycle.
Scientific only plans on a three year lifecycle. But on their forums
they also mention supporting things in theory as long as Redhat does. So
I’m a little confused on this one.
While I don’t typically plan on using the same OS for longer than 3
years, if it ain’t broke, I’m certainly not fixing it.
Advantage: CentOS
So those are my thoughts on the situation. Scientific Linux is
definitely on the rise, and CentOS certainly needs to air out themselves
a little. But at least with version 6.0, we’re still going to be going
with our tried and true CentOS. I’m just not comfortable enough, yet,
with the Scientific Linux community, mainly because they still don’t
quite know how long they plan to keep their products alive. Out of this
look at RHEL clones, though, the single biggest thing I’ve discovered is
that I’m going to have to keep evaluating this choice down the road.
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