Can we please stop emails like this? It's getting really annoying. This

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On 07/26/2011 11:54 PM, Yasha Karant wrote:

> 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.