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