Can we please stop emails like this? It's getting really annoying. This
is a technical support mailing list.

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.