Two comments.

I am not pursuing the IBM FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) marketing and business strategy that made IBM the dominant business, accounting, and the like, computer systems service, software, and hardware supplier in the USA for many years.

The research and scientific market was dominated by DEC (since absorbed by other for profit corporations), Control Data, Cray, and Sun (also absorbed, currently Oracle as I recall).  Of these, only Sun was strongly unix (BSD that was SunOS then Solaris and then left BSD for the descendant of ATT System V Release 4 -- the old "original" ATT of unix, C, C++, etc., not the current ATT that bought the name, etc., but not Murray Hill Bell Labs, etc.).  Linux is a relatively new "unix", but the history is irrelevant to this reality -- most of the major servers run Linux or on a open systems "bare iron" hypervisor for "cloud services" that shares much history with other open systems.

Indeed, this list did suffice for support -- the personnel from SL at Fermilab would reply with some detail, but not for those who need detailed key-stroke "hold the hand and fingers" support.

I understand the current for-profit business arguments that IBM will continue to make CentOS viable and stable.  I also do not trust these for the long term unless there are some strong fiscal reasons to do so for the long term (e.g., a change in taxation policy and enforcement).

Second, the issue of support.  "My" university has changed dramatically under the current campus President.  Even under the previous campus administrations, the only supported entities were those for administrative computing controlled by the administration and that has, and had, no academic freedom.  Worthless for any research that interested me.  Most of these functions have been outsourced at this time.  The administrators in these areas have no background in science or engineering, but rather "management".  I am not deprecating anyone, merely putting things into perspective.  There is no internal support at my campus for academic freedom curiosity-directed disciplinary research, with some support for some persons to secure external funding.  My funding to do any of this was external, not internal.

Yasha Karant

On 2/21/20 5:49 PM, Mark Rousell wrote:
[log in to unmask]"> Andrew Z wrote on 2/21/20 1:57 PM:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">
> It is odd that you have no budget to support critical systems for your
> department,  Yasha.
>
> What if you power servers down and see how "critical " they indeed are? And if
> they are not - then get fedora and be done with it.

I don't think Yasha said that he has no budget, did he, only that he in effect has a limited budget. Why is it limited? Could it be because it was possible to do what was needed within that limited budget?