One major thing in Jeremiah's comment really stood out to me:

In a perfect world I'd even suggest that RHEL is treated as a specific RHEL_derivitive, just like SL or Cent.

I'm not sure how it would make any sense to treat the original product (RHEL) exactly the same as the two major derivatives (CentOS and Scientific Linux).  The notion of treating a thing as a derivative of itself  just seems...odd.  There's naturally going to be something of a barrier to entry when one uses something developed for one thing and expects it to flawlessly work for that thing's derivatives.  RHT engineering and development have contributed significant time and resources to SSG to help ensure the guidance and content work perfectly with their product.  They cannot (and reasonably wouldn't) attempt to guarantee the supportability and applicability of SSG for derivative offerings, as the CentOS and SL dev teams could - at any point - alter something from the upstream.


On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 9:51 AM, Jeremiah Jahn <jeremiah@goodinassociates.com> wrote:
I understand the no government certification thing and not going to
argue with it. But as someone who uses Scientific linux most of the
time. I'd like to propose that we either add sl and cent or a generic
rhel derivative, perhaps by simply using a tailoring var. In a perfect
world I'd even suggest that RHEL is treated as a specific
RHEL_derivitive, just like SL or Cent. But I can only imagine the pain
that would cause.   I think what would be nice is if we make some
centos and sl generic profiles, and fix the platform check in the OVAL
definition. In a way that the derivative producers  wouldn't have to
mess with, but a specific user/ admin could with a simple tailoring
file.

The problem as I see it right now, is that there is a pretty big
barrier to entry for admins of derivative systems.  Which means that
there won't be a lot of eyes on the guide except for the die hards,
who also happen to have the time.  And that doesn't seem like a good
long term thing.

 I also get the sense that some of this cent os stuff is changing a
"little" bit  with RH pulling cent in under it's wing, but they'd be
foolish to get Cent certified in any official way. If you want true
certification, you should probably pay.

just my 2 cents,
-jj-


On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 6:09 PM, Shawn Wells <shawn@redhat.com> wrote:
> On 8/15/14, 6:30 PM, Greg Elin wrote:
>> Shawn,
>>
>> Really interesting points.
>>
>> Can you also speak to Fedora vs RHEL and why Fedora is included?
>>
>> I think a CentOs generic is a smart approach.
>
>
> We've been very careful to not claim any gov baseline compliance with
> the Fedora content. Currently there is a generic/common profile:
>
> https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/tree/master/Fedora/input/profiles
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