On 2/22/06, Fajar Priyanto <fajarpri@cbn.net.id> wrote:
Hi all,
I hope I'm not starting a flame war.

Can someone pls tell me the ups and down between Centos and FC?
I'm familiar with FC4 and some things that I like from it:
1. The available packages are abundant. Very easy to find packages for FC4.
2. The user list is very active and friendly too (I have subscribed to Centos
list and seems like they're friendly too :)


I personally think that the CentOS project and Whitebox and those re-spins of RHEL are pretty much ripping off Red Hat.  Red Hat spends a ton of money, time and effort in making their enterprise distro.  They give the entire thing to the community via the Fedora project.  As required by the terms of the GPL, they release everything for RHEL as source RPMs.  Then the clone distros come along and respin them and give them away.

While this is perfectly legal, I think it dilutes the value of what Red Hat is doing.  "Legal" does not necessarily mean "right."  The respin distros don't really innovate, they just leech off the work that Red Hat has done.  IMHO, if you want the benefit of Red Hat's work, you should support them by either buying their products or using FC and contributing back to the project.  Even if that contribution is just filing bug reports or answering questions on the mailing lists/forums, it is contributing back to Red Hat.

Let's not forget how much Red Hat is spending to give us FC - I think we should reward them for that however we can, not leech off them.

LW