On Thursday 21 March 2002 01:04, Joel Schneider wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 09:46:27PM -0600, Scott Dier wrote:
> > * Samir M. Nassar <nassarsa at redconcepts.net> [020320 21:00]:
> > > You have to hand it to Red Hat, they not only care about their business
> >
> > However, instead of working with their fully able customers to create a
> > 'enterprise' level operating system, they decide to pull it all in house
> > and not allow collabration with users.
>
> The decision to create a separate 'enterprise' system makes a lot of
> sense for Red Hat.  It gives them (and the linux community) a credible
> way to address customers' concerns about RH's history of "dot uh-oh"
> syndrome.
>
> The centralized decision making process is not all bad either. Sometimes
> it's better to move forward with a less-than-perfect product than spend
> too much time haggling over how to make it perfect.
>
> > Wow, I'm really happy we stopped the redhat train after 6.2 and I can
> > collabrate with others on projects for debian, where I actually have
> > some input on what happens and its with mindshare, not money.
>
> I think Debian is a high quality distro.  Yay Debian!
>
> Joel

The interesting thing for me about this is that SuSE (you knew this was 
coming) did something similar about a year ago. I don't mean the Personal and 
Professional versions. SuSE established at some point between the release of 
7.1 and 7.2 (I think that was the cycle), SuSE Linux Enterprise 7. This was 
essentially the packages at the 7.0/7.1 level that had been more riggerously 
tested with things like Oracle, DB2, Notes/Domino, etc. They have used this 
as the base for their Enterprise "packages", the SuSE Mail Server, the 
Groupware server, and the Firewall CD-ROM. This is what they recommend to 
people wishing to run production Oracle servers on Linux.  

We all know stories of somebody running a web server on a linux box using a 
1.0.x kernel and some early version of Apache. Why? Because it works and they 
don't need anything more. What Red Hat is doing now is just acknowledging 
this fact, older Linux versions are still better than the alternative. If 
corporations what a little "stability" in their Linux environment.

Fire away. ;-)

-- 
Jack Ungerleider
jack at jacku.com