Red Hat Hires CentOS Developers 91
rjmarvin writes "Karanbir Singh and a handful of other CentOS developers are now full-time Red Hat employees, working in-house on the CentOS distribution with more transparent processes and methods. None of the CentOS developers will be working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The CentOS project would become another distribution and community cared for by Red Hat, like Fedora, and Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens says the company is planning its future around OpenStack, not just Linux."
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah. Oracle would rather kill Solaris than let that happen.
Because it's good business. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does this matter to RedHat? The more people whose yardstick and gold standard is RedHat-related technology, the better; and ensuring all you can do on the derivative can be done exactly the same way on the commercial (down to the version of a command, the dot in a package name and the quirks of the brand) goes a long way to provide this promise.
How does this benefit RedHat if CentOS is given away for free? CentOS is RedHat's technology already in the hands of the client. But having the software is one thing - having access to support, formal enterprise training offerings, consultancy services and a dedicated rapid response for business-critical bugs is vital in business. Once the small company who could not afford RHEL becomes big, suddenly they are aware that they are on systems that RedHat knows perfectly, and migrating from CentOS to RHEL is painless - being systems different only at branding level. Migrating to anything else, even to SUSE Linux for Enterprise or Oracle's Linux (the latter being a part-clone of RHEL), becomes more involved. CentOS really now is RHEL.
Indeed, the good karma from being seen helping the community is peanuts compared to the advantage the offering of an easy transition and self-trained fans and already-committed users brings.
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah. Oracle would rather kill Solaris than let that happen.
Good riddance... Solaris is nothing special or unique, at least these days. It's best feature was that it ran on Sparc based hardware, which when Sun Micro Systems was in it's heyday said "Rock Solid reliability". So if you wanted something to run for a decade or two, you purchased Sun hardware which locked you into Solaris. Now days, who cares about Solaris? Running Solaris on X86 hardware it is pointless because it buys you nothing in reliability while costing you in obscurity. Just go to a stable Linux distribution.
The ONLY reason you field Solaris now, is if your customer demands it or your legacy application is not easily ported. The one possible exception to this might be if you are putting up an Oracle cluster.
Solaris is going to die... It probably should too.
Genious. Absolute genious. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me take a second to applaud Red Hat for doing this.
This is why they own the Enterprise Linux market.
Their thinking, in a nutshell, is this:
Give the software (CentOS) to small companies.
Get kids right out of college using it to build their home servers.
Get everyone comfortable with CentOS/RHEL.
When it is time to buy, they will buy RH. Simple.
Here in NYC, Linux jobs are 99.99% RH/CentOS.
Because CentOS is free, anyone can download it and test
it. No disabled features, nothing. You want a job in Wall St?
Download CentOS, sit down and learn the thing and then
you WILL get a job! I guarantee it!
Microsoft, Oracle, Apple take note: This is how you own
a market. Not by squeezing every penny out of your
customers.
That's why Apple will never break into the Enterprise
market. This is why Microsoft has lost the Enterprise
market and this is how Oracle will fuck off and die soon
(hopefully).
Personally, I was a Slackware guy, for my home machines,
but CentOS has won me over. Now, it is the only thing I use.
One more thing: I work in Wall St. and I use RH/CentOS
every single day.
Red Hat, you guys rule. I salute you! Rock on!