Do it yourself
Many who opt for Red Hat rebuilds are confident of their own expertise, though.
"I've had years' worth of support from Red Hat and have never called them once," said Jacob Leaver, a senior systems administrator who uses CentOS at his employer, a Washington-based Internet service provider. "I find that I can usually provide the answer to a technical problem using a Google search."
That's also enough support for Claire Connelly, a systems administrator who helps run 66 Linux servers at Harvey Mudd College's Mathematics Department.
"Convincing me to run RHEL on more of our systems would require Red Hat to add some significant value over community rebuilds or other distributions," Connolly said. "I don't have a problem with giving Red Hat some money, as they do a great job contributing code and support to the community. The problem is that their current pay-for-support structure doesn't work very well for our situation. As an academic institution, we don't have tons of money to throw around for 'enterprise-level support'."
A year and a half after Red Hat introduced the first version of RHEL, it announced deep discounts to education customers that had been alienated by the pricing choice.
But those educational discounts haven't been steep enough for some others, either. The University of Manchester uses Linux on a "couple hundred" workstations and servers, said Niels Walet, a professor with the university's School of Physics and Astronomy. His main concerns with Red Hat are support and fees, he said. He's moving several CentOS systems under his purview to Scientific Linux to maintain compatibility among university groups.
Some clone users could be drawn into the Red Hat fold, though. One is Maciej Zenczykowski, a CentOS user and student in Poland who runs Linux on three university servers and four Internet servers for his own and three other apartment buildings. He'd be willing to pay $50 to $100 per year for software support, and he needs the RHEL compatibility to ensure that software from HP works properly.
"Frankly, I wanted to go with RHEL 4 on [an] enterprise-level server at the university. I even had the $50 ready for an academic licence," he said. But Red Hat's Polish reseller was charging about $120, and trying to coax longer-term support payments out of the university's financial department was frustrating, so CentOS won out.
Freedom from bureaucracy is one of the reasons Dave Parsley, an administrator at Alfred University in New York, founded Tao Linux.
"It's always easier to pop a DVD into the drive to install it and not register and not do any paperwork," Parsley said. "It's like the old days of Linux — just install and go."
