I simply don't understand why anyone would use Fedora Core in a workplace, let alone
on servers. I can understand wanting to avoid paying yearly per system
licensing fees for Redhat Enterprise Linux, but major upgrades and
bleeding edge software every 6-12 months is not something that should be
done in a business.
There are however alternatives to those two extremes. There are a
bunch of RHEL
Forks. Each project builds a distribution based on the source
rpms made available by Redhat for Redhat Enterprise Linux. Each project
has slightly different goals. Scientific Linux for example
endeavors to be RedHat comatible while still adding in various
clustering goodies used by researchers. My current choice for a
straight forward, staying true to RHEL distribution is CentOS.
Using this type of project however, is not for everyone. Red Hat
provides support options and the percieved stability of security updates
and patches coming from a company; these might be an issue for some
managers. The other big issues, are all about mitigating your level of
risk when using a completely volunter community project.
What would happen if the project weren't to put out security patches as
fast as you need? Do you have the knowledge and skills to rebuild the
source rpms yourself? What if the project collapses? How quickly would you
be able to migrate to another distribution? (One option, is to migrate in
place with these
instructions as a guide.) And the most devasting of possible issues; What
happens if Redhat stops releasing source rpms? Would you be able to hand
patch the services you maintain until you could migrate to another
distribution?
If those risks scare you, perhaps you will be more willing to pay
for the licenses from Redhat. These
risks don't bother me because 1) we don't have to be a 100% uptime
workplace and 2) I have the skills needed to maintain it all myself as I
worked on a migration plan.
