Red Hat is far from a dying company. Their presence in the enterprise market is massive. They also sponsor and support (read: pay the developers) several large and well known open source projects (Foreman, Pulp, FreeIPA just to name a few). RedHat also recently just acquired Ansible and has partnerships with several other companies in the industry.
Yes, distributions like Debian have more recent versions of things like PHP, because distributions like Debian are more bleeding edge. You sacrifice bleeding edge features and functionality for stability when you use an EL distro (CentOS, RHEL, SL, etc). This is not a secret. This doesn't mean that you sacrifice security since RHEL backports upstream security fixes in to their packages (and typically they do this very quickly). Nobody is stopping you from building your own packages or installing them from third party repositories. As an enterprise customer, I don't want to run 'yum update' and have new major versions of packages installed on my system(s). I want to run 'yum update' and install important security updates without potentially adversely affecting applications that are running on my server. If you want the newest and "greatest," run another distribution or install third party packages. Novell does not own Red Hat. It looks like Novell may have purchased an undisclosed minority stake of Red Hat in 1999 (according to Wikipedia), but the companies operate completely independent of each other. Novell's enterprise distribution is SUSE. RHEL and SUSE are competing products in the same industry, so I'm not really sure what you are talking about. On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 9:29 AM, Steve <[email protected]> wrote: > Yeah that is like two dying companies merging to make one large one to > compete. That is a sign of desperation. Thing is Debian attracted all the > newbs when Ubuntu came along. So it had a higher visibility initially and > a lot of the lower level talent flocked to it. There are far more eyes on > Debian but the talent mainly styayed with Fedora. (The real hard core > talent stays with BSD though etc). Thing is the population is just so much > higher with Debian some of those newbs are starting to get good at it. They > push things through faster (and less securely) than Fedora (etc) do. This > is why for example you will see Debian far ahead in supporting PHP versions > than Centos/RHEL. For Centos if we want to support more advanced versions > they want us to install a 3rd party repo and "risk it". That is just ONE > example of Centos being behind. > > Fact is even though Novell has always been behind the times and slow to > advance. I remember consulting so many little shops that were still stuck > on Novell having all sorts of issues, still running IPX/SPX trying to get > their IT people to embrace change move away from it. Novell made a really > smart move buying Redhat and it was good but I'm seeing the same patterns > emerge. They are slow. They are safer for sure but developers don't wait > around forever. > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Josh Baird" <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 9:21:02 AM > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] CentOS 6.7 or 7? > > What are you finding that is not compatible with EL7? > > CentOS is not going to fade into the oblivion. It's probably the most > widely adopted distribution in US 'enterprise' environments (other than > RHEL it's self). Red Hat also joined forces (officially) with CentOS early > last year [1]. > > [1] > > https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-centos-join-forces > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 8:58 AM, Steve <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Finding a lot of things are not compatible with 7 yet and may not be for > a > > while. Starting to see a lot of people flipping to Debian. Such a shame > > because I really do think Centos is going to now flounder around for the > > next 3 years and fade into oblivion. Thanks Novell! > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Josh Baird" <[email protected]> > > To: [email protected] > > Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2015 8:21:41 AM > > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] CentOS 6.7 or 7? > > > > We have been running RHEL7 in production for quite a while now. My > > suggestion would be to deploy EL7. Bite the bullet and learn systemd. > > It's really not that hard, just different than init. > > > > Josh > > > > On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 12:41 AM, Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > There seems to be a fair bit of dissatisfaction with RHEL7/CentOS 7. > I'm > > > building a couple new servers, if my others are running CentOS 6 and do > > > what I need, should I resist the temptation to jump to 7? I think > > CentOS 6 > > > EOS dates are 2017 for full updates and 2020 for maintenance updates? > > > > > > I know some people will say switch to Ubuntu or Debian or whatever, > let's > > > assume I am staying with CentOS, I'm just asking 6 or 7? > > > > > > > > >
