Attack of the clones
Published: 24 Mar 2005 18:35 GMT
Send in the clones
There are several prominent RHEL rebuild projects besides CentOS:
- Finnish Lineox, which released its clone of RHEL 4 on 25 February, charges between €5 (£3.47) and €15 per server for its software update service.
- White Box Enterprise Linux was born when Red Hat dropped its freely available commercial product, Red Hat Linux, said project founder John Morris, who runs dozens of servers and personal computers using Linux at Beauregard Parish Public Library in DeRidder, Louisiana. "We have workstation hardware that costs less than a RHEL contract, so something had to give when Red Hat dumped Red Hat Linux in favour of RHEL, and thus WBEL was born," he said.
- Tao Linux is a "community supported" version not intended for mission-critical computers; users are expected to solve problems on their own or with help from mailing lists.
- Scientific Linux is maintained by programmers at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and other labs. It's geared for technical tasks at labs and universities.
- X/OS Linux, for which X/OS, a computing company in Amsterdam, sells support.
CentOS in the limelight
CentOS was an offshoot of a separate Linux project called Caos Linux, said Kurtzer, who is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory administrator and a programmer as well. But it turned out the Caos Foundation's more popular project was a rebuild of RHEL.
"For a new distribution to be widely used, it must demonstrate to the community that the project and the product are both stable, reliable solutions," Kurtzer said. "But because CentOS is based on a known codebase, it was able to short-circuit the typical path and become an almost instant success."
Kurtzer doesn't have firm numbers, but he estimates there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of CentOS users. The first version was announced in December 2003.
CentOS doesn't veer from the Red Hat course. "The point... is to be as legally identical as possible," Kurtzer said. CentOS tries, for example, to build security updates as quickly as possible, with an informal guarantee of a 24-hour turnaround after Red Hat releases the original.
CentOS isn't exactly free. The Caos Foundation asks for a $12 per server per year donation to defray download costs, though few beyond some companies pay, Kurtzer said.
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