[TriLUG] self-support alternatives to Novell/SUSE & RHEL

[Magnus]

It's becoming increasingly apparent that the community needs an 
RPM-based distro that is community driven rather than profit driven. 
Profit isn't a bad thing, and I wish Red Hat & Novell well in their 
commercial ventures, but their business models do not serve 
self-supporting shops.  Many orgs have been winging it with Red Hat 
Linux (the consumer distro) and have expressed a lack of confidence in 
the Fedora Project.

While this project doesn't perfectly meet my needs either, I've started 
participating in the cAos-el project ( http://www.caosity.org/ ) which 
is basically taking RHAS 2.1 and augmenting it from there.  I'm 
personally working on a related project, based on RHEL 3 (for those of 
you that were following in IRC last night, I've got about 1,000 binary 
RPM's done now).  Anyway the goal is to have an umbrella organization 
for packaging up an enterprise class distribution with long life 
cycles.  There is considerable financial support coming from some big 
names to make this project happen.

I've only just signed on yesterday so I don't know all the ins and outs 
of the project yet.  I'm just raising it as one alternative to all of 
the whining aimed at Red Hat (and now Novell) which I too am guilty of. 
  There is already quite a lot of activity in this distro, despite what 
the sparse web site would suggest, so check out the mailing lists & IRC 
channel to learn more.

I know with Windows we weren't empowered to do much more than b*tch 
when we were handed changes that we didn't like.  This is Open Source.  
Each and every one of us is empowered to fix things we don't like.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not 
bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man." - 
Mark Twain
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