[WBEL-users] whitebox: the pros and cons of hitchiking

[Jesse]

On Thu, 20 May 2004, Mario Gamito wrote:

> I think it's a great distro and my company is *strategically* moving all
> its servers and its clients servers for whitebox, at my advice.

Similarly, a lot of the companies I work with are gradually moving most of
their servers to Whitebox. That amounts to at least a couple hundred
production machines.

> About the other issue, of course as a CTO of my company, it worries me
> that whitebox is a one man show. Someday, he may wake in a bad mood or
> get an excelent job and put an end to whitebox.
> And if that day comes i'll be in troubles in my job :)

If that happened, at that point, hopefully between all of the people
running the distribution, a few of us would find time to take up the work.

Part of the reason I like Whitebox is it's not over-ambitious. I'm not
looking for the latest, greatest, super-duper redesigned distribution. I
just want RHEL without the licensing issues.

A 'low' bar with little deviation from RHEL means that there's not that
it doesn't take that much manpower (compared to a 'from scratch' distro)
to maintain, which hopefully means it'll stay healthy. If worst comes
to worst, rebuilding my own SRPMS is easy.

The only things I'd really be concerned with are intentional moves by
RedHat to make projects like Whitebox difficult. But at least for the life
of WBEL3.0, that doesn't seem likely.

I'm pretty happy. My concern about the mirroring situation right now is
more just from the perspective of the community health. As was said
earlier, it's pretty easy for anyone to rebuild RHEL SRPMS if they really
need to.

---
Jesse <j@lumiere.net>