On Saturday 23 September 2006 19:19, Vivek J. Patankar wrote:
A certain corporate has a very large mail setup, several servers hosting thousands of POP mailboxes. The OS used here was RH7.3 or RH9. A decision is taken to cut down the number of servers that mailboxes reside on to two. The hardware selected was powerful intel based hardware from Sun. The OS of choice was Centos 4.0 because it was recommended by the vendor who supported the mail servers. A hardware related hiccup caused the corporate to refer the matter to Sun who promply refused to provide support. The reason cited for the refusal was that the boxes were certified for RHEL and not Centos, so Sun wouldn't be responsible for problems. After being stung by something like this, the business side decided that the servers are to be migrated to Solaris, and any software distributed with an open source license, specifically if the license/documentation states that "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS AND WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY" and that the developer is not resposible for any data loss or other problems arising from using the software. To what extent this decision was adhered to, I don't know.
From what I have known the whole business model of OSS is based on _not_ selling the software but rather providing services based off it. Why did the organization choose CentOS over RHEL? Essentially they are the same but AFAIK if they would've chosen RHEL, then they could've gotten support from RH as well as SUN. Didn't they read the agreement details before buying the boxes? I find it hard to believe that a "certain-large-corporation-with-thousands-of-mailboxes" would take chances with support.