For filePro and overall strength which is best, SUSE or RedHat?

[Fairlight]

In the relative spacial/temporal region of
Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 04:32:14PM -0500, Walter Vaughan achieved the spontaneous
generation of the following:
> > Third party only, presumably?  Or does the foundation do support?
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/support.html
> 
> 1) You can't get more worthwhile answers more quickly than at
> 	news://comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc

Yes, well...much as -I- like community support and respect what I've
seen of the FBSD community's collective expertise, company's tend to want a
Responsible Party (ie., Vendor) standing behind the software.  

One of the primary complaints/questions about Linux has been, "Who do you
go to if...?"  And generally, people want to go there in a hurry.  

Now personally, I'll take community response over RHEL support any day of
the week based on what I've seen of both.  There are relative FBSD newbies
that know 1000x more than some of RH's "trained" support folks.

But try convincing a large corporate entity that this is the way to go.  A
lot wouldn't even consider Linux because it didn't used to come in a
physical package with at least a box to set on the shelf.  (A poorer
rationale for avoiding something, I've never heard.)  FBSD -still- doesn't
come commercially pre-packaged, to my knowledge.  That's going to be an
uphill battle with many places, despite its excellent security and
stability.

> 2) The documentation is superb
> 	http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/

Indeed, it is.  Very complete compared to the Linux world's docs.

> 3) You can pay people if you like
> 	http://www.freebsd.org/commercial/consult.html

And therein lies your primary support channel[s] for Real Corporate Use.
You'll pay someone.

Seeing as, in LinuxLand, I'm one of those Someone's, I don't have a
problem with that concept.  But there are companies that do, and no matter
how decent 3rd party support for something is, they still want a Large
Corporate Entity standing behind the product--and all the excellent
community assistance or paid third-party support in the world won't make up
for that one missing factor in their eyes.

Their loss, IMHO, whether it's Linux or FBSD..

> and finally... Bill Vermillion likes it. That's good enough for me.

Amen.  Bill's really an accurate guage in this regard.  This is largely
because he actually knows what he's doing at the lowest levels and how
things are supposed to work in *nix.  He's read more whitepapers than I'll
probably ever see in my lifetime.  He's also got mountains of experience,
and he never stops learning--so he's current.  He's the first person I talk
to if I have an FBSD issue somewhere--which is rare, but it's happened.

Plus, you couldn't ask for someone more professional with which to work.

mark->
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