The Future of CentOS and Criteria For Choosing a Business Distribution

Aug 06, 2009, 16:04 (2 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Caitlyn Martin)

[ Thanks to Caitlyn Martin for this link. ]

"My remaining concern about CentOS is that thay have been slow with some security patches lately and that has nothing to do with the developers' issues which made the press. Red Hat delivered Firefox 3.0.12, a security patch which closed five vulnerabilities classified as "critical", the same day Mozilla did. Scientific Linux (another RHEL clone) had it available within 24 hours. It took CentOS more than a week. That isn't good for something with known, significant vulnerabilities. Before someone points out that a browser isn't critical or perhaps even appropriate for most servers I'll remind my readers that the upstream "prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" sells its product for both servers and corporate workstations/desktops. It is fair to assume that CentOS is used the same way. This also was not an isolated case of one late patch. Some patches have been very quick to arrive and others have not been. CentOS has been erratic with its patching for quite some time."

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