Facebook Linux, What Distro is it?

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Facebook, GoDaddy, Host Gator, Layered Technologies, CPanel, Zynga, Arizona State University's Mars data, Duke University (... so on and so forth). These and many others use CentOS. CentOS is the 2nd most used version of Linux in the world.

GoDaddy using CentOS isn't exactly a good testimonial at the moment.

I also would really like to know where you get the idea the CentOS is the "2nd most used version of Linux in the world." I doubt anyone has accurately measured distro use for starters, and I really doubt that CentOS would rank second. Also, what use? Servers, desktops, both? This is a nonsense statement AFAICT. I'd love to see a source for that claim.

Perhaps he means second most used version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

tracyanne: That would make sense. Of course, that isn't what he said.

BTW, I want to make clear that my comment isn't criticism of CentOS. For people who want the things Red Hat Enterprise Linux brings to the table but don't want to buy a subscription both CentOS and Scientific Linux are excellent choices. A lot of small businesses (including a couple of my customers) use CentOS and nowadays I have nothing but good things to say about the distro. I just find the claim that it's second most used distro unlikely.

If there weren't free RHEL clones like CentOS and Scientific Linux, those users would gravitate to other free, long-term-support distributions. They wouldn't be paying for RHEL. And Red Hat knows it and condones it.

Do you wonder why there's no free SUSE Enterprise clone, just OpenSUSE? It puzzles me, for sure.

@Steven I have often wondered the same thing. I always thought SUSE was a big enough player in the enterprise space to warrant a community rebuild effort. I guess there just isn't the demand for such a project.

There's plenty of demand for a free SLES/SLED clone, but I also think that Suse itself doesn't want it to happen and discourages any effort to do so.

Here are a couple of old articles on this very topic:

http://dag.wieers.com/blog/why-is-there-no-open-source-sles http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/novell-free-sles-while-the-...

That nobody is talking about this now is somewhat telling.

Quoting:There's plenty of demand for a free SLES/SLED clone, but I also think that Suse itself doesn't want it to happen and discourages any effort to do so.

I completely agree. I'm about to go to work in a SUSE (SLES/SLED) shop and I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the toolset. I installed openSUSE not because it's the closest match I can easily find, not because it's the right way to go about this. I know I would really benefit from free SLE(D)/(S) right now.

I think the issue, as some pointed out in the comment to the Dag Wieers article you linked, is the Novell mindset. Their roots are in the proprietary software world. That's also true of AttachMate, their parent company. They have never fully adopted the kind of FOSS mindset that has been part of Red Hat from the very start.

Quoting:That nobody is talking about this now is somewhat telling.

It's also unfortunate. I may have to write an article about this. Thanks for the inspiration :)

Oh, and if anyone cares, my first impressions of openSUSE 12.2 are very positive. This looks like a really good release so far.

I meant Linux web servers ... and CentOS is second:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux

Here is a multiple university DNA Project that uses CentOS for their data:

http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/200-libby-clark/636...

Used on University of Texas's super computer: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu/resources/hpc

Many. many more.

(WRT GoDaddy comment #2 ... CentOS has nothing to do with their routers :D)