Linux Administration Best Practices

Chapter 2: Choosing Your Distribution and Release Model

When we talk about Linux system administration, we probably jump quickly to wondering what flavor of Linux we are going to be talking about. This is typically the first topic that pops into our minds when having even a casual conversation with a business owner or someone in another, non-technical department. What we rarely spend much time thinking about is release and support models and how these play into our planning, risk, and expenditure models.

A quarter century ago we used to be educated regularly about the merits, caveats, and machinations of different software licensing models. Today terms such as open-source are used constantly and no one is surprised to hear them but like with ...