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Comment by commandertso | Hacker News Reader

One thing to consider, for the folks that assume everyone on CentOS is a parasite allergic to paying for software... CentOS is heavily used in the HPC academic organizations, in part because paying licensing fees for an OS on 2k+ nodes isn’t workable in academia.

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When I was at Princeton, a lot of clusters ran Springdale Linux[1], which is a Princeton/IAS version of RHEL compiled from RHEL source. I wonder why they didn't simply choose CentOS, and if there's any institution outside Princeton using Springdale.

Btw: it doesn't seem to have been ported to RHEL 8 (?).

[1] http://springdale.math.ias.edu/

They don't have a dvd iso for Springdale 8 but there is a boot.iso download and a package repo[1]

1. https://springdale.math.ias.edu/data/puias/8/

They address that particular question even before the FAQ on their site:

"This project was started long before CentOS or other projects were available."

I bet the have calculated that their work maintaining this is rather simple and well-worth it, or they would have changed over to CentOS a long time ago.

Indeed we're running CentOS on the cluster at work. I always wondered, why not Debian ?

Support. Commercial software packages that you may want to run often come with a list of supported operating systems which usually only includes RedHat and maybe SuSE. Ubuntu and Debian are rarely officially supported. And although you usually can get things to work somehow, your application software support will be useless because all tickets get closed with "unsupported OS, use RedHat". With CentOS you at least might have a chance to get a non-useless answer from you application's support team.

Don't they use scientific linux (CentOS clone?)

SL died some time ago.

Scientific Linux has been abandoned in favor of CentOS.

Scientific was discontinued and the sponsoring organisations switched to CentOS 8. It looks like the work involved in rebuilding RHEL 8 was too much to deal with.

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