Crust or Corteza - That is the Question ;)
At Crust we often get asked the question as to whether an organisation should use Crust or Corteza? If your deployment is in a professional setting, then we always recommend Crust. If not, Corteza is a good option, as it usually has some extra features. We often use the analogy of Fedora’s relationship to Red Hat Enterprise Linux to explain the differences. However, that’s an over-simplified comparison, and we usually need to explain in more detail. The following are some useful questions and answers:
What’s the difference between Crust and Corteza?
Corteza is fundamentally a development and testing platform. We’re continually adding new features to it, and it often gets updated a few times a week. This “rolling-release” approach means you need to know your way around Corteza to support it reliably.
Best think of Crust of as an enterprise product based on Corteza source code. It is stable and thoroughly tested. The versions we sell are based on major releases which only come out every three months (the next major version release is 19.12 this December). Crust also doesn’t contain everything in Corteza, for apparent reasons.
Are There Other Differences?
Yes, and they’re essential differences too! They primarily concern intellectual property.
Corteza is released under an Apache 2.0 license. It is 100% the property of the Commons Conservancy Foundation. Crust, while based on Corteza code, has its proprietary binaries and a proprietary user subscription model.
One reason Crust takes this approach is to offer more flexibility to enterprise customers who may not want to work with an exclusively open source license. Customers may wish to add on their proprietary extensions or business logic.
The other main reason is that open-source software licenses are distributed “as is” without warranties or assurances of any kind. The “as is” condition is often unacceptable to enterprises, with good reason. Businesses need to know someone’s going to take responsibility when software throws up bugs and other surprises.
Will Long-Term Support Ever be made Available for Corteza?
Yes, we certainly hope so someday. The stronger the community gets, the more likely this will be. Corteza counts many great organisations amongst its users to date, and exciting new developments are happening almost by the week.
Long-term support is a big responsibility for a community to bear and maintain. However, with enough determination, we’ll reach that goal, for sure.
Any Plans for a SaaS Service?
For those who don’t want to self-host their deployments and wish to leave all support and management to the team here at Crust Technology, we will be delivering a Crust Cloud in 2020. Watch this space for more information!