[CentOS] was - Vote For CentOS now "pay for CentOS" :)

[Greg Knaddison]

On 6/3/05, Johnny Hughes <mailing-lists at hughesjr.com> wrote:
> 
> Not that I am opposed to providing information, but if you are using a
> product like CentOS, and you think it has value, why would you not
> contribute a fair value to the people who develop it, regardless of what
> they do with the money.  Each person is able to determine what monetary
> value the software has to them, and contribute it.
> 
> I give money to distrowatch.com, gentoo.org, slackware.com and several
> other open source projects ... I don't care what they do with the money.
> They provide things that I find have value, so I give them a fair
> donation.  It seems quite simple to me, if you use a free software
> product that accepts donations, especially if you use that product to
> make money or in a business, you should make a contribution to the
> organization.

Yeah, I generally agree and have done.  I don't feel the CentOS
project is worth enough to make a donation beyond the BT.  If I ever
do, I'll probably go buy it from RH, to be honest.

For a while I used CentOS at work and encouraged my employer to
contribute...I'm not sure if they did (don't think so) and I'm not
sure if they will.

> 
> > I asked for that many months ago and got no response, so I left it
> > that there was enough money coming in that it isn't worth doing the
> > accounting to get even more money.
> 
> At the time you asked, you were asking the cAos Foundation.  We are no
> longer a member of that group.  There have been all of about $200.00
> contributed to the CentOS project since March 20 (the date of split).  I
> can't comment on the accounting of the cAos foundation, as I know
> nothing about it, but while the CentOS project was a member I wasn't
> happy with the information provided.

So, you were in a position where you couldn't state the accounting nor
could you get the accounting?  Why not state that at the time?

> 
> We haven't spent any of the $200.00 for anything yet. It is sitting in
> the account.
> 
> > I would probably just trust that the money goes to a good place, but
> > the second result on this search doesn't sit well with me.
> 
> Don't know anything about that.  I know that 2 developers have bought
> and paid for computer systems to expand the number of distros we can
> build CentOS for, I think they should be compensated for that.
> ----------------------------------------------
> >   That story
> > is also the reason I am concerned about the slow and unpublicized
> > drift from RHEL-SRPM rebuilds (change to Glade, change to Mozilla
> > cert-db).
> 
> Neither of these things was unpublicized.
> 
> The Mozilla cert-db is done .. we will continue to support CACert as a
> free alternative to the get SSL Certificates.  There were MANY posts on
> this issue in the Mailing list.  If you don't like it, it is easy to
> remove it yourself (trivially easy in fact).

Yeah, I know there were many posts on Centos-devel on the subject.

> 
> The Glade issue may never be addressed by RHEL ... they built theirs in
> a way that it works.  Their SRPM will not build as is on itself.  This
> issue is documented as broken by all 3 major rebuild projects.  We have
> 2 choices ... a non working glade, or we fix glade based on a patch BY
> the glade people (who saw it as a problem and patched it).  We submitted
> the bug and the patch (that come from the glade website) to RedHat.
> They have not acted.
> 
> But, since theirs works and ours does not, ours needs patching.
> 
> There is also a required patch to Thunderbird and several other packages
> need to have special parameters passed in to build.
> 
> All these things are documented fully in the bug tracker:
> http://bugs.centos.org/



I understand what happened and why you did it and I'm glad  you did,
but I caught the fact that there was a change on the WBEL list of all
places...I just feel that as a RHEL rebuild, that is what draws 16TB
to the group so you should state clearly whenever there is a change. 
The CaCERT issue is on the front page - but not the fact that it was
edited in the SRPM.  Open source projects live and die on
transparency...if it's not readily clear to the group what changes are
made until they slip out, then how can we trust that the rest of the
packages are unedited?

I really hope that I'm dense and wrong and that on the "hey bozo click
here" page of the website it states all these changes, but it hasn't
plonked me on the head yet.

Pointing to the 411 bugs in bugs.centos isn't much consolation on that
front.  If there is an easy report that brings them up, stick it in
the faq and the suspicions will be squashed and I (and any others who
feel like me on this front...) will get a warm fuzzy in our hearts.

> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> The PPC distro will need several patches, as RH doesn't care to release
> the packages required to build that distro (or any distro for that
> matter):
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=134188
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=109697
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=134192
> 
> SO ... building the Centos Distro is trial and error, since we do get
> everything that RH releases, but they don't necessarily release
> everything that is need to BUILD RHEL (or build things on RHEL).
> 
> Everyone thinks it is just plug and play to build and maintain the
> distro ... it is not.
> 

I'm sure it's not and I appreciate the work you've done and the quick
level of accounting given just now.

Thanks,
Greg