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

Fri Jun 3 23:21:38 UTC 2005

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 16:21 -0600, Greg Knaddison wrote:
> 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.

That is your choice, of course, but $24 for an enterprise OS is quite a
bargain. You and I obviously see the value of CentOS very, very
differently.

If the 168,000 people who used the CentOS mirrors in the last 2 months
donated $1.00 we might be able to do some things like have booths at
Linux events, ect.

> 
> 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?
> 

Because I was fairly new to the project then, and I was developing a
beta distro ... I didn't know anything about the money end at that time.
I am now more involved in all aspects of CentOS as the Lead for
CentOS-4.

> > 
> > 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.

Both of those changes we announced ....

You mentioned the discussion for Mozilla, and here is the announcement
for glade:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/2005-April/000052.html

We painstakingly document everything in bugzilla, on the announce list
and inside the changlog of the SRPM/RPM.  If you are interested, you can
look up any changes made to anything in all 3 of those places.

ALSO ... each and every SRPM that has been edited is marked as .centos
and the command:

rpm -qp --changelog packagename.rpm  (if the RPM is on disk)

(or rpm -q --changelog package ... if it is installed)

will tell you why it is changed ... glade2 says:

* Wed Apr 06 2005 Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

- added the glade-infinite-loop.patch to correct bug #855
- thanks to David Parsley of TaoLinux.org for this patch :)

> 
> 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.
> 

If you go there, click on view issues, then search for glade2 you can
easily see the issues.  This is the Mantis program, and links to the
full documentation are also on bugs.centos.org.

You can also get an account on bugs, login, click Summary and while in
the summary, click "Print Reports" and see whatever you want.

Being that we host the bugzilla for TaoLinux, and WBEL doesn't have
one ... and neither have forums, I can say that we are by far the most
supported and document distro (at least it seems so to me).

> > -----------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> > 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.

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