[CentOS] Vote For CentOS :)

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 22:22 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> I was just having a moment of nostalgia for the old days. Do you
> remember the time when Red Hat was building their reputation and
> building a free version of Red Hat Linux took exactly *no* extra work
> by another team that might instead be adding value by packaging new
> programs in their repository?

BTW, I don't know what you are talking about on this.

A _lot_ of people who worked on forks used to complain about RPM
_in_compatibility with Red Hat.  Different projects and different people
maintaining different versions would clash, compatibility nightmares
resulted -- especially on a lot of forks.

Worse yet, because they didn't remove the trademarks, people assumed it
was Red Hat, and that it wasn't compatible with itself.  The forks
actually made it far worse, while people assumed they were still Red Hat
Linux.

Cobalt was a perfect example.  I'd hear people complain about Red Hat
having "too much control" over what was released, then they'd turn
around and say "we need to break from Red Hat" -- all when that's what
they _already_did_!

And even then, Red Hat tried to clarify its trademark guidelines and
other issues.  And people just ignored them.  It really didn't come to a
point until Sun bought Cobalt, and was just blatantly redistributing all
sorts of modifications that were nothing like the original Red Hat
Linux, with all the trademarks intact.

And when Red Hat tried to get them to stop, that's when their entire
history of allowing their trademark to be freely redistributed came back
to haunt them.

You say "*no* extra work"?  Hardly!  The forks and just blatant mis-
appropriation of "Red Hat(R)" caused a lot of headaches before.  Because
everyone was releasing modifications of Red Hat Linux -- some just with
updates (which Red Hat allowed under several of its guideline
revisions), and some completely built for other architectures, with
complete changes in GCC, GLibC and other components.

At this point, I don't know what fantasy world you live in, but it's
getting old.  People keep "re-inventing" this Red Hat Linux history that
_never_ existed.  Nothing has changed other than Red Hat put its foot
down on trademarks because companies like Sun finally forced them to.

Today, we have the Fedora Project.  It's not perfect, but Red Hat is
trying, and re-trying and will continue to try to "get it right."
Fedora Core is developed just as Red Hat Linux always was.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                     b.j.smith at ieee.org 
--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
It is mathematically impossible for someone who makes more than you
to be anything but richer than you.  Any tax rate that penalizes them
will also penalize you similarly (to those below you, and then below
them).  Linear algebra, let alone differential calculus or even ele-
mentary concepts of limits, is mutually exclusive with US journalism.
So forget even attempting to explain how tax cuts work.  ;->