[CentOS] CentOS and SL, together?

Johnny Hughes mailing-lists at hughesjr.com
Sun May 29 04:30:18 UTC 2005


On Sat, 2005-05-28 at 22:41 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Saturday 28 May 2005 19:38, Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org> wrote:
> > From: Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>
> > > Referencing SL3 and CentOS 3 (as I haven't run SL4 as yet) there were
> > > some scientific applications and some Java stuff, eclipse for one,
> 
> > You do understand the redistribution issues with Java, correct?
> > It's a Sun problem (a typical thorn for Red Hat in general), not a Red Hat
> > one.
> 
> I was asked what the differences between CentOS and SL were.  I simply 
> enumerated some of the differences.  The Fermi internal Linux had permission 
> from Sun to redistribute JRE for a particular version, apparently, but the 
> latest does not include a JRE.
> 

The answer to your immediate question is that CentOS is a community
operating system and anyone who wants to can use it.  We take
contributions to CentOS from non-developers, and we add developers from
the community.  Those contributions, however, must be accepted into
CentOS and be redistributable by us.

I don't think Pine and OpenAFS will be part of CentOS, neither can
anything that plays mp3's nor can anything that distributes JAVA (unless
it is an Open Source java, the Mozilla project is working on one ... so
maybe later).  

CentOS supports the Free Software Foundation's position on non-GPL
products .. and if they recommend not releasing products with a certain
license, we will try to do what they ask.

We are under the RH microscope too ... if we breath wrong, we are
contacted.  We can not do what SL is doing for their release notes, for
example. Instead, we have to include the RH release notes in their
unmodified form (or we can't use them at all).

> As to Pine, the license does not preclude distribution; Red Hat just didn't 
> like the way modifications couldn't be done, rendering it unsupportable.  A 
> 'SLplus' repo addition to CentOS (hosted by Fermi or whoever) would probably 
> handle the things that are different (like pcp and the others), and that 
> could handle things.
> 
> However, with the reaction this got I wonder if Connie and the rest would want 
> to try working in that direction.  The OpenAFS kernel portion could be a 
> problem, but could be handled again by a 'SLPlus' repository.

If they SL wanted to use CentOS as their base and add other things (like
pine, mp3's, java, etc.) and were not part of the CentOS Project, and
those programs stayed on their servers, that would be fine.

I have corresponded with Connie Sieh in the past (not about this subject
though), and I like the Scientific Linux project.  If they had CentOS
public mirrors on their site and created just the addons, which they
maintained separate from CentOS, then something might be able to be
worked out.




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