Andreas Kasenides wrote:
Does rebuilding packages not count as helping the project? If the release speed is seen as the biggest problem with the project, why do you assume ulterior motives for people who want to help out with the effort?
For goodness sake, it's an open source project. Who cares if the occasional person wants to produce their own respin.
RH would!! Apparently!! If that occasional person develops to a more than "occasional".
I still stand behind my evaluation of the situation done here https://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=29676&forum=... Apparently the people behind CentOS are so intricately professionally related to RH that CentOS exists because RH wants it to exist. Working in the background RH reserves its options for the future. As a corporation it evaluates the developing business environment (ex. Oracle buying Sun, killing OpenSolaris etc etc) and and takes appropriate action. Including making life harder for other corporations to compete. All these is perfectly understandable. It may, though, mean that CentOS dies quite likely a similar death to OpenSolaris.
Andreas Kasenides
That must be true in part where RH supports CentOS. That makes sense if you Look at RH as Open Source supporter, as well as good OSS business decision. They are in support business, at least with OS part. Making sure that there is free version of their OS that can be easily converted to full RHEL, and that there is large user base happy with the product and learning on RHEL clone makes sure that RH will always have customers. Even Microsoft testified in favor of illegal home user vs BSA because he did not want to frighten people into stop using Windows even illegally. If someone does not use your software home/outside the business, he also will not use it inside his business environment.
Looking from that perspective, CentOS will he around for many years to come.
This of course does not mean that RH can not create time-consuming problems to make sure that competition is always lagging behind to make sure mission critical systems have their payed support.
If that is necessary in order for me to use their huge R&D and HR potential for free, then I do not mind. This will make sure they have the money to keep developing the product I will be using for free.
If someone is not willing to accept this approach, if they want it now, then I advise them to pay for real thing, fully knowing that their narrow-mindness can not accept the fact that world is *not* revolving around their wishes. You can not stay virgin and have sex at the same time. Appearing to be is another matter.
Ljubomir.