On 6/3/11 2:41 AM, Steven Crothers wrote:
If you want to get into the nitty gritty of it, the ONLY group of people who deserve ANY credit at all are the Redhat folks. So saying a product that is released off Redhat's coattails is competing with another product that is ALSO running off Redhat's coattails is absurd.
Yes, RedHat deserves the credit for denying access to the binaries of open source work, even to the community responsible for it even existing.
A more definitive list would be anyone who has created original packages. The Redhat folks, EPEL contributors, El'Repo/Rpmforge (Dag W), and ect. Those are the people who deserve credit, anybody can download a source rpm and use the Redhat ISO (which is available easily enough) to rebuild RHEL6. The major deterrent is probably that type of "competitive market share thinking" you're exhibiting.
But when you say that, keep in mind that the 'original packages' part is the packaging work, not the creation of the vast majority of the code. And that the Red Hat company made its name and developed its community of users by allowing free access in the first place up until the EL/Fedora split. Personally I think everyone who uses free versions would have been better off if they had switched to Debian the day that Red Hat put the restrictions on redistribution, but I was too lazy to learn the options to 'apt-get'.