On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 21:26, Lamar Owen wrote:
I'd put it this way instead: Red Hat is responsible for any difficulty in creating the CentOS distribution, while sharing the same upstream developers as all other Linux distributions.
I'd put it this way: Red Hat makes CentOS possible at all by providing Source RPMs (which they are not required to do;
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?
I have written spec files, and have maintained a specfile of moderate complexity; spec file hacking is not trivial. Then there's the work of building an installable ISO image or image set; this is nontrivial as well.
There are other distributions. Much of the value of this one comes from that RPM-packaging work by others - much of which was started when (and because) the RH base distribution was freely available.