On 6/2/11 7:03 PM, Rob Kampen wrote:

Ian Murray wrote:

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This week's FLOSS Weekly interview is about ClearOS (audio/video at http://twit.tv/floss168). Apparently they have taken the CentOS developer's frequently given advice to go away and do it yourself and will have a 'ClearOS core' release that is their own rebuild from Red Hat sources that will be the base for the ClearOS enterprise distribution instead of relying on CentOS as they have before.

Thanks for the link. It makes interesting listening because there are claims that they tried to engage with the CentOS devs to offer support and resourcing, but that relationship was not forthcoming... so they intend to build (as I see it) a direct competitor distribution (i.e. "binary compatible"). Also interestingly, apparently they have recruited help from the SME/Contribs people, so I don't know if that means SME will die because it had precious little resources to start with (and now those resources work for the competition) or SME will still carry on and be rebased on Clear Core. Also stated in the audio is that this was all a direct response to the uncertainties around CentOS.

So, it is interesting to see how this is all going to pan out.

My look at the website shows only i386 versions - this is a long way away from a replacement or alternative to CentOS.

None of the 6.x based stuff is visible yet. ClearOS was more of a "modern" SME server replacement (where the services a home/small business needs come up working and are managed with a simple web interface), but all their planned updates were on hold waiting for a 6.x base distro. They will call this part ClearOS core, but I guess we'll have to wait to see how well they do at strict upstream compatibility on that part.

Worth watching as they do have some very positive indications of supporting and assisting the little guys (small business and home users) - they also have their foundation registered in New Zealand rather than the USA as the Kiwis have a more enlightened view on software patents and protections - particularly in regards to FOSS. (My totally unbiased view of course as a Kiwi ;-) ).

It will be at least interesting to see how it works out having something resembling a commercially-oriented company behind it.

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'.

On Friday, June 03, 2011 09:06:28 AM Les Mikesell wrote:

Yes, RedHat deserves the credit for denying access to the binaries of open source work, even to the community responsible for it even existing.

[snip]

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'.

Red Hat deserves credit for still provided the source RPM's in buildable form even for those parts of the distribution that are not GPL licensed. They are not required by license to do that; for instance, the PostgreSQL RPM's, since PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed. I mention that particular package only because I have first-hand knowledge of that package.

Red Hat deserves credit for providing vast amounts of developer time to the upstream projects, including but not limited to the kernel, glibc, gcc, GNOME, PostgreSQL, and RPM itself.

Red Hat is not the only Linux provider who has limited distribution of binaries. And as the CentOS and other rebuild projects have proven time and time again, having the source (and some time and significant effort) is sufficient to build a fully binary compatible distribution.

To my eyes it was a win-win for Linux, since without the for-profit model that Red Hat adopted, Red Hat likely would not be around today, nor would Red Hat-funded developers likely have been able to continue to devote as much time and effort as they have done. Perhaps they could have handled the PR in a better way, but then again when someone is used to freeloading they're going to hate having to pay anything at all (and that's not an accusation of anyone in particular, just a simple observation of human behavior).

The CentOS developers/rebuilders are to be commended for taking on the significantly difficult task of not just taking at rebuilding the system, but taking on the much more difficult task of making the resulting rebuild 100% ld-level and dependency-level binary compatible, as least as much as is possible with the released source code to the distributed binaries. Not to mention the far more difficult task of then releasing it publicly and dealing with that....

But, I do understand and am sympathetic; I miss the old boxed sets as much as anyone.

On Friday 03 June 2011 16:21:35 Les Mikesell wrote:

On 6/3/2011 8:57 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:

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Red Hat deserves credit for still provided the source RPM's in buildable form even for those parts of the distribution that are not GPL licensed. They are not required by license to do that; for instance, the PostgreSQL RPM's, since PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed. I mention that particular package only because I have first-hand knowledge of that package.

I'm not really talking about what Red Hat does - and I'm not against selling restricted software in general. I'm talking about what would be more in the best interest of the community that they attracted by permitting redistribution of the collated works - and then cut off.

So what? Red Hat created a community by beeing free in both senses, and then decided to go commercial at some point. And that hurt the feelings of some minor number of hard-nosed community members. Is that what you are talking about?

I was around at the time of Red Hat going commercial. I heard about that, and immediately went to their website to see if that was true, since I was having a hard time figuring out the alternative distro I could use. And when I opened the website, there it was --- Fedora Core 1. It was publicly advertized by Red Hat as a free (in both senses) continuation of old-style Red Hat releases, only with the branding and name changed. It was right there, on redhat.com, you can take a look:

http://web.archive.org/web/20031118114916/http://redhat.com/

I still remember a sentence somewhere that said something like "Think of Fedora Core 1 as a release of Red Hat 10" (although I failed to find it now). There was a clear pointer for every community member where to go if they wanted to stay in the "old" community. The only difference was the absence of the "shadow-man with a red hat" logo.

So that can be considered as "cutting off" only for a couple of very hard-nosed community members who were emotionally attached more to the name "Red Hat" and a nice picture of a hat, than to the product itself. Both the old product and the old community continued to live, just under a different brand. And Red Hat helped to create that new brand, and is still helping.

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Red Hat is not the only Linux provider who has limited distribution of binaries. And as the CentOS and other rebuild projects have proven time and time again, having the source (and some time and significant effort) is sufficient to build a fully binary compatible distribution.

But the need for the rebuild projects shows that Red Hat has restricted access to what is mostly the result of community work.

Red Hat didn't restrict access, it was only rebranded as another project. The result and work of that same community is still here, is very much alive, and is called Fedora. Every RHEL release is based on Fedora, which is still unrestricted and available. The process of creating RHEL from Fedora is closed within Red Hat, and community does not contribute to that part. And Red Hat has every right not to release the binary distro (RHEL) that they created *without* community input from a community-based free distro (Fedora). Everything that community creates is still completely free (again, in both senses). The "difference" between Fedora and its derivative RHEL lies strictly in the closed-to-community input from a commercial company, and Red Hat has therefore every right not to publish the resulting distro. They publish just the source code, since they are required to do it by the GPL (and other licences).

I fail to see how did Red Hat restrict the access to the result of any community work.

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To my eyes it was a win-win for Linux, since without the for-profit model that Red Hat adopted, Red Hat likely would not be around today, nor would Red Hat-funded developers likely have been able to continue to devote as much time and effort as they have done. Perhaps they could have handled the PR in a better way, but then again when someone is used to freeloading they're going to hate having to pay anything at all (and that's not an accusation of anyone in particular, just a simple observation of human behavior).

At the time, RH was backporting fixes into most/all of their previous major-number releases in a way that clearly wasn't sustainable. So they had to do the split between fast-track new development and long-term supported versions that get backports, but it is not at all clear that they had to restrict redistribution in addition to selling support. This just created the need for Ubuntu...

I tend to disagree here as well. Ubuntu was created from Debian, and had a completely different idea --- to become a favorite Linux distro for desktops. And they apparently succeded in that. Red Hat, and later Fedora, never even aimed at such a goal. The need for a desktop-oriented Linux distro was there since Linux came to existence, and was never properly addressed until Ubuntu appeared. Using Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, Slackware or Debian as a desktop distro was more a "surrogate Linux desktop". Creating a proper desktop distro needed an initial financial push by someone, and that push finally came with Shuttleworth creating Ubuntu.

Ubuntu was *not* created as a community response to Red Hat going commercial. Far from it.

Best, :-) Marko

On 6/3/2011 1:17 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:

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I'm not really talking about what Red Hat does - and I'm not against selling restricted software in general. I'm talking about what would be more in the best interest of the community that they attracted by permitting redistribution of the collated works - and then cut off.

So what? Red Hat created a community by beeing free in both senses, and then decided to go commercial at some point. And that hurt the feelings of some minor number of hard-nosed community members. Is that what you are talking about?

I'm not talking about the hurt feelings, I'm talking about the ultimate best interests of the community members that are now relying on the rebuilds.

I was around at the time of Red Hat going commercial. I heard about that, and immediately went to their website to see if that was true, since I was having a hard time figuring out the alternative distro I could use. And when I opened the website, there it was --- Fedora Core 1. It was publicly advertized by Red Hat as a free (in both senses) continuation of old-style Red Hat releases, only with the branding and name changed. It was right there, on redhat.com, you can take a look:

Fedora is not a 'usable' distribution unless you have nothing better to do with your life than install software and it is nothing like the old-style RH release that were maintained for years with updates. How many hours have you spent re-installing fedora versions? I quit when a mid-release kernel update refused to boot on a mainstream IBM box where it had happily installed. And running a box without current security updates is not an option so you can't just stick with an old copy.

I still remember a sentence somewhere that said something like "Think of Fedora Core 1 as a release of Red Hat 10" (although I failed to find it now). There was a clear pointer for every community member where to go if they wanted to stay in the "old" community. The only difference was the absence of the "shadow-man with a red hat" logo.

No, the difference was every fedora was like the X.0 release for RH releases up to 7, where they were followed with X.1, X.2, etc., that actually worked. If you came in at 8 or 9 you might not understand the distinction because 8 and 9 never did reach the stability of 7.3.

So that can be considered as "cutting off" only for a couple of very hard-nosed community members who were emotionally attached more to the name "Red Hat" and a nice picture of a hat, than to the product itself. Both the old product and the old community continued to live, just under a different brand. And Red Hat helped to create that new brand, and is still helping.

No, what has been cut off is the product that evolves from user feedback and experience - that is, the thing that eventually works in spite of the broken new stuff that keeps getting pushed into new fedora versions. If they knew how to do that without community input, a fedora release or the old X.0 RH releases would be as good as X.2 or an EL. They aren't.

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Red Hat is not the only Linux provider who has limited distribution of binaries. And as the CentOS and other rebuild projects have proven time and time again, having the source (and some time and significant effort) is sufficient to build a fully binary compatible distribution.

But the need for the rebuild projects shows that Red Hat has restricted access to what is mostly the result of community work.

Red Hat didn't restrict access, it was only rebranded as another project. The result and work of that same community is still here, is very much alive, and is called Fedora.

It's not the development community that pushes wild and crazy changes into fedora that I'm talking about. They seem to not like unix much and want to turn it into something else anyway.

Every RHEL release is based on Fedora, which is still unrestricted and available. The process of creating RHEL from Fedora is closed within Red Hat, and community does not contribute to that part.

They don't participate in the packaging of the bits, but I'm not convinced that they don't contribute to the results.

I fail to see how did Red Hat restrict the access to the result of any community work.

That depends on what you consider community work. I say every change resulting from a bug report or contributed patch is community work, and work that would be better aimed in a direction that doesn't restrict redistribution or require a dependency on a rebuild effort.

I tend to disagree here as well. Ubuntu was created from Debian, and had a completely different idea --- to become a favorite Linux distro for desktops.

Their 'different idea' was to have an actual release schedule, unlike the Debian of the day with the 'when it's ready' mantra. Plus they relaxed the free-as-in-gnu policies to make it usable.

And they apparently succeded in that.

They did that too, but a linux distro is a linux disto and you can install the parts you want. The important part is how well updates are handled. You need a predictable release schedule to get new versions out and an update process that maintains them with minimum breakage.

Ubuntu was *not* created as a community response to Red Hat going commercial. Far from it.

That's not what I said. I said Red Hat's redistribution restriction created the need for Ubunutu. And that the community that is now dependent on RH-rebuilds might be better served by a distribution that does not restrict redistribution in the first place. These aren't cause/effect but you could put them together if you want.

On 6/3/2011 10:12 PM, Ron Blizzard wrote:

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Les Mikeselllesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:

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That's not what I said. I said Red Hat's redistribution restriction created the need for Ubunutu. And that the community that is now dependent on RH-rebuilds might be better served by a distribution that does not restrict redistribution in the first place. These aren't cause/effect but you could put them together if you want.

Everyone is free to use what they want -- that's the cool thing about Linux -- choice. But, for me, Ubuntu is too "bleeding edge" to be a viable replacement for Red Hat/CentOS.

There's only about half a dozen distros that I consider good enough for server work. The advantage of using distros from the RHEL family line is that Red Hat's primary focus is business, which means I can count on them being a lot more conservative about changing / breaking things then the bleeding edge distros.

If I didn't have access to RHEL / CentOS / SL, then I'd probably run either Debian or Ubuntu LTS on servers. Because once you get past a certain point, Linux is Linux. The major differences tend to lie in package management, start-up scripts, systems administration and the GUI administration tools. Applications like PostgreSQL, Apache, etc. generally don't care which version of Linux they run on.

On 6/3/2011 1:28 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:

On Friday, June 03, 2011 11:21:35 AM Les Mikesell wrote:

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I'm talking about what would be more in the best interest of the community that they attracted by permitting redistribution of the collated works - and then cut off.

It's in the best interest of the community to have Red Hat in a financially stable position to fund all this good stuff in the first place. If the only way Red Hat can be financially viable is for me to give up the pre-EL ways, then that's fine by me, especially since Red Hat is rather accommodating in terms of the source code.

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Go back and look at the changelogs of programs in the era between the RH 4.x and 9 releases if you don't remember how bad the stuff they initially shipped was or how it got fixed.

Got back and look at the changelogs of the PostgreSQL packages.

Give me a hint about what to look for. As I recall I always installed postgresql from source in those days because the disto packages were so far behind or broken. Sort of like apache/mod_perl which was only done right in the 7.3 release and then broken again in 8.

On Friday, June 03, 2011 03:49:00 PM Les Mikesell wrote:

On 6/3/2011 1:28 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:

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Go back and look at the changelogs of the PostgreSQL packages.

Give me a hint about what to look for. As I recall I always installed postgresql from source in those days because the disto packages were so far behind or broken.

So, did you provide community-based feedback to the then PostgreSQL RPM packager? Any bugzilla entries? Any e-mails? Anything?

Sounds like the packager at the time could have used some good feedback, instead of you bailing out, installing from source.

And this is the Community in CentOS; as you have defined it here in this thread, Les. The users, not the developers; the ones who provide good feedback, but don't necessarily build (develop) the system. Your definition was: "[The community is] not the development community that pushes wild and crazy changes into fedora that I'm talking about." (antecedent of your 'it's' in the original is in brackets).

This same community is here, and it's vibrant. I see many of the same names I've seen for over ten years. Doing essentially the same thing, and giving feedback if they're not actively developing or packaging. Some are a tad more crotchety than before, but it's a familiar community.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention: I *was* the community packager at the time. And I could have used more useful, constructive, non-trollish feedback at the time. Like I got from Sander Steffann, Kaj Niemi, Alvaro Herrera and the tireless developer to whom I handed the packager role, Devrim Gunduz, who is doing outstanding work in that role even today. A vibrant developer community, one I miss, to tell you the truth.

The rh.com contact/packager changed a few times, but I was the community packager from 6.1 or so through a good part of FC2's development. Log in to a CentOS 4 machine that has postgresql installed from CentOS-Base repo, and issue a 'rpm -q --changelog postgresql' and scroll up a couple of dozen lines or so from the end (date tagged Fri Nov 21 2003). The PostgreSQL core developer Tom Lane took the Red Hat internal reins, and is still there (employed by Red Hat and in the PostgreSQL Core Team). Tom does outstanding work. PostgreSQL, just to name one project, is very much helped by Red Hat, in upstream Core roles.