[CentOS] Vote For CentOS :)

Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org> thebs413 at earthlink.net
Thu Jun 2 18:33:40 UTC 2005


From: Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>
> Red Hat didn't go the SuSE route though and not freely license their
> installer; Anaconda is GPL, but YaST was not, thus you couldn't even
> do with SuSE what is being done now with RHEL.

Until Novell bought SuSE and started GPL'ing things, correct.  Of course,
Novell already has enough of its own, proprietary** software so SuSE's
hold was chump change.  [ **NOTE:  Unlike many people, I don't consider
"proprietary" software to be inheritly bad.  I'm also careful not to call
some software from Microsoft "proprietary," because much of their
software doesn't even qualify as "proprietary" because they lack even
"proprietary" standards. ]

Something should also be said about Red Hat only producing GPL
software -- be it new developments of their own creation (and
copyright), as well as supporting only projects that are GPL except
in rare cases.

Other than maybe Murdock's Progeny, I don't know of another, major
commercial Linux vendor who produces 100% GPL software.  To make
a comparison, Red Hat completely blows IBM out-of-the-water in GPL
donations -- both man-hours as well as company buy-outs -- let alone
it makes no difference to include "GPL compatible" -- which no IBM
"Open Source" license is.

And as you've said me say before, even Sun roasts IBM on GPL
donations as well.

> As a great example, PostgreSQL is a BSD-licensed package.  Red Hat
> has made significant contributions to the PostgreSQL community (one
> by providing full-time PostgreSQL employment for Tom Lane, a Core
> PostgreSQL developer, two by paying for several enhancements and
> backported bugfixes):

It should be noted that PostgreSQL is one of the few, existing projects
that Red Hat is supporting that was not licensed GPL.  Red Hat really
avoids working on things that aren't GPL.

> Red Hat is not required by the terms of the BSD license to return
> ANYTHING to the PostgreSQL community, nor are they required to
> make their version of PostgreSQL, Red Hat Database (now known as
> PostgreSQL, Red Hat Edition) source code available to anyone.  But
> they did make it available.

While Red Hat isn't the only major commercial software company that
"just gets it."  They are the only major commercial Linux company
that has a major distro that does.



--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org




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