On Friday 03 June 2005 08:48, Johnny Hughes wrote: > I am a little touchy on this subject ... being that I hear it so often. I most assuredly understand this. I reply to your message in this thread because I find you quite level-headed. > I disagree ... the work that RedHat put into RHEL is significant. It is > a great distro, and worthy to win this award and many others ... but so > is CentOS. > BUT ... they didn't put any work into CentOS. All their work was put > into RHEL. They are compensated fairly well for that work too, I might > add. Um, I don't if I can agree with that statement. CentOS is built upon the source RPMs of RHEL with sometimes substantial modifications, right? So, out of the changelog entries in the various spec files in CentOS what percentage of persons making changelog entries have an @redhat.com address? I have some work in CentOS in the PostgreSQL set, but it is quite small compared to the rest of the work. But Red Hat developers (some of who are upstream developers paid to work on the upstream package by Red Hat) have put a substantial amount of nontrivial work into the packages that through the CentOS team's efforts became CentOS. I do understand what you are saying, why you are saying it, and the distinction you are attempting to make, but it comes across at least to me as understating the work Red Hat people have done. Let's not overstate Red Hat's contribution, by all means; but let's ot understate it either. > the items they publish from somewhere else. They are required, > therefore, to make their source code public. They take that requirement > seriously, and they do an outstanding job of publishing their source > code openly. They should be commended for that. I do it every chance I > get :) They are not required to make the source for non-GPL code public (unless the license requires it; the PostgreSQL BSD license for instance does not require it), nor are they required to distribute any spec files or special initscripts they may use. They are not required to distribute source to anyone but the receipients of the binary code, and they cannot restrict said recipient's right to redistribute the source under the GPL. But GPL code is not the majority of the Red Hat dist, is it? Anyone have a count of bytes under GPL versus other licenses in CentOS? If not, I'll do the math, tomorrow. So Red Hat could make the job much more difficult by distributing the source as simple tarballs with no specs, no initscripts, no notes. Like you say, they have done an outstanding job releasing things they don't have to release as source in SRPM format, making it not as difficult as it could be to rebuild a trademark-free build. Not that it is trivial or even easy; but it could be more difficult. > Using your logic, The only people who would get credit are the > programmers who write the code for the parent projects. Many of whom work for Red Hat. Some of whom could not afford to work fulltime on their project were it not for Red Hat's employment. > Or the Fedora > Core volunteers who actually package and test probably 95% of the stuff > that get into RHEL. Most of the Fedora Core packagers work for Red Hat, with notable exceptions. > So no, I don't think that you should vote for RHEL in a place where > CentOS is also listed I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusion, but not with all your reasons. -- Lamar Owen Director of Information Technology Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu