On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 21:40 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote: > On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 17:52 -0600, me at prestoncrawford.com wrote: > > Yes, Red Hat creates RHEL. But by that logic shouldn't the credit be > > given to each contributor to each individual project that goes into a > > distro? > > I said the same thing. > We all stand on the shoulders of others. > At least in the GPL world. Actually, you've been saying something kind of animal farm-ish. We all stand on the shoulders of others. However, some shoulders are more equal than others. > > Red Hat doesn't create mySQL, do they? > > Coincidentally, despite MySQL being GPL, MySQL AB actually gets > demonized pretty good too. Ironic because MySQL used to not be > GPL, or at least the current releases weren't. > > Now Red Hat _does_ support PostgreSQL, especially after the commercial > endeavor behind PostgreSQL died off (within 18 months of inception). > And PostgreSQL is a nice complement to MySQL for those that want more of > an ACID-level db. My point being that there's plenty of software in the distro that wasn't created by Red Hat. > > Or Apache? > > Actually, Apache is a massive project umbrella. > Apache could be considered somewhat of an entity "like Red Hat," > projects of projects under one umbrella. You know what I meant. The original apache project was the httpd server. Anyway.. My point being that there's plenty of software in the distro that wasn't created by Red Hat. > > How about Firefox? > > Now hold on there. Now we're getting a little off-track. > Firefox is _not_ GPL or "GPL compatible" exactly. ;-> > > Be careful what doors you open there! ;-ppp My point being that there's plenty of software in the distro that wasn't created by Red Hat. > > Is that Red Hat's baby? > > No. But Red Hat does maintain a lot of the "core goods." Red Hat is responsible for all the gnu software? > > Point is, if you keep on saying "give credit where credit is due" you > > have to pass it down the line to the individual developers, testers, > > bug-fixers, etc. for the thousands of projects that go into RHEL. > > Agreed. Although don't belittle what Red Hat does. > It might not be "sexy" -- but when has Red Hat been about maintaining > the "sexy" projects? ;-ppp That's not the point. The point is these pissing contests are invariably stupid since we're all part of one large community composed of lots of little communities. For SuSE or Red Hat to take credit for the new kernel or KDE is silliness because it ignores the reality of how these projects get debugged, tested and developed. > > So in the end, all things being equal and considering the above, > > my vote goes for CentOS. > > I think we can all agree we all are working together in the GPL > community. But be _careful_ of giving praise or scorn -- especially > using non-GPL or non-GPL compatible projects as examples. Who's talking about the GPL? I'm not. I'm talking about the fact that Red Hat isn't personally responsible for every single line of code that goes into their distribution. Nothing more. Preston