On Saturday 04 June 2005 02:20, Johnny Hughes wrote: > On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 22:19 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote: > > On Friday 03 June 2005 08:48, Johnny Hughes wrote: > > > 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. > > 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. > Let me try to say it another way then, I think my meaning is not clear. [snip] This is much clearer, thanks. > However, they do not release everything required to build all the SRPMS, > nor do they tell you what combinations of programs are required to be > installed to get the SRPMS to build correctly. There are many -devel > packages that must be built from code to get the SRPMS provided to > build. The build hosts have to be prepared in certain ways, with > certain specific software installed (some of which is not provided by > RedHat at all). They do not provide instructions to do this (nor would > I expect them to). IIRC, at one time the Red Hat build host was a heavily modified Red Hat Linux 6.2 box. Building a self-hosting system is not one of the goals, unfortunately. At least they provide enough of the pieces of the anaconda setup stuff to make it possible at all. But rebuilding from source is not trivial, or even easy. That said, there are many people who have done it; I have, once, as an exercise for grins and giggles (I also did a stage 1 Gentoo on a DEC AlphaServer 2100 four-way SMP box; took a very long time but was a great learning experience; if nothing else, I learned that I don't like the Gentoo experience!). But I wouldn't do it for public consumption; the abuse ratio is too great (look at poor John Morris; if he had known what he knows now about the distribution of WhiteBox he might not have ever done it to begin with; I know I wouldn't!). > > 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? > 1005/1494 is GPL/LGPL > 146 is BSD LGPL still requires source redistribution, even though it doesn't pass the redistribution requirements down to dependent packages. Ok. > I did not do a detailed comparison on the BSD works ... if the BSD > products are totally separate, then they don't have to be redistributed. > If they use GPL libraries, then the source might need to distributed. I know the PostgreSQL project tries to go to great pains to not link to GPL libs, but I believe in the case of CentOS as distributed it links to at least one GPL covered library, readline. But I tend to agree that we have probably beaten this horse far past death and into the glue stage. I'll have to acknowledge a bias in that Red Hat Software is located in my home state, and that fact is one of the reasons I have used and supported Red Hat Linux (by being on the beta team, testing public betas, tracking RawHide when it was still rawhide, and even up until a month and a half ago following and tracking Fedora Development, which I simply ceased to have time to do). And I really hate to see the fine contributions of a company that is really trying to help out and get things right pushed down and away as if they were trivial. That is, many take Red Hat for granted, and I see that as a shame. It is an equal shame when the efforts of the CentOS team are trivialized or worse, marginalized. -- Lamar Owen Director of Information Technology Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu