[CentOS] Effecting CentOS change

Wed Jul 13 20:17:49 UTC 2011
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>

CentOS has a clear mission. It's the first paragraph on the centos.org 
home page:

   CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from
   sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American
   Enterprise Linux vendor.  CentOS conforms fully with the upstream
   vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible.
   (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding
   and artwork.)  CentOS is free.

Discussions about the packages and utilities that are or aren't 
included in CentOS (the recent discussion of system-config-bind comes 
to mind, but it's not the only example) should re-read the CentOS 
mission.

Anyone wanting change in that regard should, imo, purchase a license 
from the prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor and provide 
feedback as a paying customer. Said vendor may or may not heed those 
suggestions, but that is the only effective way to change the CentOS 
utility/package list.

Honestly, we could all -- every single last one of us -- agree that 
$PACKAGE belongs in the core CentOS distribution, but until 
$LARGE_VENDOR agrees, we're just shouting in a vacuum.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/